I’m heading out tomorrow for my annual trip to Portugal’s wine region, where I will spend a week with wine friends touring and tasting through the Douro Valley. This will be my third year visiting there during harvest, and one line from this month’s selection, “The long brown path before me” makes me recalled the rugged beauty of the rocky Portuguese vineyards seemingly far away from the rest of the world. The Douro Valley is a far cry from places like Napa or Walla Walla, mainly because there simply are not a lot of tourists, shopping, spas, or other amenities you’d fine in many other wine regions. Maybe I love it for the fact that such a place of simple ruggedness and beauty produces such amazing Ports and wines from its rocky soils. It’s a magical place, and I am looking forward to arriving there in a matter of hours.

Portugal will be followed by a few days in the UK, visiting friends, catching a show in the West End, attending a monumental Cockburn Port tasting reaching back to the 1890’s,  enjoying some museums and…well, since I’ve always been such an Anglophile…just taking in the sheer history of the place.

I hope you are all doing well, and I leave you with a selection from Walt Whitman’s Songs of the Open Road…

Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)

From Song of The Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

Faith Poem

I need no assurances—I am a man who is
pre-occupied of his own soul;

I do not doubt that whatever I know at a given
time, there waits for me more which I do not
know;

I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside
the hands and face I am cognizant of, are
now looking faces I am not cognizant of —
calm and actual faces;

I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the
world is latent in any iota of the world;

I do not doubt there are realizations I have
no idea of, waiting for me through time
and through the universes—also upon this
earth;

I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the uni-
verses are limitless—in vain I try to think
how limitless;

I do not doubt that the orbs, and the systems of
orbs, play their swift sports through the air
on purpose—and that I shall one day be
eligible to do as much as they, and more than
they;

I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities,
insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds,
rejected refuse, than I have supposed;

I do not doubt there is more in myself than I have
supposed—and more in all men and women
—and more in my poems than I have
supposed;

I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and
on, millions of years;

I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and
exteriors have their exteriors—and that the
eye-sight has another eye-sight, and the hear-
ing another hearing, and the voice another
voice;

I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths
of young men are provided for—and that the
deaths of young women, and the deaths of
little children, are provided for;

I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter
what the horrors of them—no matter whose
wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone
down—are provided for, to the minutest
point;

I do not doubt that shallowness, meanness, malig-
nance, are provided for;

I do not doubt that cities, you, America, the
remainder of the earth, politics, freedom,
degradations, are carefully provided for;

I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen,
any where, at any time, is provided for, in
the inherences of things.

Walt Whitman
(1819–1892)

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranges in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer,
where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.