a ‘be who you is’ poem

Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’ is about all of his parts. How every part has an equal and opposite part, and how they meet in the middle to create one sentient being. He is saying to embrace yourself an love yourself, at whatever point in your life, because you are always the perfect you.

In that very message, though, he transcends himself. The “me, myself, and I” gives way to the “divine in me recognizes the divine in you”. It’s just as much about being a force in the world as it is about our response to others. Whitman wants to connect with everyone he meets. He wants to feel and love deeply. To dissolve a sense of separateness from others. To be together, free from influence - influence over how we live, talk, relate, love.

This was my first time reading it, and I’m in awe. It’s a small trip because I was recently struggling to express similar feelings in a poem I wrote, “Body awareness is the child’s deepest knowledge.”

… I won’t share the poem because it’s shitty, but it springs from thoughts around self-knowledge and self-consciousness. How, the more hidden a piece of self-knowledge is, the more influential it is over our life. The more “wizard behind the curtain” it becomes. [missing parts]

What if deep down inside us, there’s a being who’s hyperaware of itself and its full potential [birthright] and life just kinda unfolds around that?

But somewhere along the way of that unfolding, we begin to disembody ourselves when we realize the risks of knowing all parts of ourselves. We realize how painful the world can be when we expose our most sensitive parts to it. We actually regress our body awareness by compartmentalizing and shutting down parts that feel too much. I once heard that we are always most afraid of that which challenges our sense of self the most.

Maybe we even begin to extend that same rejection outwards to the vulnerable and sensitive around us.

…

The transcendent message delivered by Whitman is, perhaps, about loving all you is regardless of pain tolerance. To “endure without loosing one’s tenderness”, and to become deeply satisfied [euphoria] in the process.

Like endorphins rushing to a birth.

What a trip.