Some Words from Walt
What follows is an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855). It’s an excellent perspective and a starting point I return to whenever I feel as if I’m off track.
“This is what you shall do: 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“.
Reflecting
I’ve come to embrace sayings like “tomorrow begins right now” and “today is the first day of the rest of your life”. While there is no point in living in the past, there is great value in not forgetting it. Although one day is as good as the next for reflecting upon the past, the habit of celebrating the New Year especially focuses my thoughts during this time.
Tenses of Being
Knowledge represents the past.
Anything you can know has already happened. What you know is based on perceptions of the past: taught to you by others or memories from your own experiences.
Imagination represents the future.
We imagine things that could be: maybe things we want to be, maybe things that will be. They are possibilities. The future is a cloud of possibilities.
Awareness is now.
Now is neither knowledge nor imagination. Awareness is the bridge between what has been and what will be.
Can We See Without Desire?
Today I heard a man repeat the old saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. It caused me to pause and think about just how extensive the effects of desire are upon our “eye”.
Unity
Recently I received an e-mail complaining about our current state of affairs concerning health care reform. The e-mail devolved into a general rant about our government and suggested that if things didn’t go the way they want it, then revolt would be the solution.
While I find politics interesting, I have always felt that less government is ideal. In the Daodejing, it is said:
“If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be. The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be.
Therefore, the Master says: I let go of the law and people become honest. I let go of economics and people become prosperous. I let go of religion, and people become serene. I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes common as grass.”
Although I do not consider myself to be a political activist (mainly because I see politics as it is today to be a symptom of our societal ills, not a solution to it), I am prone from time to time to make comment on the subject. What follows is my response.
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