John Woolman’s Testimony: Walk the Walk

By Keith Seabridge 

(Dedicated to Interfaith Peace Walks)

My friends, it is about the walk, simple. 
Put on thy walking gear and come along;
discernment will come to those who journey
rather than to those who merely record.
Experience the ground under thy feet.


My own walking shoes are UN-dyed leather
on principle.  I have walked the byways
of fashion, where the dying industry’s
run-off forms the swamps that kill our children.
I walked; I saw the morass; I acted.


I do what I can.  The Journey goes on.
If thee think I speak in symbol—I do.
But that is mere poetry left behind,
Not the pattern of my life I bequeath
to you and all who listen to my words:

JohnWoolman.gif

 “I have gone forward, not as one traveling

in a road cast up and well prepared,

but as a man walking through a miry place

in which are stones here and there safe to step on,

but so situated that, one step being taken,

time is necessary to see where to step next.”**

Experience gave me the metaphor, but
metaphor cannot give thee experience. 
         Get up and walk the walk! 
Looking back, I gasp at the miles it takes
to be a part of the human race.







I wrote this poem in April 2012 as "Poem #9: Testimony: Walk the Walk,"a gift for the Philadelphia Interfaith Peace Walk.  Today, I revised and posted it at dVerse's "Open Link Night ~ Week 60."



 More of John Woolman's words:  “Having of late traveled often in wet weather through narrow streets in towns and villages, where dirtiness under foot and the scent arising from that filth which more or less infects the air of thickly settled towns, and I, being but weakly, have felt distress both in body and mind with that which is impure. In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed and sundry times walked over ground where much of their dye-stuffs have drained away. . . . Some who are great carry delicacy to a great height themselves, and yet the real cleanliness is not generally promoted.”                                                                          ~JohnWoolman, Journal*

Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Submitted to The First Day

Chosen for book 11/9/2013.

* Quoted in “Walking in the Light” a study guide for Woolman's Journal by Louis Cox and Ruah Wennerfelt. 
**  John Woolman, Journal, ( http://www.jesus.org.uk/vault/library/woolman_journal.pdf ) 105.