Note

“Sing Me The Universal” adapts text from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of the Universal, and is my personal statement of belief in the universality of the human condition and the inherent goodness found within it.

We live in a time defined by divisiveness and dominated by a kind of toxic individualism that obscures the bigger picture from many people’s view of the world, and I think it is both important and grounding to remind oneself that the human experience is a “universal” one. The humans who painted horses on the cave walls at Lascaux experienced the same joy, love, sorrow, and doubt that we modern humans experience, even if many of the sources of these emotions have changed with modernity. I find great comfort in the knowledge that I exist in a great continuity of people who have laughed, cried, loved, and sang just as I do. Though we construct imaginary walls and boundaries between parts of existence and between one another, nothing we do can ever change the fundamental fact that human joy is universal.

That the Good is Universal.