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Amending Bitter Cultural Wars in this Republic I Find a Prescription by Starting With Whitman Which Turns Me to Yoga Which Turns Me Back Again to Whitman and then to You
“Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book mean nothing, the drift of it everything.”
- Walt Whitman “Shut Not Your Doors.”
We must not be stingy with compassion. Be present and real now. This is yoga, this is life. In this yoga and in this life, yours is mine and mine is yours. Catch the drift?
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
— Jean-Paul Satre
Walt Whitman remains America’s greatest poet of healing. Born in a Civil War torn land, his witness to the great tragedy in war and American grandeur in its people led to an overwhelming luminosity in compassion. I believe it was his — and is my preference -to always err on the side of compassion.
He knew that America could remain intact through the Civil War only by inclusion of all, especially one’s enemies. It’s how we became one United States of America versus a Northern or Southern United States. Enemies were included!
Whitmans poem “America,” wasn’t describing what America was during the The Civil War, but was envisioning what it could be and what the American experiment aimed to be. America, he wrote, you are the