I’m learning to live with us. I want to swim in us as a sea. To swirl our souls. That would be enough. We would be enough for me.

The audacity required to draw a line of comparison between oneself and America's most enduring poet is bewildering, and yet...

Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass at the age of 36, an ongoing work of art in which he stitched together the body and soul across six editions until his death at 72.

The idea of SOULED first visited me soon after I turned 36, embedding its intricate tendrils deep in my heart and mind as a lifelong work of art. I was of course familiar with Whitman, but not invested in his work at the time. Only a few weeks before I unveiled SOULED at WHEN WE WERE 36 did I start to fully explore his life and words.

In "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman defines the soul through its entanglement with the body, each mutually manifesting the other.

Citing the poem's vivid sexuality, Ralph Waldo Emmerson encouraged Whitman to revise the language so that Leaves of Grass could find the larger audience it deserved. To which, Whitman later said, "I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way."

What audacity!

BEAUTIFUL, CURIOUS, BREATHING, LAUGHING FLESH is the first WAVE of SOULED. It debuted to the public at WHEN WE WERE 36, accompanied by a recorded recitation of Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric by Dr. Mark Lucas.