Walt Whitman remains America’s greatest poet of healing. His close-up witness to the tragedy of the Civil War, coupled with his robust faith in the American creed led to his majestic and compassionate poetry. I believe it was his — and is my preference — to always err on the side of compassion vs anything less.
In his poem, America, Whitman wasn’t describing what America was during the Civil War, but was envisioning what it could be and what the American experiment aimed to be. America, he wrote, you are the “Center of equal daughters, equal sons, / All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old.”
Whitman knew that the American Union could remain intact through the Civil War only by the inclusion of all, especially one’s enemies. It’s how we became one United States of America versus a Northern or Southern United States. Enemies were included!
Today, the healing prescription for cultural bitterness must adopt this vision. Today, we hear a lot of nice words and slogans that remain distant but never get bloody. But change requires hard work, like the work of a man tending to the wounded and dying in a Civil War battlefield hospital – legs and arms piled in the tent corner – shoes caked in blood-stained ground.
In Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, “For every atom belongs to me as good belongs to you.” Quantum thought posits this as true. My atoms are yours and yours are mine. Your breath is mine and mine is yours. We are not separate from, or different from one another; your wounds are mine and mine are yours. The unity of opposites and a deep connection with all was accepted as a starting point and used as a technique in traditional Eastern yoga where the entire goal was spiritual evolution. It still is, even if it’s roundly ignored in the West.
Yoga’s great unifying spiritual principle was then expressed clearly by this formula Atman=Brahmin (self is both biologically human and cosmically divine). This fundamental unity was the ground of yoga philosophy and practice. Hatha yoga, a defining word in practice means the blending of opposites through force. ‘Ha’ means sun, and ‘tha’ means moon. Yoga is cosmic and biological, blending sun and moon, or compression and extension; and when Western yoga doesn’t teach this, it is unconnected to its philosophical core, therapeutic force, and foundational strength.
Stay with me here . . . yoga is both individual and corporate; birthed in the forge of asana, stilled in meditation’s gaze, and mobilized by breath. Yoga’s offer of deep-seated liberation is not in the stretch but in the reach where yoga counsels a flexible mentality, moving body, mind, and soul to new limbs to open the heart, the hotline to all stories of consequence.
A yoga song forms in every exhale, a sacred song that rides the current of our breath. At an atomic level, your song, like a cloud of breath is mine and mine is yours. This cloud is a safe home where every joy and sorrow burst forth in prophetic rain. And like colors blurring into a rainbow, yogis bend into their longings where yours are mine and mine are yours . . . even those of the beating cosmos and life-giving wind.
In the yogi’s heated engagements, change is created within the body by the convocation of inner winds (vayus) that energize all passions, your passions are mine and mine are yours; and where yogis are formed by this tapas, they shift like lava as their practice unfolds in a slow but sure and unrelenting force to end in luminous savasana; your savasana is mine and mine is yours: common, salty, damp, the shroud of a lifeless corpse, alive breath by breath.
Fluid yoga shapes every remaking, one connected to another. Born in water, I am nymph turning to dragonfly. My spine is bent low and becomes rabbit; then I lift to camel, morph to fish, or rise into ever-watchful sphinx. I evolve once again going back and yet forward – at the same time – to my child in his innocent, trusting repose. My evolving is yours and yours is mine as we embody fish, dolphin, or the honorable warrior.
Your asana is mine and mine is yours. Your practice of distress linked to eustress turns out warriors of heart and soul embodying a prayer that is at once metaphysical and physical. Heart and lungs are the crucial center – interchangeable – in the koshas (or layers) of fullness brought to bear in the warrior where every move yokes heart and lung and brings us closer to the wheel of life. Breath by breath, your move closer to the hub is mine and mine is yours, where self, other, and God reside.
Yoga reforms you as it reforms me in its heating, bending, reaching, and shaping. It is hatha (force), the well-wielded power of creation’s dance in forceful opposites registers in my body as they register in yours. The forces in me are forged likenesses in you – alive in you – where your fiery tapas molds a reformation that is yours. You are forged in fire as am I, and molded by heat and the tapas that reforms each of us alike and anew.
Do I find a witness for this collaboration? I may not hear you, but my collaboration is yours and yours is mine. Your energy is also multitudes as mine is; I witness it all and am collaborated by you as you are collaborated by me.
Braided together from the soles of our feet to the crowns of our heads, your atom-ic breath is mine and mine is yours (catch the drift), and the vital life-bending force at the center of it all is mine and mine is yours. My spine is yours and yours is mine as we reach to breathe deeply, stretch to embrace joy, yearn for wellness and become the road map for our American “going-on” here, now, in this “Center of equal daughters and equal sons.” My breath moves to release and a yearning is fulfilled. My yearning is your yearning and yours is mine, both set to ease in the deep centering.
Commencing with asana, hoping to catch the echo of sages, I listen deeply for the next move, the next mantra, the next rising. My gaze, known as drishti, moves my sight from ground to horizon to sky and back again; an ascent to the mountain in me and flight of the winged one in you.
My rising in steady gaze from ground to horizon to mountain is yours and yours is mine. I follow the arrow of concentration higher and higher. My drishti is yours and yours is mine, and in this concentration of new flight an energetic makeover forms into a transformation that is yours, and yours is also mine. My rising is yours and yours is mine as we come on up from your savasana of deep repose, and from this corpsed status breathe again to take back life.
Intent and focus break open consciousness and light up pathways of long-dormant memories. Emerging, they lead me to another place where you are connected to my bending and shaping as I am to yours. This great I AM, our spiritual mantra, an Aloha for America where “All alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old.” My endeared is your endeared and your endeared is mine.
A seed takes root in the smallest and darkest crag of a rock where its urgent reach grows into a flower or large tree. This too is the way of yoga, where stories come from the seedbed of my body and soul, from your body and soul. Ours is the same as fluid yoga continues over us all in its unique making and remaking, and the water still flows to low places, the chthonic root of life.
Gravity propels all fluid journeys and hydrates the stories made by time and pressure. My story changes and is yours, just as yours turns another page and becomes mine. I present myself, and I learn; you present yourself, and you learn. Gravity working you is the gravity working me and our fluid journey is one.
By melody of motion, yogis grow into a new creation where yours is mine and mine is yours. This is the ground for Yoga Song, it’s a sacred song formed by expansion of the heart, draw of breath, gaze to the depths, and the unbent will to love every life star.
Leave the gods out of it, It’s the work of men, women, and people to love. Whitman knew the gods, but he put them aside for the blood and guts work of tending Civil War casualties. In your mind, dare to see now this hospital war-tent: severed limbs here and there on the ground or in bloody boxes, blood-soaked clay of Georgia, fields of Gettysburg, moans and pleas from dying and injured.
Civil War hospital tents didn’t need just any man, but a man who would love and care for another man no matter North or South. We need such men today; we need such women today; we need such people today.
Here, Whitman takes the measure of Gods and dispenses with the formalities by “laying them away.” It’s our work, he rightly claims.
“Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah and laying them away /
Lithographing Kronos and Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson /
Buying drafts of Osiris and Iris and Belus and Brahma and Adonai /
In my portfolio placing Manitou loose and Allah on a leaf and the crucifix engraved /
With Odin, and the hideous-faced Mexitil, and all idols and images.”
— Song of Myself.
Whitman’s mission was not to be a god, but to be a man, a man no more modest than immodest. A man active, and compassionate, investing in his present. It’s what it took to be real in the Civil War battlefield hospital tent. It’s what it takes today where my sorrow is your sorrow, your joy is my joy, and our forgiveness and compassion is built for one another; it’s the only Px that will heal this bitter land and people.
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