On Songs of Myself

So I’m reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and more specifically this morning I’m wrapping myself up in Songs of Myself and of course I love it, but my brain can’t get past the first verse because it says:

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

. . . I’m thirty-seven years old . . . and for a moment I let that sink in . . . Wow . . .  I like that kind of thing. I don’t mind measuring myself against greatness. Ginsberg wrote Howl when he was 29 and though I recognize the differences the two have a similar smell about them. I wonder if I will ever have the luck of writing such a thing. I wonder if all of the work, all of the patience and practice will one day combine with the right stimulus and a ready state of mind to create a moment of literary greatness.

One of the things that inspires me about Songs of Myself is not just the words and the reach and the joy, but the sense of self contained within. To me Whitman seems to know exactly where he is in the universe - in the ebb of space and time. That is what I envy and decide to emulate. To read it you would think this knowledge alone makes it difficult to do much else but celebrate creation.

There have been times in my life when I have felt this. And when I do worries fall away, ego disappears behind the bigness of interconnection, and there is a something that I’m in touch with that, to this point has hidden from definition and truth be known need not be defined. It’s not that I am above the concerns of the day . . . it’s more like I am aware of the relative size of the concerns in the context of everything that is, was, or might be.

I realize I have been waiting for words like this for my generation, not old words that amaze, but words that pierce the core of my life right now – words that tear at an inescapable truth and change reality by voicing them. I make a promise to myself not to wait for these words anymore, but to hunt them – to make them mine – to speak them.

The promise within the promise is to remember myself. The Gunslinger also touched on this - remember my scale in context and my place in possibility. If I approach my life and this hunt for words from a place of love for all, love for self as all - I know I’m going to have fewer problems with fear and doubt and who knows . . . maybe in twenty years you’ll discover that , hidden in some chap book are the words I’d been hunting for. If you find them, speak them  . . . and change the world.