During the fall of 1974, sitting under the long, low reaching arms of a giant and ancient Live Oak on the campus of Flagler College, a student in a history of religion class, I listened to the words of Redding, the minister at Memorial Presbyterian Church and measured his words againist my own thoughts.
Over the last half year I had embraced the transcendental message, and its particular American slant, as taught by the Trinity: Emerson, the Father of the ideas and the old man; Thoreau, the Son, the one who with all his being lived in the world as an example; and Whitman, the Spirit, who sang and sang and sang of all things.
I first read Emerson in high school and was stirred. When I read him again as a student at Rockingham Community College under the guidance of Gladsky, my world turned.
Sitting under that oak that afternoon, I looked up into the trees and thought of a Whitman poem, and smiled.
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;
Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself;
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near--for I knew I could not;
And broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away--and I have placed it in sight in my room;
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than them:)
Yet it remains to me a curious token--it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,
I know very well I could not.
After class, I mimicked the action of Whitman, breaking a twig, with leaves and moss, and packed it in a small shoe box and sent it to Gladsky. He later commented that it caused quite a stir in the faculty offices when he opened it with all but he wondering what it meant.