O living! always living!

Throughout the morning we observed with rapt attention this cicada emerging from its former body, now a dried-out lifeless shell. The following Walt Whitman poem played over and over again in my mind:

O LIVING always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and
look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.