Uncontained Goodness

I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me. Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Lately I’ve been circling a phrase that won’t quite let me go: uncontained goodness.

It keeps showing up when I’m walking in the woods, when I’m tired in the evening, when I’m thinking about desire, faith, work, and the strange exhaustion that can follow even the best intentions. The trouble, I’m beginning to suspect, is not that we lack goodness—care, love, longing, generosity—but that we rarely learn how to hold them. We use them as instruments or tools before we let them stand in our bodies.

We’re taught to be afraid of eros, as if desire itself were the problem. But eros is simply the fire that animates life—the pull toward connection, beauty, meaning, God. Fire isn’t dangerous because it burns; it’s dangerous because it burns without form. A hearth makes flame livable. Without one, even warmth becomes destructive.

The same is true of attention. Attention is how love learns where it wants to land. It gives shape to desire. It tells goodness where to stay, or better yet, how to be in a human body. And yet so much of modern life trains us to scatter our attention endlessly—across screens, needs, crises, responsibilities—until we’re everywhere and nowhere at once.

We leak what we mean to offer sometimes, and as such it becomes something else.

We mean to offer presence, but we leak it into interruption.

We mean to offer care, but it leaks into compulsion.

We mean to offer love, but it thins into vigilance, anxiety, or over-functioning.

What begins as devotion slowly becomes depletion—not because the source was wrong, but because the vessel was never formed. There wasn't enough structure to contain the goodness. I love how Whitman uses that word, "held." I did not know I held such goodness. Not leaked out haphazardly - goodness held with purpose, first in his own body.

In forest therapy, we practice something quietly defiant: staying. Staying with a tree until it is no longer scenery. Staying with breath until it remembers its own rhythm. Staying with a sensation long enough for it to speak instead of being managed.

Nothing is taken. Nothing is fixed.We do not ask the forest to improve us or perform relief on demand. We let attention become a vessel—wide enough to hold what arrives, steady enough not to spill it. Again and again, people are surprised by what happens when the moment is released from usefulness.

Goodness gathers the way water gathers in a cupped hand.

The body loosens its grip.

The nervous system remembers it is allowed to rest.

And without effort or announcement, something stops leaking.

For now, I’m letting this question live in my body before it tries to become an answer. I’m noticing where desire wants to move too quickly, where care outruns its own ground, where eros—meant to enliven—slips into fatigue because it has nowhere to rest.

Perhaps holiness is not the extinguishing of fire, but the slow learning of its shape. A body that can stay. An attention that can receive. A life sturdy enough to feel what it loves without spilling it. If that is true, then the work ahead is not to want less, but to become more embodied—to let desire land, to let goodness arrive, and to remain long enough for it to be held.