As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.
O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
(From “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” Walt Whitman, 1881)
I’ve been wearing a heavier shoe lately:
The Bailly Homestead trail was muddier than I expected.
As you might imagine, this has slowed my pace considerably, but that’s all right. I haven’t been chasing PRs, or really even running much these past few months.
What I have been doing—a lot—is hiking the dunes and the lakeshore here in northwest Indiana. Many days it feels like I have all of Lake Michigan to myself, only occasionally sharing it with a seagull or a man sifting the sands with a metal detector.
It’s incredible.
It is also humbling. There’s a reason Whitman chose the shore as a setting for his meditation on mortality. Where else can we see so clearly the transitory nature of our lives? For a poet who stretched his songs as much as he could, whose Leaves of Grass accumulated poems like a drift in a snowstorm, the shifting sand beneath his feet reminded him how much remains “untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,” in spite of his best efforts.
It is true that life goes on without us, heedless of all our accomplishments or efforts to leave a mark.
This doesn’t have to lead to melancholy, however. It’s a question of attention. For example, on my hikes, I have been fascinated by the trametes versicolor, the turkey-tail mushroom:
These unassuming fungi are everywhere in the forest, sprouting from nearly every fallen tree. Still, they can be easy to miss, particularly when we are focused on the horizon, or on the branches waving above us.
An amazing February day in the Indiana Dunes State Park.
And after all, why pause for these symbols of decay when life soars so much more majestically in the powerful oaks that haven’t yet succumbed to the ash-borers, or the wind, or time itself?
I can’t get over these vibrant colors in the dead of winter.
Because there is beauty here, as well, if we pause to look for it. Beauty in small things, in life springing from death in an endless cycle that we all join, no matter how fast we run or how much we write.
For Whitman, this was always finally a source of comfort. As he writes at the conclusion of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,”
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out
before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.
Countless others have walked these paths I’m walking, and countless others will walk them when I’m long gone.
And in the tumult of these times, there’s real solace in that thought.
outsidereading 