The picture of myself posted on the blog, by the way, is taken from “Dante’s View” in Death Valley National Park overlooking the valley, one of the hottest and lowest places on earth.
From a spiritual low point and crisis in 1997, by 2002, following Whitman and love in general, I’d ascended to a kind of purgatory. But like Virgil in Dante’s epic, Whitman could only take me so far. Dante would have his Beatrice, and so it would seem, I would have mine.
Based on my experience, a person may bare their heart upon occasion, but to bare one's soul is something quite different and a rarer occurence. My wife bared her soul to me on two separate occasions: the first time, in our hellish days, I couldn’t appreciate it at the time; yet both occurrences would shake me to the core. The second time, however, because of my ruminations on Whitman and the experience of my own personal odyssey, it would seem to set off a chain reaction within me and induce a rapid succession of revelations.
Through a physical act of sexual love and healing came immediate clarification as to what had put her in the depths of hell, through no fault of her own, the ramifications of a past of repeated childhood sexual abuse. But beyond the personal, I came to appreciate how a shameful truth, that the mind can fail to recognize, impairs our reason and alters our world view. Furthermore, I came to appreciate inextricability of love and the truth. Coming forward with the awful truth and finding love is how we can save each other on earth.
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