Leaves of Grass (Not THAT Kind of Grass)

Thursday 26 April

I got home last night and passed the fuck out last night. That's my life.

Anyway. So yesterday began too early for functionality with my 8 AM physics recitation, which was okay and we're good at physics. Fuck yeah.

THEN my Norlin class got cancelled and I stayed in the library and wrote my blog. I was really quite distraught. I love that class, and we were going to talk about my favorite poem in the ENTIRE FREAKING UNIVERSE, "Song of Myself." I was sad. Anyway. Then along came Ethics and I heard presentations on Steve Prefontaine and Paul Farmer. And they were quite excellent and I'm jealous that they are actually coherent in front of an audience. Honestly.

Yeah. So then I got food and stayed in my room and watched the rest of Thor because I'm cool, and then I watched part of Captain America and it was TOTALLY WICKED. I love him so much.

After that Sam and I did chem homework and finished it in one hour flat, which was amazing because it usually takes days. I then went to the library and hung out there reading Democracy in America by Tocqueville and looked quite scholarly or whatever. Woo!

Then we got food at Farrand (again—this is why Loretta the cashier knows my life so well) and then we baked cookies AND a cake, and then we frosted said items, and then Crissie and I began our girl's night.

It quickly turned into something else since the Triple was up to their shenanigans and then Morgan and Poppy came in and then we played "Tourette's" which was super fun, and Willow came in (and she is wonderful human being) then we danced, and then we just hung out for awhile, taking pictures and talking about life and all that jazz. Then I was tired, so I came back to Smith and passed the fuck out. Like a winner. I didn't even do my politics homework.

Yeah. That's about it.

So because I didn't get to talk about "Song of Myself" in class, I'll just leave you with the short essay I wrote on it a couple of weeks ago. It was about how my top value in life is "Connection." Yay!


I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass my freshman year of high school under a tree in my backyard (like the hippie I am). I started to realize over the years that his philosophy greatly paralleled mine. He titles his life’s work Leaves of Grass for a reason. At its core is a theme of common humanity. For Whitman, humanity is a field of grass. Each one of us has a distinct leaf, but we’re all connected by a single root system—a common human experience if you will. No man exists without the collective human experience unifying us. If you’re cut off and isolated, you will die. These connections are our life source.

Whitman also writes a great deal on loneliness, yet uses it to make more connections. He realizes through all his poetry that he cannot exist as a solitary live oak in Lousiana, that he must continually seek the sphere to connect him to other humans like the spider flings his web hoping to catch somewhere, that even though he is lonely crossing this ferry, others are united with him in the common experience. It always, for Whitman, comes back to connection.

I’ve believed for a long time that my views largely parallel Whitman’s. I believe, as he does, in a collective human experience that unites us and that even in your loneliest and darkest moments, you have that to connect you to other leaves of grass. Even if you’re united in loneliness, you can know that other people feel the same way. You can know that, because we share a common experience, we are connected, that we are all a little lost, all a little scared, and yet all a little happy.

I’ve been told it’s strange that my top value is connection, a social quality, when I’m an introvert. I don’t think it creates any sort of dissonance. I believe the connections I’ve made, the people I meet—be it my family, my friends, my colleagues in my major, my teachers, my coworkers, even random people in Arvada, Denver, and Boulder—have a hand in shaping my life. Every truly unifying moment has depended on other people. I, like Whitman, cannot live without these connections to other human beings. They are necessary to my core. I’m a hopeless wanderer, going from peer group to peer group, from major to major, from one town to another, but each connection is of intense value to me. I cannot live without having at least one place where I feel close-knit and deeply rooted.

I've realized, finally, that I’ve found my roots of my solitary leaf grown deep—that I am connected with the rest of the human experience, and it is wonderful. It reinforced the value of connection, and I believe that’s why I keep coming back to it.

So yeah. That's scholarship at its best. I'm going to go sit in the sun now.

Thanks for reading! :)