Loving Walden
How connected do you feel to the nature around you? Is the place you live a location you’ve chosen, or a place circumstances have dictated you make your home? Are your surroundings exquisitely beautiful or more “ordinary” in their physical makeup?
Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing and so-called inventor of the modern memoir, lived in and wrote about a place of very ordinary beauty. In fact Thoreau wrote, “The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach grandeur.”
Nature writing in America was born out of extraordinary connection with an ordinary place.
Thoreau was born in the town of Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. Just a 25 minute walk from town lay the glacier-formed kettle pond known as Walden Pond. A little over 60-acres, Walden Pond is not enormous, nor noteworthy. The area is relatively flat and the pond is surrounded by maples with a few pines mixed in. It’s the type of scenery that is a dime-a-dozen in the eastern part of North America.
When Thoreau decided on his great experiment to live in the woods for two years and write down his experiences, it was only natural that he should go to the place in nature he had been going all his life: Walden Pond. Thoreau recognized that it would take more than a lifetime to notice, understand, and record all that was happening in the ordinary nature around him at Walden.
Thoreau went to Walden with the intention not just to notice his surroundings but to actually understand and connect with what he discovered. He was invested in the notion of “truly seeing” not just “looking”. Looking has to do with the physical act of directing our eyes towards something. Seeing is taking in the information of what we are looking at and processing it mentally, connecting it with other information we have, and developing meaning or relationship. Seeing is an art form that has the power to change us deeply.
What Thoreau “saw” at Walden Pond changed the literary life of America over the next two hundred years. Best of all, Thoreau’s observations changed his own life, bringing him a deep connection to nature and the joy and life satisfaction that accompanies it. I believe the same result is ours for the taking wherever it is that we live and observe. We cannot claim Thoreau had an advantage over us. He lived in an ordinary place.
What’s your “Walden”? Do you live in an inner city where the nature you observe is on your windowsill, between the sidewalk cracks, or at a local park? Do you make your home in the middle of rolling farmland where every look out a window brings you beautiful vistas and makes your heart sing? Or maybe you live in a place where weather makes it more uncomfortable than you would like to be outside. The first step to “loving your Walden” is an acceptance and awareness of the place where you live.
This year inside The Nature Creative membership we’ve taken “Loving Walden” as our theme in an effort to “connect our hearts and minds to the nature around us,” just as Thoreau did. Intentional exploration, curious question asking, and an open heart to wonder are the foundations to building this deep connection.
Our nature journals will make an ideal record of our exploration and deepening relationship with the nature around us. An essential part of Thoreau’s experience was his documentation in his journal of what he saw and felt. It’s because of Thoreau’s “nature journaling” that we find ourselves influenced by his life and work centuries later.
I intend to concentrate my nature explorations around Eagle Creek Park this next year, a park that lies a mile east of where I live. It will be my “Walden,” a place to truly see and observe and connect with. I can walk to a corner of the park in about the same time that Thoreau could walk from the village of Concord to his hut in the woods. I’ll remind myself that Walden Pond was an ordinary place, just like Eagle Creek. In this very ordinary place I look forward to building an extraordinary connection.
Will you join me? What place can be your “Walden”?
I’ll be using the hashtag #lovingwalden on social media for posts related to my exploration and I’ll be posting regular updates here so you can have a glimpse at what I’m discovering.
If you’d like to join us inside The Nature Creative membership, you can find more details here.
For a video version of this blog post, click this link.