dear walt

sing us a song! it's a hot summer day. they're evacuating the hills and ash hangs in the air. there is smoke in our various noses. despite all this, here we are, *still* in possession of home and family.

i've been thinking about fear and uncertainty lately--how i have been spared the worst of it for a long time. in my single years i'd panic every so often {what if i lose my job? what if i can't afford rent or groceries?} but always there was the glorious fact of my family. there are just so many of them. i knew that, come failure and disaster, i would never want for love, support and, of course, money if i needed it. i'd recite this fact during uncertain times; it became like a mantra and its comforting echo still rings for me.

granted i never rose so high that i'd have far to fall. i have made mostly safe, predictable choices. no flood, fire, earthquake or hurricane has {yet} threatened. and even though we all wonder what sacrifices the suffering economy will ultimately ask of us, well.
it hasn't asked too much yet.

and so, until then, thanks be for the comforts we have today. what else can we do but keep living our spontaneous and ordered lives? find places where we're needed close to home, and reach further if we can. thanks to all of you who do.

take it away, walt.

"Spontaneous me, Nature,

The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,

The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,

The rich coverlid of the grass—animals and birds—the private untrimm’d bank—

the primitive apples—the pebble-stones,

Beautiful dripping fragments—

"The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)

Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,

The torment—the irritable tide that will not be at rest,

The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen’d long-round walnuts;

The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,

It has done its work—I tossed it carelessly to fall where it may."

*-The Whit{man}