“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” —Rumi
Maura James and Jim Stellar
This quote prompted us to write about the big challenge of connecting moral words with the place words in thinking about social justice as tied to a place location, the brain, decisions, and another famous quote from the 1600s philosopher and mathematician, Blasie Pascal, “The heart has reasons of which reason does not know.”
We will tackle this complex topic in two forms. First, we present two narrative stage-setting stories from MJ. Then, we present a neuroscience interpretation from JS. Finally, we attempt a synthesis.
Narratives
Maura is a humanitarian researcher who has been investigating and analyzing European borders since 2021. Recently, she worked with humanitarian colleagues in Poland delivering humanitarian aid at the Polish-Belarus border to people moving. Any border is a highly contested space, often securitized and what Maura calls a “gray zone.” Meaning a zone where things are not always clear, people are not always who they seem to be, and those we are taught to believe have authority are often just as confused as everyone else operating in the gray zone.
Both “Forest Floor” and “Just One Shoe” depict night actions. An “action” is what aid workers call a humanitarian intervention at the Polish-Belarus border. It usually involves locating people who need help, may not speak English, and are in need of protection. These narratives reflect Maura’s experience to the best of her memory.[1] All names have been changed or omitted.
Forest Floor
Recently the forest played a trick on me. The moon was hiding, keeping her light from us. In the darkness of night there are layers of blackness. As my eyes adjust there are differences in the darkness. After my eyes learned that there was no light coming, no torch to illuminate a path, no rays from moon’s face, no warming of the sky from sun’s beams, my ears became my super power. Every noise heightened. I could hear it all.
The young man was from North Africa. I think. God, I can’t remember. It doesn’t mean he isn’t real. I remember him. He hasn’t disappeared into the forest never to be seen again, never to know he’s Tunisian or Moroccan or Yemani; for all that matters. It doesn’t matter. But it does to him. He matters. I can’t remember and I love myself.
Three times while we were with him we hit the ground. The first time it was the army truck we passed on the way to do the drop. It moved slowly, canvassing. Looking for our car? Could I hear the voices of the soldiers in the back of the truck, their feed dangling from the bed? Or did I invent that from the memory of them high above me, staring at me in the driver’s seat earlier in the day?
We had to move on quickly. We refilled his soup before we left him to meet his smuggler. We decided to walk away from the direction we had come. We would walk 100 meters and drop a new pin. Hopefully putting enough distance between us so that when they did see us and search the area he would not be found. We told him to walk in the opposite direction. He nodded, looking lost.
First we encounter a fence. A really tall fence. We walked right into it trying to extract ourselves from a particularly dense pile of fallen trees. Because I was forced to stop; there was no climbing over this fence, my eyes had time to catch the distinction between black/ blue sky, dark metal, gray/ brown wood, green/ black leaves quivering in the still night air.
Foot steps!
We dropped. It was the second time that day I was sure soldiers were upon us. So many footsteps.
I flattened to the forest floor, sunk into the Earth’s supple soil. Focused on my breathing. Ground, ground, ground. She’s holding me.
Could it be people on the move? Is it an animal? They must know we’re here like we know they’re here. Do we know they’re here?
This pause would have allowed my eyes to adjust, but I kept them closed, focusing on the crack of the breaking branches underfoot, on the swarm of swooshing mosquitoes, on the sound of impending confrontation.
After a while, I did open my eyes. I knew I was staring at my knees, mer millimeters away from my nose, but I saw nothing, just blackness. As if my body had left me and my head was all that remained on the forest floor.
Just One Shoe
It’s Sunday night. The moon is bright. The action is very near the busy road on the way to Hajnwóka. We don’t have a good drop location and we are very near the military base. As A pulls over two cars approach from around the bends in the road.
“Down. Hit the ground.” S whisper shouts.
Thank god he does. It’s my first night action, and I think I would have been paralyzed without his steady calm voice instructing me. As I lie with my face on the forest floor, my body contorted and the heavy backpack full of clothes and supplies somehow on top of me, I feel my heart thudding and I can imagine the sound reverberating off of the trees around us.
In the dark, all other senses are heightened. Suddenly my hearing is sharp and I can gauge the distance and speed of the cars by sound. Is it slowing down? No, there is a curve in the road. Both cars pass. Then, with the absence of all headlights, the darkness sets in around me. The headlamps we brought are unusable so close to the road. We have to make our way 200 meters into the trees. Because of the forest, the canopy blocks the moon light mostly, but there are clear spots where it shines through. The changes in light are deceiving.
We are so close to the military base I’m convinced every sound is the sound of footsteps following us. I see the red light of a scope every time I turn around. There is nothing there, but in the dark forest the mind sees what it wants. Tail lights become the light of a scope, accelerating engines become the sound of drones or helicopters. I am leading them right to these boys. We will get there and suddenly the soldiers will surround us with their flood lights and ambush us before we can get them to sign the POA.
Ah the POA. Power. Of. Attorney. A piece of paper including the migrant’s date of birth, country of origin, and name. Only my Polish colleagues can complete the rest of it with their personal details. Once signed it gives them the power to represent this migrant. To make decisions on behalf of this migrant. This single piece of paper, completed in haste, under cover of darkness, on the forest floor, is the protection that sometimes prevents a pushback. It is also the piece of paper that dooms the migrant if they decide to venture further. To leave Poland and her whiteness of people and blackness of forests. To go to the promised land, Germany.
But tonight, there is no doom.
S and I make our way painstakingly slowly 200 meters through the forest. Without lights, we don’t realize until it’s too late that we have entrapped ourselves in a creche of fallen trees. We slow down. I regulate my breathing. I move as slowly as possible over the trunks. Still smashing my knees on vertical branches and losing my footing in nests of vines and leaves. We head toward the moonlight. We desperately want to get out of this quagmire and it works, a little bit. We find an animal path and take it as long as we can until we have to work our way toward the pin again.
We come upon them, three boys, because they are indeed young, so young. One from Somalia is 21. He is traveling with two from Syria, a 28 year old and an 18 year old. Well, he says he’s 18, but he doesn’t look a day over 15. The Syrians are from the same town, but they only just met in Belarus. The Somalian is a bit removed but they seem to be treating him well enough. They can’t communicate with each other that well.
We serve them soup and tea. They keep trying to light our efforts and we struggle to explain the danger to them. How close we are to the road, that we can’t put lights on. Anyone might be with us in the forest. A threat.
We give up and I envelop them with my jacket while S shares the POA with them. I do my best to cover the red glow from his headlamp. They crouch under the cover of my jacket, hastily reading it and signing away their rights. This soothes me, and Simon and I get a bit comfortable once we have the shield of the paperwork.
They asked for shoes specifically. One of them has a hurt ankle, S assesses it as I dole out the clothes and shoes. Why the shoes? Because the Belarusians took one shoe from each of them. They’ve made their way 15 kilometers through swamps and over nests of fallen trees with just one shoe each.
Neuroscience
The importance of movement
You do not know how you place your feet under you to keep your balance. Unless you think about it or fall, or get hurt, you are not even aware of it. Way in the back of your brainstem and even lower in your spinal cord are a set of brain mechanisms that gives you the ability to properly place your feet without falling, adjusting for terrain, and you only have to think about where you want to go. Now you could take control and skip down the path rather than walk but in circumstances like above, you do not do that. You just walk on and keep that precarious balance on two feet without thinking about it. This is shown in a famous old diagram below by Paul McLean that emphasizes three levels of function; primate, mammalian, reptilian (where we are saying walking mechanisms exist)[2]. Walking is reptilian.
The importance of affect
Just like walking, a slightly higher level of your brain in the midbrain. In the diagram above this area is called the limbic system and it generates your basic affective responses. This limbic generation comes in two flavors. The one flavor is driven by the amygdala and it keeps you out of trouble through the emotion of fear. The fear can be automatic and maybe unlearned, like seeing a snake in the ground. Or it can be learned like Pavolov’s dogs who have a tone paired with foot shock and become afraid of the tone even though that tone by itself does not hurt. Such conditioning could underlie PTSD. On the other hand, safety, food, rest stimulate the nucleus accumbens and that is reward. The reward effect is related to the neurotransmitter dopamine, which comes into the accumbens. Here the dopamine mechanism could produce addiction, particularly to the cocaine but maybe other non-drug addictions as well. In the above situation fear and reward drive the behaviors described. Both of these reactions are seen in the narratives above and our point here is that they can be automatic too, like walking. But these positive and negative emotions do get organized at a higher level so they can be tied to your plans. That discussion is a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but we did write a prior blog just about how the highest regions where thinking and planning (and language) occur can incorporate limbic system processes.
The importance of place
In 2014 John O’Keef and others won the Nobel Prize for work that there are so called “place cells” in the the hippocampus, a brain region that was earlier associated with memory studies (see this summary). Those studies showed its surgical removal in a patient, known as HM, damaged the formation of any new declarative memories, e.g. memories of which we can speak. Interestingly, learning new procedural memories, e.g. driving a car, remained intact. Later, the role of place cells in forming spatial maps of any familiar environment came from the work of O’Keef and others. This work is quite sophisticated, showing for example that the size of the space seems to determine the size of the grid of place cells in the brain, e.g. your living room and a large class auditorium where you have your favorite seat. What pushed our thinking further was another discovery of mirror neurons in your brain where there are motor command neurons (e.g. putting a peanut in your mouth) that fire when you see someone else do that movement. Mirror neurons have been suggested to play a role in empathy.
You need all three of these brain processes to be in place to have such a story. You need to be able to walk and move in general through the place. You need a purpose of avoiding pain and getting to safety or something positive to motivate and direct the planning. You need a map in your head to know where you have been and where you are going. You also need one more thing and that is a cognitive plan of what you are doing and what is happening around you.
So, putting these ideas together, we ask again, how can a place be emotional in the sense of the Rumi quote of “out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing” that we cited above? Can these emotional inputs influence motion through space and affect through cognition to get to this place beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing? Or is it futile?
Synthesis
What do we see when we read Rumi’s quote? I see rolling tall grass and wildflowers. They part easily as I walk towards mentors and colleagues who have shaped me throughout my life. In the distance, very far away, dark forests surround the field, and we’ve all emerged from them. It’s the golden hour and there is ease of movement, an expectation of reward upon meeting, and a mapping of this place where I’ve never been. In my vision of this quote, we never meet, but there is joy around the expectation of finally reaching this place. Notice that this vision and place have an emotional property to it. That is part of what we get from the Rumi quote and how we bring value into plans and places.
Borders are certainly beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing. Even on the warmest summer day, borders can be dark and cold. Naturally borders are places of geographic significance, meaning there’s usually mountains, rivers, or oceans where people found crossing difficult and natural borders were created between spaces (or countries). Nature makes them intentionally difficult to navigate. Instinctually the body wants to stay away. And yet many of us meet there.
Perhaps this is what is missing from our vision of Rumi’s quote. Critics of Rumi often label this field an unattainable utopia. Rather than being a place free from conflict, it is precisely the place where we can detach ourselves from norms, from strongly held beliefs of the “other.” Where all of us are equalized by the uncertainty of movement in darkness. We all must suspend some belief and trust that we can put one foot in front of the other. It is a place with immense risk, causing fear, and high reward.
Those who survive borders do so precisely because they navigate to Rumi’s field. We catch glimpses of the field when a border guard disobeys orders, when a smuggler provides a ride for free, when a person moving pauses in his dangerous journey to support the aid worker who tripped, both running from gun fire at the border. These instances are rare but possible.
We also create Rumi’s field. When we do something unexpected; e.g. when the aid worker offers the border guard water, we create a space for exchange that wasn’t there before. It can close, just as quickly as it opens, but these blips in our complex mind map allow us to reprogram expectations and find commonalities, even with the most unlikely counterpart.
[1] These narratives are part of a larger work that includes many of Maura’s experiences working at European borders. She intends to publish this work in 2025.
[2] https://neuroexed.com/projects (scroll down to the bottom of the page to get the diagram and explanations)
