Take My Hand

On Walt Whitman's birthday, the road before us, and the call of the soul

Dear Ones,

One summer evening, just before I began tenth grade, my older brother Tom handed me a book. It had the look and feel of a Bible without the preciousness of onion-skin pages. Thick and leather-bound, it smelled of rainy days and pipe smoke, cat fur and old carpet.  In those days, he was spending a lot of time at Hyde Brother’s Books, our town’s only used bookshop.

I traced my finger along the gold embossed title.  Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.  The name was familiar. I’d read O Captain, My Captain in English class.  I’d watched Robin Williams sound his “barbaric yawp” in Dead Poets’ Society.  But that’s as far as my knowledge went.  I opened the cover to find a grainy photo of the author.  Bearded and bright-eyed in a white button-down and a hat pushed back on his head, Whitman looked mischievous, playful, inviting.  I dare you to read this, he seemed to say.  I dare you to let it change you.

My brother had marked a section in pencil.  Don’t worry about it making sense right now, he said.  Just see how it makes you feel.

This is what you shall do, I read. 

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, 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 and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

At first I read quickly, shoveling in the words like someone starving for something I didn’t even know existed.  Then, as the cells of my body opened, receiving the nourishment, I slowed down and tried to to taste the meaning.  I could tell that words like these were meant to be lingered over, savored.  Like the Old Testament Psalms and Sunday morning liturgy.  Like prayer.  I read the passage twice through, three times.  When I finally stopped, I knew I would never be the same. Was this what people felt when they had had a conversion experience?  Finding Jesus in their rock-bottom moment like a ray of light streaming into their hearts, just knowing, knowing to say yes? 

Was I being saved through poetry?  Maybe that was why I always preferred the liturgy to the lecturing, the psalms to the sermon.

But it wasn’t just the form that was so powerful - it was the words themselves – what they advised - that opened me into a way of being and a worldview that resonated in the oldest parts of myself.  Older than my 14 year old self.  I Knew in the truest Knowing possible that I had always believed this, that my soul understood and agreed.

That gentle, loving attention to the body which as a young woman I had been taught to fear, cover, and guard and as an athlete I had been taught to control, push, and force.  

That celebratory attention to the overlooked, the outsider, and the seemingly crazy.  Though I looked the part of the insider, the privileged, and the powerful -  white, healthy, successful student-athlete and president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes  - inside I knew I was a weirdo and a misfit.  Yearning, hungry, angry, and divided. Where did I belong in my world where women could not lead or preach or guide or shine in the fullness of themselves? There were no models for what I felt and knew within myself, and I was deemed too sensitive, too dreamy, too emotional, too sexual, too MUCH.   

And Whitman’s encouragement to not argue about God.  Yes, yes! All my Lutheran school and Baptist church community seemed to do was argue about God.  We were right and everyone else was wrong, lost, or misguided.  And it was our job to make disciples of all nations.  To in every moment embody our power and privilege to convert and to testify. To explain and justify through every means necessary why our God was the true God.  We were taught to believe ourselves separate and divided from most of humanity.  But here was Whitman saying, so lightly, so casually, don’t even waste your energy on that.  Argue not concerning God.  It felt like permission to take off a heavy suit of armor I didn’t know I was wearing. I sat in his words like a person newly naked in the Spring sun, the truths like a gentle breeze on my skin.  Dismiss whatever insults your soul. Really?!  I can do that?!  Your job, this breeze whispered, is to be fully yourself.  Your job, Whitman seemed to say, like Jesus before him, is to love.  The pushed-aside.  The covered-up.  The shamed-away.  The rejected.  It all belongs.

And Just like that, in a conversion experience that the Apostles Creed or Luther’s Catechism could never had created, I was re-born at 14 and never the same. Eventually I became an English major, a literature teacher, a poet and a writer, encountering many other writers who have moved me to tears, but Walt Whitman –that inscrutable rascal, that indefinable, unapologetic mystic who wrote anonymous glowing reviews of his own self-published work – he was the first, his words most enduring, the pages of his book my most-dog-eared, ink-stained and underlined.

May 31st was Whitman’s  205^th birthday, and for two decades I have tried to honor his legacy when that day arrives. One year I came by a button-making machine and my high school students and I assembled over 100 buttons of Whitman’s body, face, and famous quotes. We passed them out on street corners and shouted poetry to passers’ by. Another year, we chalked his poetry all over Burlington, Vermont’s pedestrian mall Church Street.  Later, in Whitman’s beloved Brooklyn, I joined twenty other readers in an annual marathon recitation of Song of Myself under the Brooklyn Bridge.  Five months pregnant, I wore oversized vintage striped overalls and my Whitman-esque straw hat, and I prayed that Freddi could hear me say,

I exist as I am, that is enough

and

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me… not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile…

Because how might life be for Freddi if he grew up truly believing that?  If we could ALL truly believe that?  What would be different if we knew the truth that we are whole and perfect, existing as we are, in our original natures, and that just as I knew that little body growing inside of me was inherently holy and good, so, too,

man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred… and each belongs here… each has his or her place in the procession?

How would life change for you if you lived in not just acceptance but in a welcoming delight of yourself? And by yourself I mean the deep true essence of yourself before the armor of the world and its expectations and fears weighed you down and forced your life into a very small, tight space of expression?

I know some people roll their eyes at Whitman’s exuberance and intensity.  Those infinite lists!  Those sentimental metaphors! Those exclamation points! (!!!!!)  But also.  The deep mysticism.  The ideas about balance and equanimity. The radical politics.  The fierce pacifism.  The passion for the earth.  Most of all, the love.  The love for all. The love for nature. The love for the moment. The pure and simple love, unclouded by rules and repressions and legalisms and divisions.  It’s a lot…Whitman is a lot … but so is a mountain range at sunset.  So is an ocean in a hurricane.  So is a body having an orgasm. 

No amount of exclamation points can truly capture such ludicrous beauty and largeness – to utter what he calls untranslatable  - and yet why not try?  Isn’t that what we are here to do?  To put such awe and love into expression, language and action?  To also let the white spaces speak in their silence of all that cannot be wrangled into words?

My Whitman partner-in-crime was a man with whom I had a turbulent, poetic and dramatic love affair.  I should have known that would be the way of things when after our first real connection he left a stack of poetry on the front seat of my car.  e.e. cummings.  Wallace Stevens.  Walt Whitman.  Several pages in Whitman were marked with the wisps of his red and black feather boa.  Lines were starred in pencil.

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,

Going where I list, my own master total and absolute…

I am larger, better than I thought,

I did not know I held so much goodness.

We fell in love with the blessing of Whitman’s words– hid ourselves in the expansiveness of all they held – and we read them on the stage of his coffee shop every year on May 31^st. Together, we leaned into the permission that Whitman was granting - permission to believe in and create what was possible - and we believed we were living it in our big gestures and wild clothes and edgy behavior and middle-finger boldness. We rode naked on bicycles with 100 others, protesting the Iraq war. We performed original plays in warehouses and parking lots. We paraded down neighborhood streets in costume, led by a jazz band. Looking back, though, I see that so much of it – at least for me - remained a surface layer aspiration rather than a bone-deep acceptance.  At that time, it was still just a welcome costume change. Like I had taken off the armor of my conditioned small-self beliefs - which was a relief! - but I had realized I was naked and now I needed to clothe myself with these ideas.  I was young, and I did not yet know that the nakedness, just how I was/am, was what I needed to live from. I didn’t yet know how to embody that goodness, rather than simply perform it.

And how does one learn to do that? To actually live from the inherent goodness, wildness, and truth of who we are? And how, at the same time, do we allow, accept and celebrate our contradictions?  To know we are large and cannot be summed up, buttoned in, or drawn around?

Exuberance and Equanimity.  Passion and Perspective.  Compassion and Clarity. All of it existing together in one body, one soul, one moment.

Here is the test of wisdom, Whitman writes in Song of the Open Road,

Wisdom is not to be tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul…

We already Know how to embody goodness, and so our questions on how to live cannot be answered in lecture halls and master classes and zoom courses but right here, under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.  It can only be answered by stepping outside of whatever we call “comfort” (that is actually constraining and strangling us) and feeling ourselves alive in all the weather of life. Embodying our goodness and being accountable to it happens by living fully and vulnerably, boldly as ourselves with an open heart, with an aspiration towards liberation, a liberation that nature itself models.  It is obeying the call of the open road, which is less about actual travel and more about inner experience and outer true expression. It is freeing the wild in us.  That great Knowing that is the voice of out true selves, the divine within us.  

What is that call for you?  That wildness that longs to find a form, an expression? What is one call that won’t stop sounding within yourself?  What invitation towards a larger life won’t leave you alone? 

My own heart quickens with this question in a way that comforts me.  Okay, I think, relieved, I’m still that bold young woman.  I’ve still got it in me to take a leap!  But just as strong is a sense of weariness and anxiety.  A voice in me that says, No, you had your time of bold adventuring and Open-Road Following. This is a question for young(er) people.  It was fine to adore the exuberance of Whitman when I was 14 and 27 and 37.  But now, as a single mom of a nine-year-old, so often tired or feeling trapped by circumstance and so often lonely, I think, Nope. It's time for me to buck up, create stability, reliability, predictability.  I need a nest egg.  I need home ownership.  I need routines that Freddi can count on, beliefs and rituals and comprehensible communities that I can drop into without thinking about.

But who is that talking in me?  What remnant of my conditioning calls for such boring, soul-shuddering predictability? The other part - I call her my soul - stands insulted by such sacrifice. She whispers to me, Dismiss whatever insults your soul. She says more loudly, The only predictability Freddi needs is that you are alive. Fully yourself and alive.

All religion, all solid things… all that was or is apparent upon this globe, or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe… forever alive, forever forward, they go toward the best – towards something great.

It’s true that I am a mother, solely responsible for the wellbeing of my child.  It’s a big responsibility and one that requires a constant consideration of need-balancing – mine and his.  Safety is a consideration.  But only one among many.   And if I am to raise my son in the way I want him raised  - intact as himself, knowing his goodness, his wild and true nature - than I had better model the very liberation that I myself longed to see and experience as a kid.  The untamed, untranslatable, Spacious Cloud and Flowing Current kind of a life. 

The best part – and scariest part – about it is there is no roadmap or formula.  Home ownership could be the call for some. Living on the road might be for another. Outwardly a life can look “conventional” and inwardly it can be bursting with the wildflowers of a fertile, blooming spirit. We cannot know except for ourselves what is enlivening. All that exists is the call within. The personal invitation that is written in the language of your specific spirit.  The cry of the soul that is itself the proof that we are ready to take that first step.

Allons! The road is before us! urges Whitman.

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!

Let the tools remain in the workshop!  Let the money remain unearn’d!

Leave it. The inner and outer voices that shush. The preachers and journalists and doomsday headline writers.  The ones that say there’s nothing we can do. The judges and social media bullies and well-meaning neighbors.  This is just the way it is, they say. The inner critic and the outer critic.  It’s all too big, too loud, too much, so uncouth, how dare they and how dare you? Those that are envious and that channel their envy into judgment. Leave it.  Leave them. You can.  We can.  Together, we can.

Camerado, Whitman calls, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? will you travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Only you can know what call is yours to listen to and obey. No call is too small or too large, too weird or too much. You and you alone were, in fact, created to live into it. But while this is your specific call to live into, you are not alone in the act of obeying. As you listen to the wisdom of your goodness and your largeness you will find yourself in amazing company… and it may surprise you! You will recognize friends and family and neighbors that are weirder than you ever knew, misfits in their own way. You will see them living their own wild and unique calls, obeying something only they can hear.  And they - we - will be so glad to have you on this journey. We will take your hand and welcome you. We will stick by you. Will you join? Allons! The road is before us!

From my place on this journey of becoming more naked and more free, of reading these leaves every year of my life, of taking tiny brave steps and remembering again and again the call of my soul, the truth of what I value, and the importance of staying unfettered and close to the open sky, I am yours in love and adventure,

Sara

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wearing my beloved button in 2012, on my way to share Whitman with my high school students

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