My recent move nearly complete I sat down to relax over a cup of tea and a snippet or two from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 

  What a way to start the process of exorcizing the City and its way of life from my being, a way I knew had taken hold of my soul over the last couple of years, which was the main reason I had increasingly neglected work here at the Cafe.  

  Anyway, what healing there is in Nature, tea and Walt Whitman!

  His life’s work is not to be read from opening page to the end, at least to my thinking. It is to be enjoyed, celebrated and indeed reverenced as one would a garden or meadow, in its wholeness and plurality as well as the beauty of its distinctive parts, its individual petals, shoots or Leaves.

   Opening the book at random this is what I read:

  “My spirit to yours dear brother,

  Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you, 

  I do not sound your name, but I understand you,

  I specify you with joy O my comrade to salute you, and to salute those who are with you, before and since, and those to come also,

  That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession, 

  We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,

  We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,

  Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,

  We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers nor any thing that is asserted,

  We hear the bawling and din, we are reach’d at by divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side,

  They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade,

  Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,

  Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.”

  

  Ahh, how sweet and true and filled with the wonder of Nature is Whitman!

  Blessings to you, dear reader, and may you awaken as good ole Walt did to the fact that…

  Life is ALL there is!