Walt’s Reminder

I fly home in 60 days, my ticket from Tokyo recently purchased. The days will pass quickly and already I feel the faint pangs of loss.

There is a grief that arises as one approaches the end of a long journey. I knew it in the last weeks of a year and a half of hitchhiking. And five years later on a freighter bound for Miami after six months in Central America.

More recently, I grieved in the last days of my journey with Walt Whitman,

knowing he would soon die and never again would I write of his life in the 21st century.

I hope to talk with Pa about this, the end of one life and the beginning of another. What it’s like to know that there will be a last day, a last breath.

There was a time when I read a poem a day, everyday, for many years. And that ended. But I’ve picked up Whitman’s Leaves of Grass again, and started anew with Song of Myself:

I celebrate 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 . . .

The old man has slapped me upside the head, reminding me that it’s today that counts, and no other.

So I’ll ride the cable car this morning over Tung Chung Bay, arriving at the Po Lin Monastery. Perhaps I’ll meet Pa there and we’ll marvel together at the great bronze Tian Tan Buddha.

Maybe I’ll read to Pa Walt’s account of sitting with the faithful as the Buddha neared the end:

“Despite his grave condition, he spoke with gentle concern to his disciples.

The teachings which I have given you, I gained by following the path myself. You should follow them and conform to their spirit on every occasion.

Then, with but a moment remaining, he uttered his last words.

Make of yourself a light. Rely upon yourself. Do not depend on anyone else. Make my teachings your light.

And so he left them to go their own way.”

And if Pa returns on the cable car, perhaps I’ll read a selection from Leaves of Grass in which Walt reminds us of the challenge of journey, no matter what that journey might be:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, there are millions of suns left,

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,

nor look through the eyes of the dead,

nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.