There is no more fatal blunders than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.
This month I finished reading the Barnes & Noble edition of WALDEN and Other Writings, as authored by Henry David Thoreau. The preceding excerpt is found on page 353 in his final essay titled Life Without Principle. This next excerpt is located on the bottom of page 5 and top of page 6 from his essay titled Economy, the first chapter of WALDEN or Life in the Woods
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance- which his growth requires- who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Found in these preceding excerpts are two words, love and integrity. I want to put a pin in these two words and revisit them later in this post.
Last month I took a break from the constant drumbeat of manipulative, negative election fear mongering by both Democrat and Republican candidates. I immersed myself into a history of Oliver Ellsworth a prominent member of the Continental Congress, a Senator from Connecticut, the third Supreme Court Chief Justice and, most germane to my current state of mind, an integral member of the delegates that worked tirelessly on drafting our Constitution. I hoped I could find something that would highlight a key as to how many delegates of different opinions and ideals could put aside those differences and reach a consensus draft of a constitution to present to the new thirteen states for ratification. That key; compromise.
This past month I continued my boycott of paying too much attention to shallow election campaigns championing false change. I was tired from being buffeted by the continued channeled political nastiness that made it a chore to be comfortable in my tide pool of salty awareness; I retreated like my neighboring clam. In the sand I found a writer, poet and naturalist that I had turned to a few times in my 70 plus years of this incarnation, Henry David Thoreau.
Thirty five years ago, my late mother- in- law invited me to join her and her group of 60 and 70 year old fellow members of a chapter of the Sierra Club on a two plus week guided canoe trip up the Allegash River in Maine. This was a hundred mile canoe trip in the north Maine woods. Who better to bring along for this trip but Mr. Thoreau and a battered paperback, The Maine Woods. For almost a decade I lived on Cape Cod and the Island of Nantucket. Again another Thoreau atlas, Cape Cod helped me navigate the dunes and summer rose thorns salty bouquets of pleasure!
I have finished reading written chapters about his two years of life on the shores of Walden Pond. It is located in Thoreau’s home town, Concord Massachusetts. His writings were published in 1854. I list here his chapter titles to give you an idea of the in-depth scope of thought he allowed himself on a daily basis. His notes and writings were prolific in my humble opinion. The chapters are as follows; Economy, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Reading, Sounds, Solitude, Visitors, The Bean-Field, The Village, The Ponds, Baker Farm, Higher Laws, Brute Neighbors, House Warming, Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors, Winter Animals, The Pond In Winter, Spring, and finally, Conclusion. This edition finishes with the following Thoreau writings; Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown and finally, Life Without Principle.
Here, I extrapolate a few sentences from Thoreau’s chapter in WALDEN, Solitude. These words lead off paragraph two on page 113.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of the old musty cheese we are. These sentiments can be applied one hundred and seventy years later to our culture with the following revisions. Today, many of us do not meet as a family to share three meals a day. Schedules and technology add to our solitude. The shared text, or email message cannot begin to enhance the windows to our souls. Such a loss, absent eye contact.
My metaphorical lighthouse awaits my visit. My solitary visit, ironically with a multitude of Henry David Thoreau’s points of view keeping me company. So many of his observations from the 1840’s and the 1850’s are still visible in our early twenty-first century march through time. His questions: Do we treat each other with love? Do we communicate to each with other our truth with integrity? Thoreau’s Walden Pond had pressure from the technology of the day. The railroad, so close, taking many so far. Along side those tracks at Walden Pond today, there are added cell towers, cable and satellites taking many even further away, if not in body than in spirit along with their eyeless souls! But from my tidal pool at the base of the Lighthouse I feel vibrations similar to the vibrations the Walden Pond neighbors must have felt when a train passed on by. My question is simple. Is the heightened vibrations I feel coming from the waves breaking upon the rocky shore or are they coming from within me? Are more of us feeling a higher vibration that allows us to rise above our fears and solitude brought on by division? Thoreau wrote from his heart with compassion. Today, I have added his channel to my list of subscriptions on MyTube! Or is it YouTube?
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark