Leaves of Grass

I read this book as a young person in college, but it wasn’t until I re-read it about 10 years ago that I was able to experience the depths of its power.

This classic collection of 19th-century poems was a beacon at the time and holds true today for modern people who long to re-claim our interconnectedness with the natural world and embrace ourselves in all of our complexity. It’s a book I keep in my campervan to read on camping trips and one that I go to when I need inspiration with my own writing. 

A bookseller once said to me, “There are your heroes, and there are your heroes’ heroes.” Walt Whitman is both.

He is the OG. I love the man so much that the first tattoo I ever got was a line from one of his poems. Whitman can write a poem whose premise is basically “What’s the deal with grass?” and make you weep. He can write a 50-page poem that I actually want to read and that, my friends, is a magic trick.

If you love travel and nature and being alive you can read my new book or… show more.

I can’t say I have a love for poetry, but Walt Whitman sure stirs the soul! "Song of the Open Road," one of the poems in the Leaves of Grass collection, is my favorite. His opening lines, “Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me” makes me want to lace up my shoes! But also, as many wanderers who are conflicted by the call of the open road and place to call home, the last lines of the poem capture that bittersweet tug: “Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with… show more.