Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language
- even the phrase "each other" -
do not make any sense.
From The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks.
© Copyright, 2004, HarperSanFrancisco.
I woke up this morning to find the word "raukkadessa" floating in my mind, between sips of coffee. The word came from a song on Beyond Love (Sami Records, 2004), an album by my friend Kathi Huhtaluhta. Kathi lived in Finland where she studied "Yoik" traditions of Sami chanting. She told me her song, Raukkadessa, derived from a word she learned while there, which meant "beyond love".
Meaning, beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond loss, conflict, history, and the constructs of personality and culture, beyond even our temporal experience of love, "there is a field".