Whitman and Muir as Guides to Restoring Connectedness 

by Holli S. Emore

Roiling, unfolding individualism in dynamic tension with cooperative community has characterized the ongoing story of America.  Hardly more than a lifetime past, the North American continent was still wild, tantalizing those who felt the restrictions of an old world and stale way of life.  By the time of poet Walt Whitman and naturalist John Muir, the scores of refugee religious movements had dispersed beyond their original settlements and the American psyche seethed with existential questions.   

In her social history of spiritualism in America, Weisberg articulates the dilemmas faced by many in the country: 

Ordinary Americans in the 1800s had great opportunity for social, economic, and geographic mobility.  They faced a number of questions that perhaps can be summed up in a simple query that had rarely been so pressing in the past: “Where are we going?”Shall we pack our worldly goods and journey westward?  Or leave the farm behind and head for the city?  Are our struggles moving us upward on the social ladder, or have our risks only pushed us down a notch?  Is our society advancing toward utopian perfection?  Or under new pressures such as urbanization, is it descending into chaos?

Most believed in the so-called American Dream that the average person could strike out alone, finding success which was only limited by hard work and determination.  Ironically, the opportunity to stake such a claim rested in a fragile web of social cooperation, a web dramatically tested throughout the nineteenth century.  If the swirl of change during this period, including the Civil War and westward expansion, were not enough to provoke self-questioning, Charles Darwin’s landmark mid-century publication, On the Origin of the Species, further pressed those anxious to reconcile their faith with science. 

Pagans of the twenty-first century also find themselves driven by reaction to the religious culture of their childhood.  “Witches and Pagans construct their identity in contrast to that of the dominant American culture,” notes folklorist Magliocco.  The post-modern cult of individualism both enriches and threatens the social fabric which makes the individualism possible.  The dominant voices of American Paganism came of age during the space race, taking for granted that science could provide absolutes in times of social upheaval.  At the same time, they rejected the emotional sterility of scientific realism, readily embracing occult philosophy and practices in reaction to the predominant culture of the Eisenhower generation. 

Magliocco continues framing the dilemma of modern Pagans: 

The anti-imagination discourse relegates the numinous to a state of unreality.  Since according to this paradigm, numinous experience is unreal, those who claim to have experienced it are considered outside the norm and out of touch with the culture’s constructs of reality.  They are marginalized, their voices are silenced, and narratives of their experiences are delegitimized.  Neo-Pagans resist this construction of reality based on materialism, pragmatism, and rationalism (as distinct from rationality).  Neo-Pagans do not reject rationality, but rather the exclusion of certain ways of knowing and operating in the world deemed “irrational,” and thus inferior.

Like the early Christians, Pagans are “in this world, but not of it,” or socially, at least, they are often ostracized and experience discrimination.  To complicate matters, they prey upon one another with a dismaying ferocity.  One way to cope with feeling delegitimized is to develop an attitude of oppositionality, the far spectrum of individuality.  In this usage, “oppositional” refers to defining oneself by what one is not, rather than what one is.  Oppositional behavior may erupt unexpectedly during any cooperative endeavor since for many it is a core belief about themselves.  Because Pagans in locales across the United States report anecdotally that they are fragmented and unable to achieve a cooperative community climate, this oppositionality would appear to be a destructive force.   

The failed relationships endemic to Pagans, among both individuals and groups, appear to be evidence of the destructive effects of oppositionality.  Following the end of a failed relationship, many people create a strong protective emotional barrier.  If left intact indefinitely, such barriers effectively starve the individual who has lost their connection to the nourishment of emotional porosity.  Vulnerability may be perceived as a threat by such a person, but the more significant threat is emotional and social isolation. 

Both of our writers (Muir and Whitman) had a keen understanding of the essential nature of sensing and nurturing our connectedness.  Muir says, in his classic My First Summer In the Sierra, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  Indeed, Whitman seems to merge with his surroundings, as in these lines from “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”: 

As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok . . .
I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, . . .
Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. 

Despite Muir’s mild derision of the tourists who disturbed the peace of the Yosemite wilderness, he strongly advocated for wilderness preservation, hoping to maintain the wilds in part so that all the tourists of the future might visit and be transformed.   

Roszak suggests that emotional isolation between humans is deeply linked to human relationships with the natural world.. 

We readily recognize that [dominance and submission] is at the root of many broken families, broken marriages, broken relationships.  What's the alternative?  Well most therapists would say there has to be trust, there has to be mutual respect.  Now in an eco-psychology you would take that same insight into human relationships and try to read it into our relationship with the natural world.  Is there some other way to find security in our relations with nature than by way of dominance and submission? 

He goes on to point out that “sanity and madness” have typically been defined by indigenous peoples in relationship to natural habitat, with insanity perceived as an imbalance between the individual or tribe and nature.   

We may readily acknowledge that the loss of perceived interpersonal connections will foster a myriad of social dysfunctions, but the voices of the relatively new ecopsychology field (e.g., Roszak) press us to look further along life’s web to the collateral damage to our natural environment which can result from these fractures.  When one human sees himself as different and separate from the rest of humanity, the disconnect results directly in damage to the community.  Someone who does not feel his intrinsic connection with others will be jaded at best and pathological at worst. 

When humans – only one species among millions of life forms – see themselves as different and separate from the rest of the cosmos, this disconnect results directly in damage to the environment.  Even the concept of good “stewardship” of the environment comes from the idea that humans own and control the earth.  Someone who does not feel that the earth is part of her will not feel the pain of environmental degradation, and may never identify her lack of engagement with the natural world as a source of personal malaise. 

Uncommonly sensitive to the divine aspect of all of existence, Whitman describes a new world which is spiraling creatively outwards from the old European hierarchies, wars, and failed movements.  He rejects any artificial separation of physical and non-physical life, describing “Santa Spirita” (Holy Spirit) as “Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan.”  Like a god himself, Whitman exults in “Song of Myself,” “I am large . . . . I contain multitudes."   

Muir sought to claim wild lands before they could be claimed for commercial or personal “development.”  Partly in contrast, Whitman made little or no distinction between what is called the natural world and that referred to as man-made.  The lines of “Manahatta” wheel rapidly between descriptions of the city, the people and the landscape. 

 . . . I see that word [Manahatta] nested in nests of water-bays, superb, Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long . . .

Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,

The flowing sea-currents, the little islands . . .

Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand a week,

The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,

The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft . . .

The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes . . .

A million people . . . City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city! 

Both Muir and Whitman demonstrated an antidote to emotional isolation.  Both moved forward from childhood difficulties with apparent openness to life experience.  Muir immersed himself in the wilderness, Whitman in the human landscape. Each practiced what today might be called “mindfulness,” simply being in the wilds, simply being with others (a notable example being Whitman’s hospital chaplaincy).  While these practices may appear somewhat passive, they resulted in very practical change far beyond their individual experience:  wilderness preservation, increased public awareness of the importance of wilderness, comfort to hundreds (at least) of dying soldiers, and no doubt better health outcomes for many of them. 

Despite their own iconoclasm, neither Muir nor Whitman represented isolation, but rather the healing respite of solitude, and the meditative habit of mindfully observing what was around them.  Muir implies profound therapeutic possibilities when he says, “. . . for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.” 

The wild temples of Muir, much like the ancient temples of Asklepius, are capable of serving as places of restoration.  As patients came to the ancient temples to wait, rest, listen and dream until they were visited in their sleep by the god, so in our time, nature has the ability to serve as a sanctuary, a place of safety and shelter for the human who suffers from disconnectedness.  Our parks and wilderness areas, city greenways, backyards and gardens may all be seen as a sort of hospital network for the soul.  Just as every community recognizes the necessity of access to medical care, so we should apprehend our need for access to these green places of healing. 

Whitman might point out the importance of recognizing that the urban landscape, while not the same, is no less valid a life form than the wild.  To separate the two would be to continue the false dichotomy of separation, perpetuating disconnectedness.  Those who respectfully and joyfully embrace all of existence much as did Whitman consequently are more likely to live in ways that preserve the wild.  Again he praises New York City in Drum Taps: “My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships, the varied and ample land . . . ,” never distinguishing with so much as a line break the natural and the man-made. 

Despite its pervasive disconnectness, Paganism is uniquely positioned to help modern society heal its relationship with the earth, according to Magliocco.   

Unlike vernacular magic, Neo-Pagan magic is a self-conscious attempt to revive and re-create a sense of interconnectedness in the world, a sacredness of time and space that Pagans locate in pre-industrial cultures. 

Whitman and Muir urge us forward in the work of re-connection.  “Thus I pressed Yosemite upon him [Shepherd Billy] like a missionary offering the gospel . . .,” he says in Sierra, and indeed, President Theodore Roosevelt told their mutual friend John Burroughs that he found Burroughs a “more comfortable” traveling companion, since Muir filled his time with Roosevelt advocating for wilderness preservation.

Even more dramatically, Whitman writes, “I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death, For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them.”  Not one to placidly write poetry from the comfort of his desk, Whitman spent countless hours helping thousands of soldiers during the Civil War, and decried slavery with nuances often lost on contemporary readers.  His career as a journalist no doubt reinforced his dedication to the power of the written word. 

But the greatest gift Muir and Whitman offer is subtle.  Muir attends the land the way Whitman attends the wounded and dying soldiers.  Each of them pays attention, simply observes, listens, rather than attempting any particular action.  Their gift to the land and to the soldiers is to be there, notice the details, to care.  This caring attentiveness can serve as a model for those attempting their own re-connection, as well as the nurturing of others who suffer from disconnectedness.  Furthermore, the healing of emotional isolation clears the way for the human psyche to rediscover the vital cause of environmental care and action. 

Muir, especially, voiced the benefit of using nature to restore the understanding of connectedness.  “Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest!  Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.” 

Contemporary Pagan philosopher Brendan Myers writes in Loneliness and Revelation that the process must be intentional: 

The beauty of the earth is there to be seen.  It is something that you must deliberately look for, and perhaps also something you must learn to see . . . Not without evidence did Schopenhauer say that the will is universal, and that a human will is but an instance of a cosmic will which dwells in every moving, changing, and living thing in the world.  In the wonders of the natural world, it can seem as if there are spiritual beings in the earth and the sun, asserting their presence to us, telling us that life is beautiful and good . . . Any and every movement of energy which sustains and empowers the life of organisms and even whole ecosystems can be a Revelation that life is beautiful and good. 

Whitman, for all his love of the crowds of New York, retreated frequently to the solitude of nature.  While gregarious and sociable, Muir’s own immersion in the wilderness underscored the value of such treks.  Myers returns again to the importance of nature: 

The idea of spiritual knowledge discovered in solitude and silence is a prominent part of many ancient spiritual cultures . . . Perhaps the voice of the universe . . . is always calling out to us, but we hear it only in the rare moments when all distractions have been put aside. 

Muir and Whitman heard the voice of the universe, gifting us with their own accounts of re-connection in both prose and poetry.  Whitman’s enigmatic words from “Song of Myself” is a hymn to connectedness: 

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

This the common air that bathes the globe.