Homesickness

I’ve been full of ennui today, likely due to my lack of sleep and stress from school. I bought a Lindt chocolate bar and ate the whole thing while walking home and listening to Billie Holiday on my iPod.   I couldn’t quite name the emotion I was feeling, but I knew that I was longing for the South. Utah just isn't the same. I miss the South. I miss it all.

While writing this, I had a remembrance and I rummaged around until I found this: “O Magnet-South”, by Walt Whitman, the very master of American word and human spirit. 

"O Magnet-South"

O magnet-south! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all
    dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things--all moving things and the trees where
    I was born--the grains, plants, rivers,
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,
    over flats of slivery sands or through swamps,
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the
    Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their
    banks again,
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the
    Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings
    or dense forests,
I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the
    blossoming titi;
Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast
    up the Carolinas,
I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,
    the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the
    graceful palmetto,
I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet,
    and dart my vision inland;
O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,
The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged
    with mistletoe and trailing moss,
The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in
    these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the
    fugitive has his conceal'd hut)
O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable
    swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the
    alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and
    the whirr of the rattlesnake,
The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,
    singing through the moon-lit night,
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav'd corn,
    slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful
    ears each well-sheath'd in its husk;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart;
O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and
    never wander more.

Obviously I could never compare to his greatness, but Whitman is also a voice of empowerment, giving tone to all those emotions which we do not know that we do not know. I would press all of you to read him as much as you could. His work is the zenith of beauty and the very essence of existence. Every word he writes perfectly captures what it is I'm still trying to think out, much less actaully say.  Not only are his imagery and references spot on; he also decribes my emotions perfectly--this sort of ambivalent longing:

"...O dear to me my birth-things--all moving things and the trees where
    I was born--the grains, plants, rivers..."
[mentioning also] 
"...The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness...the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake..."

"...O to be a Virginian where I grew up!...O longings irrepressible!..."