Voices of the Children
“Beyond this world of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” I’ll see you in a lace where the bold, black line between differences melts into the earth, laying forgotten in merged beliefs and ideas. I’ll meet you in a place of compassion and inner beauty, where men and women meet with open arms, hearts and minds.
Compassion is a delicate and personal thing. Each person defines this word with different expressions, examples, pictures, and feelings. But this is the beauty of the word. Compassion is not just one kind example, simple word, beautiful picture, or passionate feeling. Compassion is a huge array of ideas, each as right as the other. Compassion is helping someone across the busy street. It is adopting and loving a homeless animal from a crowded shelter. It is caring about others. Compassion is empathizing and wanting to help. It is saying everyone has a right to his or her ideas. Each unique individual in the world has their own personal story about when someone did something for them that made their day. Little things that do no, perhaps, seem like much, but slowly add up. These modest things are what make a person want to get up out of their bed every morning. These small gestures are what make people smile throughout the day. Each act of kindness, given from the heart, lightens the soul, and this makes each person beautiful, inside and out.
In our society today, there are people everywhere telling others how to become thinner, how to look younger, what is “in” and what is “out”, what is right and wrong, and what to buy to accomplish being part of the “in” crowd. What is harder to find are people who say how beautifully you are aging, how shapely your body is, how they love the clothes you purchased at a second-hand shop, how stunning your face looks without makeup, and although they do not agree with you entirely, they think your opinion is right, too. What makes a person’s face beautiful is their smile, what makes their body perfect is contentment with themselves, what makes a person “in” is how the pride they hold within themselves makes them stand tall. A person may be beautiful in appearance, but a beautiful, caring, and contented soul is what matters in a being.
A soul that welcomes all people with open arms, new ideas with an open mind, and hold everything in the world close to their heart is compassionate and beautiful. This soul is what each person has in themselves. We hold the potential to great things in our hands. Now the quest remains to welcome everything that comes towards us without holding immediate judgments or long grudges. Each opportunity is like us: fresh and unique. Once all of the men and women on the earth reach this higher plain of living above right and wrong, we will meet in a field, the most pristine place ever in existence.
But this faultless place is not a heaven reachable only through death. It is here. It is now. Perhaps the world had not fully erased the bold divide between right and wrong yet, but that is why we are here today. We are here together to continue the work of blurring and merging barriers and to share the message of compassion with our friends and family. And slowly, through the hard work of caring hearts, the field will not be across oceans, forests, rivers, and mountains, but in our own homes. We will not have to continue the search for a place of forgiveness and compassion, for we will already be standing in a field, a field beyond the world of right and wrong.