A Walt Whitman moment

Photo by Garaint Smith

O to speed to where there is space enough and air enough at last!

To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature!

To have the gag removed from ones mouth!

To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am!

To be lost if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life

with one hour of fullness and freedom!

           Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass”

I sing a praise today for water, which is nothing less than life in the desert lands.  A brief visit to the Rio Grande, the Big River, which is hardly a little pond by Eastern standards, set against the mighty Mississippi, or the great Hudson.  But here it is the blue ribbon of life itself, and along its meager stream is found places like the Bosque del Apache, bird refuge, and the strange little town of Truth or Consequences, where I go for a day or so when I need to be lost.  Rio, Rio. 

“All truths wait in all things,

they neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

they do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon to be born

the insignificant is as big to me as any

(what is more or less than a touch?)

I believe a leaf of grass is no less

than the journey work of the stars.”