Impressions of a National Hero: Abe Lincoln

It always comes back to images of cornfields, or, wheat fields and kids playing ball, maybe, with a parent around in a wide open space. That’s where peace breathes and innocence is born. Childhood. Where the sound of Nature is well within the reach and range of someone’s voice. Happiness and comfort live there. My childhood is there too.

Riding a train through the Midwest or was is the family station wagon driving from New York to Texas during a summer so hot it forced the invention of the air conditioner. Driving past those perfectly even rows of tall, sweet food. Corn. And the speed of the flashing rows hypnotized me in a way I just was crazy about.

My Native American heritage tells me the power of this corn to communicate. The source of life’s sustenance. Shared by my French and Irish ancestors.

They say a man bearing the family name planted the very first corn in Sangemon County, Illinois. He had been a pioneer and settled a good portion of western Kentucky before traveling north to the heart of Illinois. Springfield, where Lincoln's shadow appeared at about the same time in America’s history.

I kind of like that idea. Lincoln being in the same time as my relatives in the same place. They also say the corn planter was among those who built the first house in Springfield. I like that idea too. It warms me to think of such a thing. History lives. History breathes. History is here. Now. In me.

And as I recognize this I wonder what I really saw in that corn field back there. Perhaps my own history is hidden there. A part of me buried there with the corn.

-Excerpt from 'I Am Here' by Susan Gabriel Bunn

My knowledge of Abraham Lincoln is not scholarly. My interest in Abraham Lincoln is the character of the man rather than the chronology of his achievements. My intention is not to state facts or name figures or historical moments that are far better realized in better qualified writings of those who specialize in those things.

My attraction has always been immediate, traceable to those aspects of the person I have come to admire. Senses I have been touched by as a result of my unofficial acquaintance with the character of a man that causes hero in this world.

As fact indicates he rose into youth without funds or the promise of a notable future. Some say he came from an alcoholic home. A famous tale of an early storefront job where he gave items to the needy without collecting the cost revealed his generous heart and probably cost him that job. He fell deeply in love as a young adult with a girl who died young. Some say, though the romance remained unreciprocated, he was nevertheless at her bedside at the time of her death. In later years while deliberating the impending political marriage to his future wife, it is said he ran from Illinois back to Kentucky to take council beneath a tree where he conferred in prayer with his childhood sweetheart’s soul for her blessing.

He was known in social circles as the life of the party. Always bringing charm and joy to the faces of those who gathered like a magnet around him. Paradoxically he was a very sad man, having suffered family loss, a troubled marriage, and most notably the heavy burden of deliberation and decision that ultimately allowed for the ravaging of American men against American men on the green grass fields of Gettysburg. The loneliness of his experience as President and man leading this conflicted nation during that civil war is incomprehensible.

Clearly an unselfish Abraham Lincoln knew the darkness of the darkest night. The political life was a sacrifice of his own for the love of the humanity he so endeared. He loved God and often in speeches would refer to this source from where his inspiring and wisdom packed speeches evolved. Bookshelves are full of analysis of his greatest public speeches that confound to this day the greatest scholars in our time. I believe he was a true mystic. One who devoted his life to the bigger love that philanthropy is only named after.

I have been so taken by this American hero that I wrote of him in an excerpt of an autobiographical book (I Am Here). I am including visual renderings of my own heart that touch a contemplation of an inner world that as far as I can imagine Lincoln’s heroic gestures may have traveled across to express a kind of heroism that transcends time and lives in history now. One that has caused the erection of monumental statues, the rendering of endless debate, the preservation of human freedom, and the reliance of great wisdom.

I thank Abraham Lincoln for loving in this world when he was here and living in the heart of this beloved America for all time.