“I recruit myself as I go.”
I happened across Walt Whitman’s sage phrase (titled above) as I sat by a soft, grey-green morning window light, nibbling on some delicious short passages of his close friend, the naturalist John Burroughs. Oddly enough, I find myself reading ‘The Heart of Burrough’s Journals’, a book published in 1928, written by a man in 1916 whom I’d never come across, that now sits handsomely preserved on my window ledge in 2026. Strange how things apparently happen for all of us, yes? And how we can share that same awareness “that surpasses all understanding.”
Indeed, the story about how all these things in life happened, happens in the present, but I’ll not bore you with it here – how a friend of a friend told me about Burroughs – but take a moment to explore what Whitman (American author of ‘Leaves of Grass’, 1854, ) said way back then, and how his poetic utterings echo and touch me today. Phrases like: “I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots” and “It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you.”
I’ve often noted that, “In aware living, one never knows.” When I read “I recruit myself as I go” I was struck by how eloquently the poet expressed awareness actually moving and unfolding without one’s knowing; that one is awareness only, and how one flows like a brook, like water (ancient symbol of truth), finding its way, turning and falling and rising over, around, and through new terrain as it goes. As life flows. There’s real beauty and joy in simply being that flowing; in not knowing or needing to know, but just discovering – uncovering – what life is offering moment to moment. That’s unconditional love, loving.
Have a beautiful day discovering yourself, and be well. 🙂
~ Love isn’t a feeling; it’s the Absolute, giving purely of itself to itself. The awareness one IS, is love compassionately acting.
~ Song of Myself.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Walt Whitman 1819 –1892
Photo rendering of Walt Whitman by James Kline
~ More of his ageless Song: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/song-myself/
