#86 Autumn Solitaire

“It is a great relief when for a few moments in the day we can retire to our chamber and be completely true to ourselves. It leavens the rest of our hours.” – H.D.T., March 20, 1841

“You think that I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.” – H.D.T., February 8, 1857

Dear Henry –

I am happy to be checking in from the outer reaches of the galaxy, from whence I am beating  a slow, orbital return.

The imagery of space seems appropriate just now: first the world sees me; now it doesn’t. And it’s not that something awful befell me so much as I’m tired and wanting desperately to hibernate. A handful of friends and acquaintances have written me in the past several weeks, asking what I’ve been up to and observing, quite accurately, that my line’s been dead. When they ask why, I tell them to look out the window.

Depending on when you decide to look, it’s wet (typical). Blustery, maybe. Sunny occasionally, even (anomalous). Or perhaps some measure of all three in turns. As our deciduous friends are sloughing off their dead foliage for the winter, I’m still riding around on my bicycle with the rain gear on, drawing fascinated stares at the grocery store once again. It must be autumn in the northwest – a season to slow down, retreat a little, enjoy life’s simple pleasures, and reflect.

But what’s this? Unlike this time last year, I’m on speaking terms with the flickers, ravens, banana slugs, and geese. (Call me mad, or whatever – they make exquisite company).  Suddenly and quite inexplicably, I’m allergic to getting on the ferry to go over to the mainland, and have grown similarly averse to spending any time in the city at all. Even in the midst of thriving relationships with my friends and significant others, time spent with people has grown exhausting to me. This tectonic shift in my social life escapes easy explanation, but I find myself at a curious crossroads: between a life “out there” in the world and wanting time to withdraw and reflect on everything I’ve witnessed.

Personally, “out there” for me has been overwhelmingly important as of late: global work. Occupy Wall Street. Caring for people. Networking and building relationships. Conversing, exchanging ideas, telling stories.

But in the treadmill and hubbub of all this stimulation, I often wonder whatever happened to what’s “in here”; being “out there” for so long has all but erased my memory of whatever spiritual inventory I still possess in the cavernous hollows of my mind and soul which are begging to be swept, cleaned, re-stocked, and happy again. Attending to it: would that look like?

In processing this question, I’m craving long walks in all weather, spending time alone and in reflection, reading or writing, making meaning of events in my life and in the world, all in an atmosphere of calm and silence — and most importantly, learning to be my own best company. Only two years ago I would have been completely freaked at this last prospect; now, I look forward to it. Imagine.

Leisure is requisite to carrying oneself with grace and compassion in a world of ongoing madness and destruction. In my pursuit of peace, the prerequisite to leisure is distancing myself from technology (no email for three hours has come to constitute bliss), and going ahead and telling my friends what I’m doing and that it’s not personal.

Mindfulness was a lifestyle for you, Henry, though your critics love to invoke the curmudgeon factor, pointing to your statement that you “came into this world not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” And yet in your own way, making the world better was exactly your intention. For all our achievements as individuals and as a culture, where would the juice for it all originate other than here with me and you?

I’ve been learning to put more faith in myself and in the flow of time. People and institutions don’t miss us as much as we might think. When you spent your night in jail, eons may as well have passed; you came out of the experience so utterly transformed, but outside of your prison cell not much had changed at all. You wrote also that things don’t change; we do – and if this is true, there isn’t much to miss if we step out of the current every now and then to examine ourselves and dwell for a while on what we love and where we are going.

After even a half-day of solitude, I find myself fitted for a higher society too, Henry. Perhaps this is what self-cultivation really is: in a rare moment of clarity and sanity as we step more fully into who we are. The world will be better for it – as it was by yours, and continues to be.

Yours as Ever,
Hannah

 

#85 Universes in a Name

“There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.” – H.D.T. , “A Yankee in Canada” in Excursions

“Men are more obedient at first to words than ideas. They mind names more than things. Read them a lecture on ‘Education,’ naming that subject, and they will think that they have heard something important, but call it ‘Transcendentalism,’ and they will think it moonshine.” – H.D.T., February 13, 1860

Dear Henry –

A man of contradictions, you were, just like your buddy Walt Whitman: you wrote that there is all the poetry in the world in a name, yet disparaged naming as a distraction from the essence of that which is named. What gives?

Before I mire myself in examining that question, though, I want to reflect on the meaning of a name, and the many purposes naming might serve:

Calling things by their proper names gives them an identity unique in the world. Naming something makes it “a beautiful or unique snowlake,” as when one assigns a singularity of identity and purpose to the named object or person.

While I was traveling in Kenya, my friends there called me “Anne.” While Hannah is my chosen and preferred name, to my Kenyan friends, I was “Anne,” and so held a unique place in their universe distinct from the one I held while at home in the United States. Situationally, names may change, or be supplanted entirely: as when my friends called me by the nickname “Puffin” while I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, or your classmates taunted you with the name “Judge” as a child (garnered by your serious demeanor, I suppose?)

By contrast, descriptives may be used in place of names to diminish the individuality or importance of that someone or something, and in doing so, distance onself emotionally from a situation that would otherwise call for too much of our sympathy. A correspondent of mine makes a habit of referring to people by their behavioral patterns or geography: “the amazon down the road” or “the psychotic seal.” Not long ago, in a time and place far removed from the world you lived in, people of one collective referred to another as “cockroaches,” enabling the slaughter of millions.  Summarily then, a name is something you’re given – or denied, to a specific purpose.

A name could also be an appellation you choose: In a seeming rejection of your old self, and in characteristic contempt of authority, you flipped your name around, from David Henry, your birth name, to “Henry David,” the extraordinary name we know you by today.

A name can also serve to identify, categorize and classify things, as when studying your dear friends, the plants and animals of our worldly habitat. Something tells me that your statement regarding the poetry of a name was inspired by this particular view on the subject.

A name can be aspirational, created and built upon gradually as one moves through life, as in, “I am going to make a name for myself.” Which, indeed, you did, though posthumously and with great social and cultural impact.

So, having unpacked all the different uses of a name, I return to the quandary of your clashing statements. Yes, calling things by their names gives them an identity and singles them out, giving them an exceptional quality – yet by assigning too much attention to a name and its meaning, we run the risk of detracting from its possibilities, weighing it down with too many ideas, opinions and misconceptions, borne of the inevitable stories people create and tell one another. In the philosophy of language, two strains of meaning comprise the gap between language and reality: conceptualization, which defines something (as a name would), and association (the meaning people assign to it).

How many a reader has misunderstood your name, Henry, and, in the quagmire of interpretation and analysis, failed to appreciate the shockingly multi-dimensional story behind something so giant?

Could it be that names serve to specialize and beautify, even as they are corrupted by associative meaning and interpretation? We can never fully escape the labels they confer, any more than a sea urchin could gaze at the surface of the ocean and wonder what it might be like to lodge itself to an oak tree instead of a rock.  Yet we literally can’t live without them. They embody entire stories, of evolving and breathing entities, of universes within universes.

How we contradict ourselves, Henry. We contain multitudes.

Yours as Ever,

Hannah

 

#84 Wheels

“Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Though he no longer bathes in the stream, or reclines on the bank, or plucks berries on the hills, still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him.” – H.D.T., November 22, 1860

“The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs of the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country.” – H.D.T., Walden

“Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, — if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, — know the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus you may feel your pulse.” – H.D.T., February 25, 1859

Dear Henry –

The other day, while riding my bicycle into work, I crushed a hermit snail. With a gasp I kept riding, but was overcome by the feeling that I had just committed the most egregious kind of sin. Tears burned on my face as I continued on. It would have been something else to kill a european black slug, invasive and numerous; even then I cringe at the possibility of taking any life, no matter how pestilent – but to kill a hermit slug was like killing a banana slug, or even slaying a panda. It bowls you over with the sense that you have just destroyed something infinitely rare and precious.

Loss.  Such deep and abiding feelings are somehow amplified in the leap from gazing out of a car window to feeling the wind in your face. Joy, gratitude, misery – all escalate to new heights.

It’s turning out to be another wintry summer here, Henry. Knowing how Washingtonians grumble when it rains too much, I have been endeavoring pretty hard to conceal my disappointment, but it’s fast reaching the point where I’m going to blow my top. Really? Temps in the upper fifties and scattered showers every couple days, in an area known for having the longest rainy season and the most beautiful summers in the world? I had to summon all my power not to rise this morning, throw on my rainy weather cycling gear and dash down the hill from my house without shouting, “Oh, my hell. Somebody kill me NOW!”

Besides the lamentable conditions of the skies, compounding my discontent is the frustration that I can never be outside as frequently and as long as I want to be. You spent entire days rambling through your beloved meadows and woods, sparing as few precious hours as possible to industry in commitment to the idea that the true value of a life lies not in one’s net worth but in the sum total of one’s sublime experience. And yet see me (your fan), and one who professes a love of the sacred, let it all go by as I pass most of my young days at a desk, eyes glazed over, palms clasped over a mouse rather than in devotion. For what seems to be the umpteenth time in my life, I find myself praying to the wrong god.

Obviously, there is always much to grumble about.

But I often think how lucky I am, for the health to ride to work every day, wind or sun, rain or shine, to enjoy the perspiration on my skin as I push my body to new limits of exertion. During this wintry summer I can continue to take pride in the fact that a bit of precipitation won’t keep me off my bike. Fear, lack of will and discomfort were long ago replaced by intrepid athleticism. And something tells me that as a lover of walks in your day, you would embrace cycling and happily join me. A saner, simpler existence begins with one small step, and it turns out that this has been mine.

God knows how the world needs the multitudes to awaken and begin taking those small steps, whatever they are. As I write this, the wheels are seriously falling off, Henry – as weather patterns run amok due to our planetary indiscretions, children whose cries we don’t hear continue to starve needlessly and the race to the bottom divides itself by zero as “resources” run scarce everywhere we look. Everything in the news tells us that the formerly euphoric promise of the markets has proven false. On the island where I live, people have embraced this realization and are working to create a self-sufficient existence that is no longer tethered to these failed systems, by living in much the same way you did once: growing their own food, raising their own livestock, living in closer relationship to the land they inhabit, and yes, riding their bicycles more often, and in some cases, foregoing driving altogether. Actually, many of us have realized that an economic and social crash could happen rather suddenly. In my darker moments, I wonder whether I’ll finish these letters to you. What if, along with the passenger pigeon and steller’s sea cow, electricity were to go extinct overnight? Only a week ago, a spoke on my rear tire managed to work its way loose, a fact I didn’t notice until the bike-obsessed husband looked at it and said to me, “your tire is WAY out of true. Better take it into the shop.” – Or more wisely, learn how to fix it myself. The world around us has a curious way of going kerplunk, after which we realize what’s happening when it’s too late.

So, having begun Lao Tzu’s journey of a thousand miles – my “single step” being my love affair with my Specialized Ariel – I can already tell you with confidence how much I have witnessed by stepping forward and opening my eyes: to crispy dead frogs, lying deep-fried on the road and perfectly preserved by the sun; northern flickers on highwires; yellow warblers flitting alongside me as I pedal through Maxwelton Valley, like dolphins alongside a cruising ship; beef cows grazing peacefully with numbered tags on their ears, clueless as to their fate; curious fauns; rabbits scampering fearlessly across the road kamikaze style; seemingly just begging to be struck; the air as it rushes over my face, arms, legs, and through my lungs, invigorating every cell in my body.

What marvels we might witness if we choose, clueing us to how much of Nature remains resilient and beautiful, even as we busy ourselves destroying her. But if the wheels continue falling off the world, at least I have been reminded not to close my eyes. The only reason your name echoes throughout history is that you were one of the few who did not.

Whether murdering snails on the road or enjoying the sun and rain, like you, let me take all of it bravely and with eyes wide open, come whatever.

Yours as Ever,

Hannah

 

#83 Rethinking Liberty

“It is far more independent to travel on foot. You have to sacrifice so much more to the horse. You cannot choose the most agreeable places in which to spend the noon, commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse.” – H.D.T., July 4, 1858

“I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.” – H.D.T., Slavery in Massachusetts

“America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.” – H.D.T., Life Without Principle

Dear Henry –

As the weather heats up outside and the slugs beat their slow and long-awaited retreat, today Americans in the Pacific Northwest enthusiastically welcome in a colorful flourish what marks the official start of the summer season in these parts – from the gloomy and still-frigid days of June to blue skies and long days of picnics, camping, parties and other forms of outdoor bliss. Every celebration carries its unsavory aspects, too: seasonal allergies as the pollen count soars; animals domesticated and wild cowering in bathtubs or behind shrubs and bushes as the great booms and blasts of freedom shake the ground beneath them.  Then there are the usual perpetrators:  the hordes of people, processed and unhealthy food, the debauchery and ensuing waste.

Knowing I could be delusional, I think my humble home the calm center of all this, the haven for birds and deer with no place else to escape from the noise, a calm and steady rock in uncertain times for them as well as me. Hundreds of years after you built your experimental dwelling at Walden Pond, I am only starting to grasp the humble significance of home as an active practice of permanence and real independence. When Phil and I first purchased our home and moved from the city, it would have been hard to foresee how starting a small herb garden could actually contribute to the quiet respite we wanted. But in starting up our equivalent of your failed bean patch and working to fight off the deer and rabbits (to your woodchucks), we’ve begun the journey of asserting ourselves against that unnameable something that was killing our independence – and in some ways, our humanity too.

There are few tunes this season which hang me up and turn me off more than the Lee Greenwood song which gets played all over the media every year on this day, in which a male voice, usually infused with a southern drawl, belts out the lines: “and I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” Aside from the lyrics’ stupefyingly bad grammar and usage, the song’s statement is no longer true for most of the population. One look at the letters section of any national newspaper or magazine is all that’s needed to dispel the myth that this is still our country’s narrative, and to bring to mind the multitude of ways in which we are not free at all – from obesity, debt, foreign oil, image, the opinions of others.

At the start of this holiday weekend, Phil and I had invited over friends for a noisy and fun-filled celebration at the house. When I realized I wasn’t feeling well, we canceled plans and decided to have our own quiet affair. Last night, with two thermarests tucked under our arms and our packs loaded with drinkies and ingredients for s’mores, we walked down to the beach near our house to watch the fireworks. Surprisingly there was no one around. For an hour or so, we oohed and aahhed at the myriad display, calling out our favorites. To be sure, there were some municipal-level fireworks that were truly stunning – comets lighting up the entire beach, single points flying hundreds of feet into the air and then suddenly blooming in dozens of different directions, like so many incandescent mushrooms. The noisy and colorful bursts were beautiful, all of them. My favorite, however, would have been easy to miss without being totally present and watchful — a single, bright pink star, rising slowly and without fanfare from its launch, then making its way slowly and completely silently over the water for several hundred feet before lowering itself into the ocean to disappear forever.

Simplicity over complication. Endurance over pretension.

Beauty is not always what it seems.

When I reflect on the meaning of independence, I envision a less pompous freedom than the one the rebels fought for and won in Concord. Perhaps now’s a  good time for a rethinking of liberty – as a kind of personal, small but no-less significant freedom from the things which hold us back rather than pushing us forward with positivity into an uncertain future, even if it’s our daily choices and a look at the misguided beliefs that inform them. It’s far less glamorous, but if I may be so bold, Henry, I think it’s what the world needs now.

When I look at our history, I am a pessimist. But when I think of the future, I am an optimist.

From my end of history to yours…Happy Independence Day.

Yours Ever,

Hannah

 

#82 Pinecones in a Fire

“What we want is not mainly to colonize Nebraska with free men, but to colonize Massachusetts with free men, — to free ourselves. As the enterprise of a few individuals, that is brave and practical; but as the enterprise of the State, it is cowardice and imbecility. What odds where we squat, or how much ground we cover? It is not the soil that we would make free, but men.” – H.D.T., June 18, 1854

“When you think that your walk is profitless and a failure, and you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open.” – H.D.T., January 27, 1860

Dear Henry –

Today’s letter finds you in the form of a thought experiment. Ready?

Imagine that instead of being born into a lower-middle class family in Concord in 1817 – the luckiest place on earth, you wrote, and in the nick of time – you arrive on earth over 150 years downstream, into a small rural village in northern Africa. You lose your father at an early age and hop from school to school as a child, only to later be forced to drop out to support yourself and your brothers and sisters. Smart and inventive, you would have become a computer programmer if, say, you’d won the congenital lottery and found yourself in America, home to many such talented people who are compensated well for their labors. Instead, you’re locked in a perpetual struggle for work, suffering in silence at the hands of the dissipated and corrupt government assigned to your case.

Now imagine it’s a sunny day in December. After only an hour or so of selling produce on the street, the cops arrive and want to speak with you. This won’t be the the first time. They demand to see your permit, but as far as you’re aware, none is required for this meager operation, one which you require to survive and is the last desperate attempt at a living you will ever make. The ringleader, a woman wearing a bun, curses at you, slaps you and spits in your face. Her anger makes her ugly to you. The men who are with her proceed to beat you on the street in full view of passersby.

You awaken, fully conscious, some time later. Looking around, you see that other than a few busted persimmons on the ground, all traces of your cart are gone. They must have taken everything. Bruised so badly you can hardly stand, you summon what’s left of you and make your way over to the governor’s office to plead your case. The building is posh, with soft and expensive-looking carpet, and you don’t even know how you arrived there in your state, but none of it matters, because the man refuses to see you. Like a scene out of a movie, you find two officers grabbing you by the arms and throwing you out on the front steps of the building.

You lay there for a moment, writhing. Everything hurts, even your heart. The midday sun smarts your eyes, which feel like they have been sealed shut. How did it come to this? You wonder. What did I do?

And then, the turn. The rest happens so quickly. You see only the outline of the concrete and the stride of your well-worn shoes as you march over to the nearest fueling station, where, after a shout-out with the man behind the counter, you snatch a red canister of petrol.

I did nothing, and I get this, you think. And so this is what I can and will do. Because the world, in spite all its beauty and wonder, can’t just let me live.

You dowse yourself, and before you can chicken out, you light the match. You can still taste the blood of violence on your lips as the fire consumes your body in front of the building where you realized there was no way out. You can hear people shouting, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Less than twenty days later in the hospital, your family members tell you goodbye. But that doesn’t matter anymore, either, because by now you’ve sparked a revolution that will topple oppressive regimes across the world, paving the road to freedom and prosperity for thousands of others.

Why do I tell you this, Henry? Most revere you as the natural man, the philosopher-poet of the environmental movement. Few remember the social activist, the Transcendentalist who believed that massive social change can start with one passionate person who decides to do something – about slavery, injustice, whatever. And that message reverberates powerfully now, with the challenges that dog us and even echo the ones you faced in your day: environmental change, war, a financial crisis. The truth perhaps that we all sign onto just by living in this time is that, like the poor man in our story, we feel so much a part of this world that we paradoxically find ourselves alienated from it. Witnessing the divisiveness of our politics, the national debt, a malaise in the air, and the worries of a young generation, we all suffer from a profound loneliness.

What a horrible world we must inhabit for change to be ignited through such personal sacrifice. But when I think of your night in jail, Henry, and the movements your choice inspired – Gandhi’s Satyagraha, the Civil Rights movement, and countless others which have changed history since you showed the way forward – I realize how one disproportionately miniscule event can spark something enormous. A revolution, perhaps, and a completely transformed world, moves from romantic notion to practical possibility, with the growing sense that our choices have an impact.

To employ an image dear to your heart, Henry, consider your beloved lodgepole pine, whose cones can remain closed for years before a fire opens them, scattering their seeds far and wide to begin the regenerative process.

As a race, we hold such incredible dreams, as well as terrible nightmares. Perhaps the only thing that makes the nightmares tolerable is the dreams they somehow awaken, and which prove that they’re the ones worth living as well as dying for.

Yours Ever,

Hannah

 

#81 Names at a Party

“In our walks Channing takes out his notebook sometimes and tries to write as I do, but all in vain. He soon puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of the lanscape. Observing me still scribbling, he will say that he confines himself to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves the facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say a little petulantly, ‘I am universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite.’ He is the moodiest person, perhaps, that I ever saw [...] I, too, would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing; not facts to assist men to make money, farmers to farm profitably, in any common sense; facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought: as now the bell rings for evening meeting, and its volumes of sound, like smoke which rises from the tent in which I dwell.”                                   – H.D.T., November 9, 1851

“It has come to this, – that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees but much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common.” – H.D.T., October 9, 1857

Dear Henry -

Tired and sick from overwork, I am dispatching this volley to you about halfway from my bedroom. How is it that two months flew by without so much as a peep from my end of history? Because we’re all so goddamn busy, Henry. Life in the 21st century moves so fast indeed, that even the least busy among us, the most deliberate and mindful, can’t set foot in the constantly flowing river of society and culture without halfway getting sucked beneath its torrents. It wasn’t until last week, when following a Wednesday-night meltdown on the phone with my pal Veena I sat slumped on the floor puking my innards into the bathroom toilet, that I could barely make out the wee voice inside me whining, “me, your body? Hello?”

The first casualty of modern civilization is our own selves. I know how the forests and oceans and creatures have suffered, but the truth is that we had to first.

And so, during this chilliest of northwest springtimes, I’ve got ass to chair with the mission of taking better care of myself by doing some self-nurturing. That includes finishing what I started to you almost a month ago: a letter scribbled by hand on a piece of printer paper from a tiny cabin on the Whidbey Institute lands as the rain poured down outside, so steadily that I could just as well have been sitting outside amidst the firs and pines, the rain soaking my hair and clothes as I sat at my desk, writing.

On that rainy day I tried to tell you about my good friend and mentor, Barton Cole –  intellectual, master gardener, naturalist, and also a writer. For some reason I still remember the mythic description of you in Emerson’s eulogy after your death in 1862: that you were “firmly built, light of complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect,” with acute senses, a well-knit and sturdy frame, and “hands strong and skilful in the use of tools.” “And there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind,” said Emerson, adding that you could  ”pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain.” You friend also claimed you could find your way through the woods in the dark of night, relying more on your feet than your eyesight…yadda, yadda, yadda. By his account, you were basically a god. My friend Barton could easily be one in his own manner: in Carhartt overalls and boots, clothes the color of the earth, body slate-chiseled from years of manual work outdoors, dulcimer voice and a nearly British vocabulary, if you were alive now he could possibly be your spiritual twin and your bestest buddy, the only thing definitively NOT shared between you being the sophisticated smoke break every couple hours.

And so it was with a kind of Henry-like admiration for this man that I approached him last winter and asked him to teach me a thing or two about the forest habitats around here. Spring arrived, and I was embarrassed initially at how little I knew: what was the difference between a doug fir and a hemlock? But Barton was patient, and told me how I could identify trees by their cones and fruits, and showed me what a true fir looks like, and why nettles can always be found at the bases of alder trees. I discovered another way to guess a tree’s age besides counting its rings, and he helped me identify a birdsong or two. We even got lucky once and stood awestruck and totally still while listening to the melodiously trilling song of a winter wren.

For a girl raised in the city and who first came to know you only by your love of passionate civil protest, coming to the island and learning about the natural world was as almost as good as if you had shared your deepest secrets. It has closed the loop for me, Henry. In another way, it was like putting on a glasses. Where before there had been a blur of green color, now I saw individual trees, as unique as any person I know. Suddenly, as surely as if I had just arrived at the biggest party of the century, I yearned to know their names; who they were and where they had come from, and what they had seen.

As the weather warms in the coming weeks – and indeed, the prestigious local metereologists predict that at long last, it will – you’ll find me abroad quite a bit more, quite possibly muddied and dirtied with notebook in hand, in search of facts. But modern-day Channings would maybe ask me, quite legitimately: why do I care about facts, or science? Why can’t a tree be just a tree?

I couldn’t say it much better than you did, my friend. Framed differently, I’d say that repeating a name with your lips, or memorizing a fact, is like putting a stamp on your passport through life, declaring, Here’s what happened to me today. This was my experience. What I saw today was marvelous, the single thing that was here over hundreds of years before I came along. And if fate is kind, it’ll still be there when I die. 

And so I’ll remember their names.

Yours Ever,

Hannah

 

#80 Necessary Lands

“My friends wonder that I love to walk alone in solitary fields and woods by night. Sometimes in my loneliest and wildest midnight walk I hear the sound of the whistle and the rattle of the cars, where perchance some of those very friends are being whirled by night over, as they think, a well-known, safe, and public road. I see that men do not make or choose their own paths, whether they are railroads or trackless through the wilds, but what the powers permit each one enjoys. My solitary course has the same sanction that the Fitchburg Railroad has. If they have a charter from Massachusetts and – what is of much more importance – from Heaven, to travel the course and in the fashion they do, I have a charter, though it be from Heaven alone, to travel the course I do, to take the necessary lands and pay the damages. It is by the grace of God in both cases.” – H.D.T., August 31, 1850

“My Pegasus has lost his wings; he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly.” – H.D.T., September 20, 1851.

Dear Henry –

As the last snow melts and my body STILL tries to heal, I write this from the site of my new employer, the Whidbey Institute. Rain falls softly outside my window while I go about my business the old-fashioned way you would prefer: hand to pen scratching against paper, the only real distraction of the outside world my cell phone beeping to signal the hour. After I sign off from my post at 4:00, I’m free to do whatever I please – and once released from my duties I find I don’t have to venture very far from work to feel like I’ve come home. Now, breathing clean air and sailing my dearer thoughts to you from one of the loveliest places on earth, I feel blessed. The place where I sit is host to a great many visitors every year from all over the country and world, but on this rare day I have it all to myself. With a wood interior, cozy rooms and two lofts to retreat to for solitude, the place breathes. As a good friend observed, it feels much like sitting inside a violin.

Amidst all this peace and beauty is a strange tension, between this – writing, thinking, living authentically while giving up some material comforts – and a life I struggled to break free from for years. When I quit my job at the University of Washington to marry Phil and later move out to Whidbey Island, I had envisioned a completely new direction for myself, devoid of office work and the kind of commitment I had once thought would keep me from my calling. I had felt that being a writer and thinker was at odds with the sort of work I had been doing for a decade, and knew also that, not being a Greek philosopher or dissolute owner of slaves, I could never enjoy that sort of gratification without a good measure of personal sacrifice.

That is, until now. I seem to have landed a coveted position in one of the most amazing places I have ever worked. My new job description looks much like my old job description, but in practice it all feels different. You may be right in saying that things don’t change; people do – but I am convinced that there is something very special about being here that makes the work less cumbersome than before.  Perhaps it’s that in the midst of such natural beauty, with a mission of improving the game for people and nature both, there’s an anchoring effect which reminds you that admidst the chaos and constant movement there is a placidly still and gorgeous universe always awaiting your communion, just outside the door.

Still, I wonder at the origin of this feeling that my career is schizo, a kind of contradiction: one piece of me the humanitarian out to do good by nature and society, and the other a timid mouse very much desiring to be left alone to her skitterings in an old abandoned church.

Much as you did, I prefer to travel light, and where I please. I sell my clothes. I keep my thoughts. I tend to like being left alone. And from gathering all of the above, people frequently tell me I’m in the wrong career.

But how about you? How is it that you could travel so far afield – to New York, Canada, Minnesota — no small feats for an avowed local boy like you – and pioneer social justice on behalf of those with no voice to claim their rights, all while maintaining your sanity and sense of self? Certainly none of those journeys were easy or pleasurable, but you took them anyhow.

Here, now, in what seems the most hectic and pressing period of my life by far, I want solace so badly I can taste it. But what price would I pay? (One always exists). Can I not only love what I do, but do it well and with the deep satisfaction that I’m not just drawing figures in the sand?

Price tag notwithstanding, your castles in the air sound far better to me.

Yours Ever,

Hannah

P.S. While your Pegasus crawls on his belly, mine hides in the farmhouse, and goes by “she.” Her wings are perfectly healthy, too.

 

#79 Threes Into Tens (or on Not Picking Scabs)

“It is a very remarkable and significant fact that, though no man is quite well or healthy, yet every one believes practically that health is the rule and disease the exception, and each invalid is wont to think himself in a minority, and to postpone somewhat of endeavor to another state of existence. But it may be some encouragement to men to know that in this respect they stand on the same platform, that disease is, in fact, the rule of our terrestrial life and the prophecy of a celestial life […] Life is a warfare, a struggle, and the diseases of the body answer to the troubles and defeats of the spirit. Man begins by quarreling with the animal in him, and the result is immediate disease. In proportion as the spirit is the more ambitious and persevering, the more obstacles it will meet with. It is as a seer that man asserts his disease to be exceptional.” – H.D.T.,  September 3^rd, 1851

Dear Henry –

As writers, we keep hearing the rule of threes, whether in stories or our daily discourse: the three blind mice, three little pigs, third time’s the charm, three men walked into a bar. But as I see it, life really happens in tens: your first decade is all wonder; roots finding their place in the soil, melodies sung and remembered, habits imprinted and solidified through experience, for good or ill. Your second is host to plenty of confusion as you complete your formal education, find your way in the world, and choose a mate for life (or perhaps none of these). And your third…um, well. Perhaps I can’t be so confident, for as you once said beautifully, I am limited here by the narrowness of my experience (as well as still writing in threes, if you didn’t notice).

As I prepare to greet my fourth decade in life, though, one of the challenging lessons I keep flunking and having to re-take is the one about self-care, especially of the body. Lately I’ve had plenty of opportunities, after a period of delusional superhuman-immortal type physical power. Four months ago, as the last red leaves dropped from the maples and the winter rains began to fall with their typical regularity, I prided myself on layering up in Gore-Tex and hitting the road on my bicycle regardless of weather. I came to be seen by most in my neighborhood as the intrepid asian girl on her bike, a label I accepted rather proudly as I garnered funny looks from drivers and other passersby on the roads, and the cashiers at the grocery store shook their heads in disbelief whenever I stopped there on my way home with hair bedraggled and gear dripping wet as I filled my panniers with vegetables for dinner.

But then came the accident the first week of January, when I would be temporarily robbed of my superhuman-immortal type power. Following a period of snow and ice on the roads, I headed out on my bike in anticipation of warmer temperatures and rain. But speeding at 15 miles an hour down a rather steep road at 9:30 in the morning, I would be proven wrong as I spun out of control on black ice and kissed the pavement for the first time since I was seven in a kickball match. I later discovered that without the protection of my helmet, my skull would have been bashed in and my body a smear on the concrete.

After a period of gratitude for my nervous system (and life) came a time of reckoning with the mess I did have to clean up: a massive hematoma on my left hip, facial abrasions, and chondromalacia of both knees, pre-existing since a long period of running in the fall but further aggravated by the bike accident. My long-suffering god of a husband tolerated my cursing around the house, ice packs flung about in frustration, excuses not to make dinner because it hurt too much – and at times, you have to believe me, it did. When I couldn’t walk without pain for a solid few weeks, I began thinking I had paid my karmic dues for the entire year.

While it’s reasonable to assume the usual phase of anger and denial one must reckon with when faced with the long road to healing after an accident, I made one mistake. In my impatience and indignance, I still rode in the rain. I pumped my bike furiously up steep hills my physical therapist had told me to avoid, and in the rain and cold at the height of flu season. Finally one week, I predictably fell sick with one of the worst colds in recent memory (As I would later tell a friend, I don’t think I ever slept that much in my life). The universe is strange: it will obligingly bop you on the nose if you keep pushing it, as if to say, “quit picking your scab!” (Here I quote another friend).

I’ve come to appreciate its lessons. How infuriating but humbling it can be, when suddenly your body cannot do all the things it used to, or heal overnight the way it could when you were little. Still young and on the cusp of thirty, I was stuck in broken record mode insisting that my body isn’t entitled to behave this way. But of course it is – as is any delicate and holy system that has been dealt a shock and simply needs time.

Like saplings after a forest fire.

Like the ground as it thaws from winter into spring.

As I write this to you, snow sits placid and hushed on the ground outside, Nature’s reminder to embrace my limitations and not merely acknowledge them, an assurance that the time awaits when I again feel whole and able-bodied to return to what makes me happy. Better now than later, child, she whispers, when the earth sleeps and the birds have yet to sing their full songs. And remember that health is not the absence of disease, but encompasses everything, even unto death.

And so I’ve learned the value of living not by force of will but a presence to all that is happening, no matter how painful and crazy it all is.

Perhaps it’s time I got it, Henry – that sometimes, life in its beauty chooses to move in tens rather than in threes. Let it be so.

Yours Ever,

Hannah

 

#78 When to Hang Up

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate […] We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”                          – H.D.T., Walden, “Economy”

“Be ever so little distracted, your thoughts so little confused, your engagements so few, your attention so free, your existence so mundane, that in all places and in all hours you can hear the sound of crickets in those seasons when they are to be heard. It is a mark of serenity and health of mind when a person hears this sound much, — in streets of cities as well as in fields. Some ears never hear this sound; are called deaf. Is it not because they have so long attended to other sounds?” — H.D.T., July 7, 1851

Dear Henry –

The rule applies to most things in life: that the longer you step away from a routine, the harder it is to return. Such creatures of habit, we are — and as I grope feebly in the dark to trace my way home to the little rituals which used to give my life so much meaning, I find the universe conspiring to derail me with a force I have never seen.  It’s the condition of life now: I am assailed to no end with personal emergencies, emails alerting me to yet one more fire I have to put out, and two phones which make me reachable at all times in a way that would send your 19^th century technoskeptic-naturalist noggin over the brink.

In spite it all though, here I now sit, banging out this letter to you — and as it happens, the most painful part is always just beginning.

How did I lose my balance so quickly? (Though, as I’ll tell you in my next letter, that question denotes my recent existence in a way that goes beyond metaphor).  I wrote you one of my more sincere letters on Halloween last year and signed off with the intent to send you another in a week or so. Instead, I got roped into several different projects which have all but consumed my life up to now: a fundraiser for my non-profit supporting students in Kenya, friends and family, the usual madness of the holidays, and now the stress of new projects as the fresh decade kicks off thundering. Now, glancing at the calendar hanging on my wall which I received free in the mail from the Nature Conservancy, I wonder where the past several months have gone. In my dizzied state I may as well have gone Rip Van Winkle after a hit of ether, only to awaken a few days later in the the middle of the woods from an epically long dream.

But we both know that none of that stuff was a dream. So let us capture and examine the two naughty squirrels who’ve been impishly busy nesting under my roof, to my complete dismay and irritation:

1. Facebook (never mind; my whole f#$!%ing computer).

My friend, I can forget about living by a pond for two years to find a spot of peace to write. It’s been tribulation enough to stay away from my computer, and, failing that, to limit my time spent on the notorious Book of Faces, which has been known to “ruin” many lives. It has not reached that point with me, though it’s come close. I very much doubt you’d take any part in it if you were alive today. It’s been said that social media is an immune response to the isolation we feel as a modern culture, but I wonder what we’re missing in the process of addressing that isolation. How do we know we’re not breeding yet further isolation? When we are online interacting with one another, what are we not doing? (Maybe having lunch with a friend. Or going for a swim in the ocean. Or chatting up the smiley guy with dreds at the taco stand and immediately feeling like long-lost siblings). In a discussion about Facebook a good friend of mine griped to me in an email: “mostly, from what they tell me, it all seems a rather public form of grotesque masturbation. Got something to say? Then say it to someone. Don’t have something to say? Log onto Facebook and start typing.”

I will reply to him that his seems a rather simplistic assertion. The rapid pace of modernity has turned us into a highly mobile population who will come into contact with exponentially far more individuals and can only make time for genuine interaction with a fraction of them. But Christ, Henry. You should see what it’s doing to us. My daily newsfeed is both a blessing and a curse. I am able to see pictures of my friend Lindsey’s beautiful newborn baby while also being subjected to news hardly more earth-shattering than Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

For the first time in my life, I wonder how it came to pass that I should be friends with so many people and know so few of them.

2. Which leads me to my cell phone.

As little as two weeks ago, I would get on the bus or the commuter train with my coffee and magazine and look around to see everyone around me busy on their smart phones, devices which make those virtual interactions more mobile than ever.  I confess to having felt a little like an alien descended from Mars  – until I drowned my 3-year old flip phone in a bucket of bleach water, and was forced to replace it. With what? A smart phone, of course (flip phones now being an extinct species).

And so I get caught up with the century and enslave myself. Or do I? Who or what says I have to look up the bus schedule on my phone rather than leave it in my pocket and just wait? (A friend confessed to having missed his bus once while busy logging on). I could choose to live untethered if I want to. (Same friend was lost on the University of Washington campus once, got on his phone to look up “Mary Gates Hall,” got frustrated and quit, and then enjoyed the most gratifying conversation with a random student who offered to show him to his destination).

In an article about what children born in 2011 will never know, one thing was true knowledge – that is, the ability to truly learn something and retain it.  “Today the world’s collective knowledge is on the computer in your pocket or purse,” the author wrote. “And since you have it with you at all times, why bother remembering anything?” Why remember, indeed? Don’t even write down the number of your local emergency hotline, because of course your entire existence in the event of a disaster can be entrusted to a device which runs on a battery.

With all that griping out of my system, I am not knocking technology’s capabilities, Henry. It demonstrates its power every day to disseminate useful information, to connect people, enable efficient communication and be a tool for good. Without it, I couldn’t do the work I was called to do, and I wouldn’t have met my beloved Phil.

But in the perpetual gush of information it’s maybe worth asking what we’re missing:

Time for contemplation.

Communion with a loved one.

The humbling and haunting songs of birds as the seasons turn.

Life exists outside the noise. It couldn’t be any other way. And so I plan to hang up every now and then. I am glad you never had to.

Yours Ever,

Hannah

 

#77 Hydrophiliacs All

“How much would be subtracted from the day if the water was taken away! This liquid transparency, of melted snows partially warmed, spread over the russet surface of the earth! It is certainly important that there be some priests, some worshippers of Nature. I do not imagine anything going on to-day away from and out of sight of the waterside.”   – H.D.T., April 9, 1855

“We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.” – H.D.T., May 23, 1854

Dear Henry –

You journaled so joyfully about your love relationship with water in all its forms: morning baths in Walden Pond, a source so fresh one could kneel on their knees and drink holy water straight from it as if from a baptismal font. You wrote odes to magical afternoon walks along rivers and streams which sang and spoke. In your town of Concord, water was not only abundant but gloriously pure – in a metaphysical as well as concrete sense, still to be contaminated by the industrial revolution which was beginning to brew full force, and to which you staged a vehement lifelong protest. Polar ice caps were still intact, as well as still being unexplored. Skies precipitated their annual release of moisture in predictable cycles, and the mountains would bless the lowlands with abundant fresh snowmelt each February. The world was yet huge, but nascent in early America was the biblically-driven ethos of Manifest Destiny, the movement of land-subduers who thought it their moral duty to harrass Mother Nature for what they saw as their birthright. Against the ruling follies of the era, you were the lone but shameless renegade shouting: LOOK, you morons. What you’re doing is suicide.

And all the while you were critiqued by your contemporaries for idealizing nature as a reflection of something divine within us, the inhabitants of Earth. But a reflection how, I wonder? By what means?  Reading your journal, the key seems to lie in all our senses. Open your eyes, you seem to say. Smell the ocean, touch the rocks and trees. Witness what is happening all around you, because it’s not merely physical phenomena. What you appreciate and love around you is a reflection of yourself, your own health and sanity.

Fast forward about 150 years, Henry. The world has gotten vastly smaller, or “globalized.” In your day it was pretty common for the story of one human life to unravel from beginning to end in the same place: say, if you were born in a small village in southern India, chances were pretty solid you would grow up in that village, marry and raise your children, live out your life and die in the place you were born. In many respects, this is the path you chose for yourself as well. Now, in the age of air travel, urbanization and cosmopolitan mobility, the reach of the human family has exploded to a size you maybe envisioned but which would still shock you. Can you imagine the stress this has placed on your beloved oceans and rivers? It would destroy you inside to witness: the salt water wilderness is acidifying and overfished. Fast but inefficient machine-driven agricultural methods pollute the largest and mightiest rivers, killing off the salmon which your Native Indian friends worshipped and still require to sustain themselves and their cultural heritage. We’ve been spewing so much crap into the air with modern transportation methods that we’ve perceivably altered our weather and the seasonal migration patterns of animals all over the world. And not to mention that we’ve finally begun to melt those once-impermeable glaciers and ice caps.

As is that weren’t sufficiently ugly, my friend, water has become commercialized. Bottled in plastic, packaged in yet more plastic and then sold on the market for a profit, the only thing that could be more laughable would be for companies to sell rocks – which, I forgot, they do already.  A friend aptly put it to me once: “think really hard about what they’re trying to sell,” he said, “and you begin to see what a ludicrous enterprise it is.”

You would never have foreseen that a resource as ubiquitous in nature as water is soon to become the source of global war. How did we arrive at this place in our history, Henry? Since when did your “priests and worshippers of Nature” disavow their intimate connection with the source of all life in favor of a system of rape and destroy? We must realize by now that her energy and “resources” are finite, and it could well be that our knowledge of Nature’s limits is what’s fueling all our greed.  Reading your journal, I can only conclude that we have forgotten the sacred language you spoke fluently and which has existed since the day our species arrived on Earth. Having uprooted ourselves, we have waged war on the planet, and along the way humanity seems to have turned on itself.

Even these days, I consider my family lucky. Your family’s descendants are lucky — to be alive in the United States, a region of the world so developed that most of us don’t worry about access to fresh, clean water. But everywhere in this country and beyond, the divide between haves and have-nots has generated a collective unrest that’s getting harder to tune out. I think of my friends in Africa, who rise at six every morning to fetch contaminated water they must carry on their heads from a source five or six miles from home. Few of the lucky ever stop to think what a challenge this lifestyle must present to the freedom of leisure and self-expression for millions of people. It’s a wonder how such inequity has existed so long without inciting some kind of violent global protest, but if one day it does, it will be for lack of wonder and compassion – not only for Nature, but for one another.

As you advocated, Henry, I want to believe that change can start with me.  I want to stop and marvel at minutiae the way you did at Walden Pond, at the wildness of something primordial which existed before us, and will live on forever if we would only let it. Our peace and very existence depend on it. If the the oceans, rivers, streams, lakes and ponds are Mother Earth’s arteries, veins, lymph, and blood, then count me a hydrophiliac, along with every man, woman, child, and every living thing between here and the ends of this blue planet.

And always, my friend, let me think of others, and count Nature among them. Because in thinking of others, we heal ourselves.

Yours Ever,

Hannah