🌲 Talking Back to Walden
December: the wonder of sensory engagement with the world.
Welcome to Talking Back to Walden, where we consider only the best passages of Thoreau’s 1854 classic, for what they might tell us about our present-day environmental woes and hopes. This month, we spend a rainy afternoon with a magnificent triple poplar tree in the foothills of the Appalachians not far from the Shenandoah River.
From Chapter 5, Solitude
Thoreau counters loneliness with the reminder that our senses reward us with connection born of wonder.
“There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden (from “Solitude”)
The transcript is at the end, if you prefer to read it.
Talking Back
My encounter resonates with this post by about presence courting gratitude.
In a rain-soaked forest on sacred ground stretching from the Appalachian Trail to the Shenandoah River stands a grand old triple Tulip Poplar, Liriodendron Tulipifera. Quieting my resisting mind, I observe and listen.
Now that people live separately from trees, you carry a great desire to hear us that is shadowed with doubt. Your ability is not a forgotten skill, nor is it cloaked in lack. You were born a stranger to our songs. Deaf to our voices from the noise of your cities and phones, your chain saws and inner demons.
When I pan up along the craggy bark, awareness prickles my spine that this tree has borrowed my camera-eyes.
Take selfies.
Selfies?
Yes, selfies. Not with me, but of me.
I tackle my assignment with the earnestness of a first-year film student. The tree draws me in with irresistible encouragement. Keep it light, have fun, feel what it’s like to be a part of things, to participate. I experiment. If I hold the camera in the usual way between the tree and myself to frame a shot, I am an outsider. With the camera on selfie mode, turned away from me, I show the tree, and myself, a whole new view.
Like this? I ask, mirroring a rivulet of rainwater flowing boisterously past a knot in the bark. Fine, fine. Just keep going. I circle the trunk, picking up a spot where a long drop of water defies gravity between crags of bark, another place where iridescent bubbles crowd and congregate. Pinks and greens and blues, pearl and pale gold, a world of rainbows stack together on a monochromatic day. I don’t know who is more delighted, me or the tree. I marvel at the tree’s sturdy slowness, a being with a purpose, a life, so different from my own.
I live and grow through seasons of loss, of cold and rest, of reawakening, rain and blossom, of new leaves and heat. I draw minerals and water from the earth and send them miles through intricate threads in my trunk and branches, out to new leaves quivering on delicate stems. I hold my leaves high and flat to the sky to gather raindrops and air and sunlight. I offer shelter to wren and owl, beetle and bat and bee. My roots stretch deep into the dark earth, into the hidden unknown.
Fascinated by the three seams in the tree’s base, I wonder what is the exact point where each beautiful trunk becomes an individual? Is their ancestry a single seed or three?
She asks me if I am one or three. I answer yes.
This tree is like the Trinity. No, not like anything. This tree is both one and three, a wonder that can only be understood from the inside.
At my heart is a mirror dreaming of the sun, reflecting hundreds of seasons. In summer, my leaves gather and pour light into the mirror. In winter, when the dead leaves lie thick upon my roots, the mirror radiates its warmth into stories told around campfires.
While I stand admiring bare limbs against leaden sky, a rat-a-tat-tat of drops beats on my hood. Is this how the tree feels when a woodpecker drills the trunk in search of a meal?
I release every small leafy masterpiece when the cold returns, to feed the fungus, insects and bacteria living in my shadow. In turn, the leaves nourish me. When the air warms again, I scatter my flowers and seeds on the wind. New seedlings emerge at my feet. All is well.
Clusters of bubbles slip on the slick surface between slabs of bark in a constantly evolving dance. Jeweled domes of water meander and race, pausing in ruts or leaping off cliffs into the void. Each bubble group joins the others with great gentleness. I crouch down to watch them breathing in pods at the tree’s base, resting in glittering pyramids after their journey.
This tree’s bark has been cultivated with the same attention and care as an old Rastafarian nurturing his dreadlocks. It is a wonder of pattern, a freeform of elongated diamonds and braids that no ceiling of any Gothic refectory can approach.
My bark loves being stroked by the rain, The rain enjoys being caressed on its journey to the earth.
Drops from the branches above pound a staccato on my boot. I reposition so they land on the nylon hood of my jacket. The drops resonate in my skull as an urge to dance, to move to the beat. Loose with joy, I dance.
When I was a sapling, I heard stories of ceremonies and rituals devised by people to remember and honor our friendship. My ancestors joined with the ancestors of the people in songs and dances of gratitude for the miracle of life. When this land was cleared of trees in favor of farming, the people forgot their promises. The spirits of the tree ancestors have waited many years to renew the friendship.
Through the lens of my camera-eyes, longing shifts to belonging. Witness courts wonder. Within me, I carry a reflection of this tree and within this tree is a reflection of me.
Immersion
In this post
curates a chorus of voices on the theme of being present outside and experiencing our entanglement with nature. Here’s one luscious example fromThe longer I stayed out there, the more entwined I became with all around me. It was as though the mycelium somehow got into my brain, making space for roots of other kinds, all showing me a different way to be. ~ Alexander M. Crow
Today’s invitation is to go outside and tune into a sense or senses other than sight. Letting sight rest helps to set aside the overtrained, overbusy rational mind. That vision is considered a “rational” sense and elevated above the others is a cultural bias, not a scientific one. Still, there is far more scientific research on sight than any other sense, as noted in this literature review.1
“Seeing—perception and vision—is implicitly the fundamental building block of the literature on rationality and cognition.”2
(Text available at the end.)
Another way to give imagination free rein is music. This one is on my writing playlist.
Wisdom
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novella, The Word for World is Forest, the forest is both shelter and community. Trees are not lumber; they are individuals, friends, kin. Through the beauty of her craft, Le Guin conjures a place of belonging:
All the colors of rust and sunset, brown-reds and pale greens, changed ceaselessly in the long leaves as the wind blew. The roots of the copper willows, thick and ridged, were moss-green down by the running water, which like the wind moved slowly with many soft eddies and seeming pauses, held back by rocks, roots, hanging and fallen leaves. No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex. (p. 17)
As a reward for my participation in
’s Enchanted by the Book contest last summer, Tara wrote a lovely essay in praise of the way Le Guin courts resilience. Though the story is, in Tara’s words, “thick with trauma,” that is the offering to readers:Where the uncomfortable story can begin to do good is in the reader’s recognition of dignity and enchantment right down in the midst of everything foul. To notice and feel enchantment anywhere is a habit of mind that literature teaches and messy life requires.
While literature can be a brilliant training ground for the imagination, so indeed can being present outside. No matter what is going on in my life or the world, being with a tree for a time pulls me out of my human-centric worries and obsessions. Trees are patient, literally grounded wise beings. Their timeline is wholly different than mine. I have only to slow down, breathe, and tune in to be rewarded with a vastly bigger picture.
Measure
Rainfall patterns are changing in Maryland. More rain falls as downpours instead of gentle soaking, which can devastate stream banks and cause dangerous flash flooding and soil erosion. Warmer air holds more water vapor, which affects not only local storms but also the formation of tropical storms into hurricanes.3
The EPA tracks the effects and consequences of climate change by state:
Average annual precipitation in Maryland has increased about 5 percent in the last century, but precipitation from extremely heavy storms has increased in the eastern United States by more than 25 percent since 1958. During the next century, average annual precipitation and the frequency of heavy downpours are likely to keep rising.4
The downpours are more likely during winter and spring. Rising temperatures melt snow earlier and increase evaporation and flooding, which dries soil during summer and fall to drought conditions. Since our state’s stormwater infrastructure and farming practices were developed during previous centuries of relative climate stability, these changes will require expensive retrofits and further challenge our farmers.
The effects can be deadly. Extreme rainfall in the summer of 2022 led to flooding that overwhelmed water treatment plants in Jackson, Mississippi, killing three people and leaving more than 150,000 without drinking water.5
In 2016 and again in 2018, floods in Ellicott City just west of Baltimore, devastated the historic main street and killed three people. In 2018, over 8 inches of rain fell in two hours. In 2016, it was 6 inches in two hours, and was considered a “1-in-1000 year event.”6
In my lifetime, I’ve noticed that interest in the weather has gone from nonexistent to curious to fascinated to terrified. If I had a nickle for every time someone said Mother Nature is punishing us for our profligate ways, I could quit my day job and write on Substack full-time. Maybe Nature is simply trying to get our attention and remind us that we belong here—but as part of the miraculous web of life, not as lords and overseers.
Talking back to Walden together
Last month in the chat, we considered the mysterious animacy of houses. For December, let’s share our experiences of presence and sensory immersion outside. Subscribers can join the fun in this chat.
Transcript of excerpt from Chapter 5, Solitude
I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. . . .
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving north-east rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, “I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” I am tempted to reply to such,— This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This, which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to?
Rainsound
Rain is silent with no need of aural expression. The sound emits from its meeting myriad surfaces, alive and inert. Silver threads of drops at speed chase one another on their journey to earth, gravity the glue between the drop and the leaf it is bound to. Each drop promised to its Beloved. It falls, drunk with attraction, landing on a tilted surface and sliding, caressing a path, leaving behind its silver glow of wet. That sound is not the rain. It is the rejoicing of each surface welcoming home its lover, the drop of water that has thrown itself out of the sky, fallen into the unknown, trusting that it will land in the perfect place as always. Upon landing, it is finished. The taught surface explodes and water fuses with leaf, enters, integrates, merges cell to cell, molecule to molecule in a holy union. The sound of rain is the sound of life’s longing for itself.
Thanks for reading Talking Back to Walden. Read previous months here: September, October, November. If you enjoyed it, please share. For more like this and for my regular weekly posts, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6787282/
Pamphlet, “What Climate Change Means for Maryland,” EPA Publication 430-F-16-022, August 2016.
I loved this piece with the pictures, sounds and words and how you wove it all together. Thank you for the writing and lovely photos. When it rains, I feel closest to nature so I really related this.
I, too, especially enjoyed an engagement of all the senses in relation to such a magnificent tree. This was a beautifully written essay, Julie, personal, factual, questioning, and intertwining with Walden's world so seamlessly. A delight to read from the first word to the last.
Thank you!