Thursday, May 03, 2012


I’m still thinking and writing about religion and spirituality. 
As I go along I try to be awake to everything, and today I came across utility covers in the street with the word “electric,” and that brought to mind Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and that made me remember the wonderful segment of that work, nine verses, with the author’s piercing questions about definitions and the relation of the Soul to the Body.  I’ve included only the shortest, the first verse of Whitman’s song.  You will find the complete long text at the WEB address below.
from The Leaves of Grass
“I Sing the Body Electric”
by Walt Whitman
1
I SING the Body electric;
the armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
and discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;
and if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?


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