Journal of Sacred Work

    I see my soul reflected in nature,
As I see through a mist, one with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty...
– from "I Sing the Body Electric" in Leaves of Grass,(1855) by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

   Do you, like Whitman, see your soul reflected in nature? If you do, and you live in a a four-season climate, you are watching the dying season. Three hundred fifteen days into this year, nature is shedding her leaves The ground is seizing up in the presence of cold nights.
   Our clothes change color as well. Pink and yellow have given way to purple, brown and black.
   What happens to our souls as the earth turns through the season? Whitman was a keen observer of this. A volunteer nurse during the Civil War, he threw his passion into loving others and into expressing his own love through transcendent poetry. Considered by many to be the father of free verse, Whitman's language was so open and unrestrained that some thought his work was obscene.
   "I sing the body electric," he wrote, "Arms and hands of love, lips of love…the body of the woman I love, the body of the man, the body of the earth."  It was all too much for conservative preachers and stiff-necked business people.
   Those folks missed Whitman's point. The poet sought to celebrate the bodies we occupy for such a short time. He wrote of pain as well as of joy. And he looked, courageously, at "The gash'd bodies on battle-fields,/ the insane in their strong-door'd rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates,/ and the dying emerging from gates…" 
   You, as a caregiver, see what Whitman saw. You see pain and have the chance to relieve it, you see birth and have the chance to guide it, you see death and have the chance to ease it through "the gates."
   Caregivers, I sing your praises today and everyday. For you are the ones who offer your loving energy to meet the needs of bodies and souls who experience the pain of living in this world.
   How do Whitman's words come to you on this Monday? How do you see your soul reflected in nature as well as in the eyes of those for whom you care?

-Erie Chapman