Connections for Happiness: Whitman, Wordsworth, and Our Soul

Human beings desire connections, and I do not believe that desire arises from Ego. It arises from our divinity contained in Heart. We have Spirit in this mortal body, that Spirit may experience its own physical creation. Without physicality, Spirit has no sensory organs. I think it’s pretty freakin’ awesome that we provide the vision, smell, tastes, hearing, and touch for Spirit.

Now, it’s not like we are being used, just some sort of pawns. No! Divinity is our essential composition: Spirit. We choose to come here to participate in this wonderful creation of ours. That’s why we desire intimate connections with almost all parts of this creation. This is not a clawing, cloying desire, just a passionate joy in it all. If we operate with Heart, we will have no expectations, resentment, guilt, or blame from or for anyone or anything else. We will know why we came. Simple.

Complexity occurs because Ego comes as standard equipment to protect and isolate, features that help young humans survive in a world of others. In bodies that are relatively frail and emotions that allow us to respond to stimuli, we need — especially when younger — these qualities of protection and isolation, fight or flight responses because we come here as a social creature, which means there are a whole helluva lot of us with whom to interact, and when people don’t live Heart, they present threats.

Heart speaks to us throughout this physical existence. Because we came here for a purpose, we need to choose Heart as our operating system and dissolve, peel away, layers of Ego protectionism and isolationism that have been built in an infinite variety and array of ways through the years. Either Ego processes and runs these amazing sensory organs of physical bodies or Heart does: mind, soul, and body need some force to make us run, to help us process and respond to our environment and stimuli.

Heart tells us to seek, explore, discover, learn, grow — risky business for Ego trying to protect and isolate us. This creates a dynamic tension that allows for epiphany and process, realizations and growth, discoveries and creations as we progress. We each get to decide what that looks like for us. We have different rates, different capacities; we choose to arrive as we do. Each is unique; therefore, each is to be valued and not judged.

When I observe life — people or their works, current or contemporary — I especially notice authors and indications of how they believe about the philosophy of life I hold. Metaphysical analysis of literature yields some interesting and encouraging finds. The Romantic poets and writers share at some level my views on life.

For instance, the American poet Walt Whitman writes about the types of connections I have been discussing. In “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” Walt observes a spider who tirelessly shoots out its webs of filament and keeps going until useful connections are made. Characteristic of Romanticists, he uses Nature to understand himself, or his narrator: “And you, O my Soul, where you stand, / Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, / Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing — seeking the spheres to connect them; / Till the bridge you will need be form’d — till the ductile anchor hole; / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul.”

This beautiful metaphor of the human Soul being like a spider and casting webs to form connections captures the essence of process of Heart-work. Feel the emotional desire to connect and stop at nothing until those are connections are obtained. No matter how long or arduous the road to making bridges to other people and things, Heart does not give. We look for connections not only for and to ourselves but also we make connections, see patterns in the different spheres of knowledge that pertain to us and our pursuit of Happiness.

The great British Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, has metaphysical Heart-principles scattered throughout his work — as does Whitman. The first 210 or so lines of his “The Prelude Book Twelfth” offer insight into the importance of discerning the pure Heart desire for connections Whitman writes of, which isn’t always so easy when Ego is nurtured. The subtitle of this section is “Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored.”

Wordsworth has taken to a Nature hike to regain perspective. He seeks to make connections to Nature as Whitman did in seeing the Spider. He goes on this journey because he observes “Long time have human ignorance and guilt / Detained us, on what spectacles of woe / Compelled to look, and inwardly oppressed / With sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts, / Confusion of the judgment, zeal decayed, / And, lastly, utter loss of hope itself / And things to hope for!” Notice the work of Ego in all these words. Ego and its use of ignorance of Self and the guilt that produces because we are denying Heart and Spirit within us to experience this creation— “Compelled to look, and inwardly oppressed…” — ending up with loss of hope.

Why, then, get caught up in the entanglements of the world when they ultimately land us in hopelessness? Because there is this Ego-Heart tension. We know we should not be in “ignorance” of Self, and that core Self desires to know others. How is Ego checked? Did you notice that Ego-work produces hopelessness? How do we work through these challenges?

Obviously, I cannot quote 210 lines of poetry, but exposure to Nature, the creation of Spirit who is our essence, brings us to the point of knowing why we came here. How? By thinking on our lives: “There are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue, whence — depressed / by false opinion and contentious though, / Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round / Of ordinary intercourse — our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired; / A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced…” I can’t go on here, but these “spots of time” are, in a sense not really timeline in nature: they are “scattered everywhere,” spots that we can reflect on and know that they represent the instances of Heart working to “enable us to mount, / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen…” Our mind-soul-body complex is set right when we acknowledge and dwell in Heart-truth, personal truth, that we see has been working throughout life. We don’t end up hopeless; we end up fulfilling our chosen purpose, significant, happy, and enriched.

Reflect on those times; speak to your Heart anytime you feel hopeless and purposeless. And know that the end of making connections, vital connections of Nature to the events and experiences of our lives, is simply for us to know happiness. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing better.

​Blessings!