Song of Myself

Yesterday I went to the laundromat and, while waiting for the wash cycle to end, took this photo:

If you look closely, you will notice my reflection. Cue the thought train: the wash cycle—wash, rinse, repeat, spin—a routine I enjoy. I love the smells, folding and putting away clean clothes, crawling into a bed made with sheets fresh from drying in air and sunshine. I like habits and routines. I do admit, however, I easily fall into comfort zones around these kinds of things and can go for years sometimes before I see myself reflected, so to speak, in the laundry routine I’ve made of my life, doing the same things in a safe, comfortable way, not risking too much, not making any headway on the dreams or goals or efforts I’ve said I wanted to try. And maybe you’ve noticed this too for yourself, but one way my subconscious reflects this state of affairs is that I will literally stop dreaming when I sleep, a little tragedy. It's difficult to see myself clearly, to notice what’s going on, the choices I’m making, because everything is on the proverbial autopilot.

As I’ve written previously, part of my hope with the attention walks and deep reading projects is to wake up, invite a kind of psychic shakeup and a reengagement with the now and here and other. The experience has been rich and scented like newly turned soil--expectant, planting, watering, weeding, a confidence that something’s going to grow. In planning and selecting works to read, I had a notion that the discipline itself would pay dividends, but I’m surprised and delighted by how much I need what these authors offer. I slowed my reading of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, happy to be in his company, and read “Song of Myself” several times, lingering, closing my eyes to let myself more deeply smell the grass and hear the leaves. Attention practice seems to aggregate or multiply insight. A vision of myself reflected in the washing machine reinforces what the poet said, who is saying in his way what the essayist did, and then outdone by nature's own twist and bud, flicker and bloom.

Together they've seemingly conspired for my benefit, offering this perspective on my "now and here":

Activities, work, relationships, and attitudes that have been constitutive of these latter years of my life have been shifting and/or coming to end, sometimes slowly and with resistance, and sometimes, because time can be difficult to measure in the present, seemingly abruptly and all at once. I don't know what it all means or what's on deck. Instead, metaphorically bobbing out there in the ocean beyond the riptide, I simply can see the shore plainly and, surprisingly, don’t yearn to get back there. Quite the contrary, I wonder why I stayed there so long.  Consider these lines, as I did, from the end of section 46 of Whitman's "Song of Myself":

Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams, /

Now I wash the gum from your eyes, /

You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment /

                                    of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, /

Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, /

To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and /

laughingly dash with your hair.

In Whitman is such freedom, so wild and open and exuberant. “Song of Myself” opens with “I” and ends with “you” and in between Whitman gathers the cosmos, the individual, and all of humanity into one interwoven whole. The poem is a crucible experience, a kind of transformation, at once irresistible and inevitable. Emerson worked on my mind, on the chains of tradition and society and learning, but Whitman reaches my whole being. I feel emboldened to make the leap, to rip off the training wheels and floaties, you know? How silly to hang on to them, to habit myself to the spin cycle and mundane, to the failures of the past and the fears of the future.

Habit myself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of my life?

YES.