Leaving On A Full Heart

Let's invite the wonderful poet Walt Whitman to join our fire this Thursday.

“Love the earth and sun and animals,

Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,

Devote your income and labor to others…

Re-examine all you have been told

at school or church or in any book;

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

~Walt Whitman~

Leaves of Grass

I long to leave this Earth in such a way that I will be able to greet deaths travel guide with a head held high, a heart full of sunrises and sunsets, traces of the wind and the sun fully alive on my skin, and the taste of the salty sea still foaming on my breath! Dying this way I see as a tribute to the Earth and as a honor to my soul! Is it possible? I don't know! Poets like Mr. Whitman gives me hope–I would love for my flesh to become the ultimate poem, as he says it can. Doesn't that sound like a life fully lived, fully experienced? Not a nice, clean life of Sunday suits only, but also a messy muddy Monday rain leaving you cold to the bone kind of life. A life that will invite the next fire who meet you to warm your core once more, leaving your heart amazed in gratitude of the tree's generosity and at the ingenuity of your forefathers discoveries, both whom without, this fire would not have been possible.  

To listen to the tigers roar and let it tremble me in fear and awe, as well as letting the beautiful bird's song lift me into a summer dream raising me up to the blue sky. Life is all that and so much more. Dirt, soil in itself is a poem–it is the star filled sky, the transcendent leaf and the water of life all muddled into the darkness that gives birth to all there is. It gives birth to the fear and joy, the becoming and the loss, all mixed together in this earthen pot of a body that makes ourselves call us to attention as human beings. Perhaps threin lies its possibility to become a poem. 

*Photocredit: Mathew Brady [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.