{"id":122959,"date":"2018-12-24T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-12-24T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=122959"},"modified":"2018-11-26T10:41:38","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T10:41:38","slug":"thoreau-on-nature-as-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/thoreau-on-nature-as-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoreau on Nature as Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Walt Whitman saw trees \u2014 \u201cso innocent and harmless, yet so savage\u201d \u2014 as a wellspring of wisdom on being rather than seeming<\/a>. \u201cWhen we have learned how to listen to trees,\u201d<\/em> Hermann Hesse exulted in his love letter to our arboreal companions<\/a>, \u201cthen the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Two generations earlier, another poet laureate of nature and the human spirit made trees a centerpiece of his emotional universe. For Henry David Thoreau<\/strong> (July 12, 1817\u2013May 6, 1862), they were creative and spiritual companions, sane-making and essential. His love of them comes alive in Thoreau and the Language of Trees<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a selection of the great Transcendentalist poet and philosopher\u2019s meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal<\/a> by writer and photographer Richard Higgins, whose beautiful black-and-white photographs complement Thoreau\u2019s arboreal writings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Richard Higgins from Thoreau and the Language of Trees.<\/p><\/div>\n

Thoreau reverenced trees as living incantations, wordless prayers, benedictions for the art of being. In their company, he found a counterpoint to the falsehoods of society. Fifteen years after his mentor Emerson lamented in his own journal that \u201cin cities\u2026 one seems to lose all substance, & become surface in a world of surfaces,\u201d<\/a> Thoreau redoubles his insistence on defining one\u2019s own success<\/a> and writes in a diary entry from January of 1857:<\/p>\n

In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it \u2014 dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even on a black and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that the cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home\u2026 It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Four decades later, Whitman \u2014 who was two years younger than Thoreau but long outlived him \u2014 would record a kindred sentiment in his own notebook<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on \u2014 have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear \u2014 what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons \u2014 the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement the thoroughly elevating Thoreau and the Language of Trees<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Rachel Carson on our scientific and spiritual bond with nature<\/a> and David George Haskell on what a dozen of the world\u2019s most interesting trees taught him about life<\/a>, then revisit Thoreau on the spiritual rewards of walking<\/a>, knowing vs. seeing<\/a>, the difference between an artisan, an artist, and a genius<\/a>, and how to use civil disobedience to advance justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it \u2014 dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even on a black and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that the cold and solitude are friends of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}