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An Untold Lesson
By Lucas Walker
Winner of the HNPS essay contest
“I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, it is always to leave the best untold.” -Walt Whitman
My mom never read Walt Whitman. She never spoke of literature or art, really. She was too busy working the grave yard shift at the big hospital on the hill. She was too busy trying to cover the bills, to buy hamburger and blue jeans for her kids. We had few friends, we knew a few people and we got along just fine. I made it through. So, with my childhood obligations completed I left the house; young, innocent, hopeful and a little scared.
I became a nuclear machinist mate in the Navy. I spent six years at sea, in the bottom of a big ship. I knew nothing of government, politics or religion. I was raised by baseball and the love of a struggling mother, that was it. I had no aspirations nor hopes for great success. I was not scared of failure. I was a benign smile in a framed photograph, almost invisible.
I read a half a dozen books by the time I was eighteen years old. Six books, that’s it. During those years at sea, to fill the time and to better understand the crazy world I found myself thrown into, I wondered the ship’s library. Narrow aisles between stacks of books I had never heard of. I pulled books down, I made piles and I started to read; Thoreau, Emerson, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Carl Jung, William Carlos Williams, Hemingway, etc. I read and I read.
My service time ticked by ever so slowly. I continued to read and take notes. I asked questions of the people around me. I talked with others who knew of such things. They told me about Dante’s Inferno, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Homer’s epics, William James’ Pragmatism. It was all new to me.
I did my time in that grey world and was honorably discharged, a 24 year old kid spit out into the world, still innocent, still scared but with something else behind my eyes. I was now in the habit of absorbing time and places, ideas and histories. I was enthused and open to it all.
I followed the route John Steinbeck took with his poodle Charley. I traveled up through New England and then out west, across the continent. I lived close to the road and deep in the books. My nose sought the clean ocean air off the coast of Maine. I climbed little mountains and swam in little rivers. I finally made it out west, to this town encircled by Bellingham Bay, ferns and Firs, green water and a salty quiet.
I dug ditches and pits for money. I laid pipe and learned to frame houses. I proved to myself that I could really work. I encouraged calloused hands and I kept reading. Then I began to draw. The light was spreading.
I never took art classes. I was never shown the virtues of art. I knew nothing of the great history of the discipline. I simply wanted to experience the feeling of absorption, of looking intently and earnestly at a shoe propped against the wall or the face of a stranger on the bus or a railroad sign. I began to notice all the details. I was seeing clearly, purely. Shapes and lines and color, that is all there is. My world was being distilled by concentration. I painted pictures on giant, hand built canvases. I had no hope of becoming an artist, I was only experimenting with my own two hands and eyes and a developing intuition. I took more notes and continued to read, stretching into poetry and religious discourse, bridge building and the wild habits of stag beetles.
The world was blooming. Everything was of interest. I had no bias, no fundamental notions of how the world should be arranged, no planned ideas of my own ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I was not trying to convince anyone of anything. I wore no wares. I had no expectations. I was not hiding from a reckless childhood nor was I compensating for some reclusive injury. I was simply exploring.
Now I am a father, time is passing. I am captured by a magnificent and perilous world. I remember my mom and all those years she gave just to get me through. She will never meet my little boy but I think of her often. Though she knew nothing of Walt Whitman’s unifying verse she applied its virtues without effort. She never allowed her ignorance or insight to interfere with my understanding of the big world a child experiences. As I try my best to raise and support a family I am reminded of my upbringing and am overwhelmed by my mom’s grace. She got out of the way. Somehow she knew that the only way to raise me was to keep out of it, to let me develop my own sense of things. She refused to impart her beliefs about the world onto me knowing that those beliefs were her own, developed and shaped by her experience, her choices and hopes and mistakes. She wanted me to have my own.
As a parent I find this discipline to be one of life’s most challenging acts, to trust my kids, to believe they will find it for themselves, whatever it may be.
My mom left the best untold as to ensure I would foster a desire to discover, for myself, life’s limitless beauty, its complications and ironies, its contradictions and possibilities. This is the heart of it. I was given a peculiar kind of freedom. I was left clean of influence, free to meander and peruse all corners of thought, emotion, commitment and relationships. My life was mine to build, no one else’s.
To think freely is to accept infinite potentiality. Here the world cracks open and becomes absolutely marvelous, free of judgment, shame or insistence. I am a free thinker because I was raised to be so, knowingly or not. Only now am I beginning to recognize what a treasure this is, to not be restrained by preconceived notions or dogma or habitual, passed down thinking, to see life as possibility, endless and ever evolving; in every corner, in every act, in every word….remembering Whitman again….”human bodies are words, myriads of words, every part able, active, receptive.”
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