This is What You Shall Do

"This is what you shall do," wrote Walt Whitman in the preface to the second edition of Leaves of Grass,the collection of verse that shook the literary establishment clear down to its knickers.I keep the whole passage in a frame on my desk and have read it so many times that it has entered me by now. I hear his voice in so many places I visit.I certainly heard it at sunset the other day when I drove to the stretch of city shoreline known as Revere Beach.Let me set down the whole of what Whitman says and you will maybe see why he sang to me here. He tells us,

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals; despise riches; give alms to everyone that asks; stand up for the stupid and the crazy; argue not concerning God; have patience and indulgence toward the people; go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the Mothers of families; dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency, not  only in words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the  lashes of your eyes and in every last joint and motion of your body...

Whenever I need to feel better I reread this and then I go out to where the people are. 'Stand up for the stupid and the crazy,' he says and I know that one day I will very likely be what the world calls stupid. As for crazy, my sister thinks I'm that already .It's fine if I am. It doesn't matter. I went to this beach and was smiled at by every single person I gave a smile to.We were all just there together. We walked or sat or stood, right where we should be: where God first put us and where He can find us again, here in His light, in His glorious late day-light.