"Loos'd of limits and Imaginary lines."

     I was young when I discovered Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, maybe eleven or twelve.  I was one of those straight and narrow kids.  My mom is French so there was wine offered at dinner, but I never touched it.  I didn't party.  I didn't take drugs.  But Whitman, my God, I read him and grew rapturous, ecstatic.  He taught me you could grow drunk on words.  Whitman was my gateway drug and poetry, even now, after all these years, undoes me.  It turns me Victorian and I literally swoon  I swoon.

     This week has been filled with endings, although perhaps that's that's the right word.  Maybe partings is a better one, not good bye but au revoir, until I see you again.  As I finished work, I felt a great lifting.  I love my vocation as Speech Pathologist and this job was a good one, but letting go of it was critical to move to the new.  I think it was Seneca who said, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."  My days since, the few left before I go, have been filled with myriad tasks large and small.  You understand as you unravel one life to weave another just how many ways you lash yourself to the mast of the life you are living.  And with task accomplished, I could feel it, myself expanding; the limits I have spent years believing I possessed, my certain edges, were not true edges at all, but self-imposed.  I can fly in dreams but as a creature of air, I swear I feel as if I could fly in my waking life as well.

     Which of course lead me back to Whitman, my initiation into poetry, into the ecstatic possibilities of life, my mentor to living life fully and feeling with all of me, not just my own body electric but the bodies around me and the beloved body of the Earth, of Mother Ocean, of Father Sky.  My road is open before me, replete with possibilities and I am not pre-ordained or forced to walk a particular path.  The road before me is open and I can sing, full throated and lovely, a song of rapture, of determination, of courage, of joy.  My symphony is not finished but still in progress and the song of the open road fills my heart and throat.  There have so many gifts in this change of life, one of the most wondrous this return to possibility and a hosting of it, not in fear, but in delight.  When I board that plane at Sacramento International Airport  , there will be the deep sorrow of parting, but beneath that, and hopefully forever part of the fabric of me will by the profound joy of being loos'ed at last of limits and imaginary lines, my own master, total and absolute.

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,	55
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.	60
I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me;
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you.
I will recruit for myself and you as I go;	65
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go;
I will toss the new gladness and roughness among them;
Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.