I had a childhood teeming with people. Not just a family of three younger brothers and two parents, but also my dad’s twelve siblings and their families, and my mom’s three sisters and brothers and theirs. I have grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and too many to count. The neighborhood I grew up in has multiple families with children my age, some older, most younger.  There were always new babies next door to hold and kiss on the cheek. I had more siblings than I could keep track of to play with, sometimes fight with, but mostly just get dirty with. Whitman writes,

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, 

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough

And also, 

There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well.

I think of the summertime when we ran from yard to yard while our mothers held the babies and laughed together.  And the winter when we dragged our sleds to the nearest hill and then home to any house in the neighborhood to sit by the fireplace and dry our socks. 

My house in the neighborhood was a curious place. I asked my parents and they told me it was a house church. All I knew was that that meant on Sunday mornings my brothers and I would put aside sibling rivalries and put away our toys. We would convert the dining room into a sanctuary with hymn books on the chairs. The podium my father built went under the window. My father would lead a worship service from there. On Friday night’s my parents and others gathered in that same room for bible studies.

My home was open to all kinds of people. We would sing together, eat together, pray together, and sometimes live together. We once lived communally with another family, shared kitchen and a living room. When they moved next door there was always someone else moving in. Whether a student from Paraguay, a preschool teacher with her crazy dog, a young pharmacist from Chicago or Korean couple. I was always among people I loved, or sometimes people I would rather have nothing to do with had my parents not invited them into our home. Instead of Whitman’s housekeepers, fireman, wrestlers and farmer’s daughters In my house I remember Korean grandmothers, a Nigerian couple, an Iranian convert, a student with a beautiful singing voice, a monk, and especially a flavor chemist who gave me a collection of beads on my birthday. There was always a dynamic circle of noncompatible people who could somehow get along passing through my house, and often staying.

I hear that people are beautiful even when they are broken. They can annoy me and also have an intensity, a depth that I can never know. All I do know is that people are to be felt and experienced, known well and embraced.  Maybe the peculiarities of their personalities are not such a defining factor as the simple fact that they are human souls.

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?

[Whitman, Walt (1949) Leaves of Grass, and Selected Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.]

Love is such a humbling thing
Like water, supple and soft
Quiet or talkative
Drink it in you’re sure to be refreshed
Become immersed and you will surely drown
Like love, water comforts as well as strikes
Either as a flood carrying off a mountain
Or slowly carving
Love can humble
But it is met with such opposition
We know we must practice it
But we don’t understand it at all
Subconsciously we resist it
And like the mountains
We are carved into

No wonder this so-called world of change hates You
The message has always been the same
Submit to love
Become alive

Let the tear hit the ground
It’s done now, and there’s no going back
The only way up is kneeling down
Bow before guillotine
In those moments before death
What we call life
We just stare at the ground
Knowing it’s our fate

A breeze blows in
You exhale so confidently
Ready or not, here it comes
The moments fly by so fast
Memory cannot keep itself alive
The heart dives
The world spins
There is a clamour
There is a gasp
There is a breath
You wake up the next day…
And something just seems different…