"Hours for the Soul"

In my last entry, I wondered how Whitman came to be so connected with nature, so happy and alive, so healthy in the fullest sense of the word.  So enlightened, you could say.  I had some thoughts and theories stemming from my reading of "Song of Myself" and from my own experiences, but I could only get so far without the ability to ask him myself.  How do you do it, Captain?

Then I found the section of Whitman's Speciment Days entitled "Hours for the Soul" in which Whitman describes in detail what it was like for him to commune with nature.  At this point in his life he has clearly already grown close to nature, and in this passage he catalogs in detail the behavior of the sky almost as one would describe the most intimate movements of an irresistible lover.  In doing so, he may be revealing the secret to his enlightened state: the development of a relationship with nature.  An attentive, non-withholding, deep relationship.  And relationships take patience and consistency; we can't just enjoy a few pretty sunsets a year and call that intimacy!  But the work pays off.   Whitman writes:

"As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and through me its placid and untellable lesson, beyond -- O, so infinitely beyond ! -- anything from art, books, sermons, or from science, old or new. The spirit's hour -- religion's hour -- the visible suggestion of God in space and time -- now once definitely indicated, if never again."  

Perhaps Whitman's finest art was his ability to transcend the need for art, to cut out the middle man and directly & fully experience the most true & abstract of plains, where artists and preachers and scientists can only provide mere glimpses.