Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Leaves

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one 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.

~Walt Whitman

1 comments:

Dawson said...

Walt Whitman blows my mind in ways I can't even begin to describe...

I know you feel lost right now, but don't worry, nothing is ever lost, not can be lost, the body sluggish, aged cold, the embers left, from earlier fires, shall duly flame again. Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form--no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,the light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again; The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; To frozen clods ever the springs invisible law returns, with grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.