🌲 Talking Back to Walden

September: encounters with water

Welcome to Talking Back to Walden. This is where we’ll consider only the best passages of Thoreau’s 1854 classic for what they might tell us about our present-day environmental woes and hopes. Every second Sunday of the month, I will reconsider Thoreau’s left-brained observation with intuitive participation.

Brewster Flats

From chapter 9, The Ponds

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

The transcript is at the end, if you prefer to read it.

Talking Back to Walden is a labor of love. If you enjoy it, please share. For more like this and for my regular weekly posts, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Talking Back

“Wade in. Participate. You can’t stay on the bank watching.”

I’ve come to the Grand Tetons to be in closer relationship with nature. I’m anxious about the state of the world, hoping for answers. My first attempt is this bossy stream on Murie Ranch.

Drawn by the music of rushing water, I’d left the forest path and stepped between two narrow trees into sacred space. Thresholds and thin places are everywhere: fallen logs, paired trees, doorways where two worlds meet.

I perch on the narrow, sandy streambank to introduce myself as our guides instructed. My usual self-consciousness has been stripped bare by grief. I still feel my father’s hand, which I’d held days before as he left us for the next realm. His eyes silvered from warm brown to a newborn’s pale blue. A reverse birth. Old identities and inherited ideas are no match for this new reality.

I stare at sunlight dancing in dark depths and introduce myself as the youngest daughter of my father.

“I am the impeded one, the one who sings.” The stream’s voice rings in my mind.

My resident skeptic sneers. “How do you know you aren’t answering yourself? Fabricating a response?” My skeptic holds an advanced degree and licensure to prove expert status. This voice parrots the party line: unless I can measure, analyze or record a phenomenon, it doesn’t exist. It has no value. It isn’t real.

Our guides warned us this might happen. A novice, I follow their advice and urge the skeptic to take the afternoon off. I close my eyes to listen with the ears of my heart and to call on other senses.

The stream smells clean and ancient. My body relaxes in the warm sun into simple acceptance.

“I am content here,” I say to the stream. “I belong the way you belong.” This surprises me. I have always felt like an intruder in wild places.

As an offering, I recite two lines of Mary Oliver: “Rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity / while we ourselves dream of rising.”

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“From the mountains, the snows, the secret summer places.”

“And where are you going?”

“Not for me to know. My place is here.”

Beyond the stream, a wide swath of jumbled stones bakes in the sun. “What are you like in Spring?”

“Oh, you should see! A torrent! A boisterous reunion with this whole land.”

The sun is hot in early September. Plants parch in the dry season.

“Come, put your feet in me. Come walk and stand in me.”

Not wanting to be rude, I pull off shoes and socks, roll up my pants and step into the frigid, rushing water. My legs and feet work hard to balance on the first moss-covered stone’s rounded surface slick and treacherous. I ease onto the next stone. And the next. Here is the same awkwardness from childhood, the clumsiness of new roller skates. But no mocking teasing observers. Only patience and encouragement.

“I want to feel what it’s like to be vertical,” the stream says when I reach the center. “Reach your hands up to the sky.”

Struggling to stay balanced, I raise my arms until I can feel my own verticality as a new and wondrous thing. Revelation of a toddler’s first steps.

“Now tip your head back. I want to feel the sun on your face. . . Ahhhh. Yes.”

I stand, surprised to feel relaxed and balanced. My molecules mingle with the stream, the air, the sun. Completing a circuit that has been going on all this time beyond my notice.

It’s a strange, disquieting honor to learn that my body is not my own. That it belongs to the world. My hands, my eyes, my head, my ears are the world’s way of feeling, seeing, hearing and being in ecstatic communion with herself. An experience only available to those who step off the bank and into the water.

“You can return any time,” the stream says. “In your body, yes, and in your imagination. I have much to tell you.”

(Reader, I am back there now, even as I write these words. The water is cold and clear.)

“You are perfect. The sun loves you,” I say, mesmerized by the gold glints sparking the clear mahogany rushing water. “I love you, too, my friend.” My heart sends green rays in all directions.

“I know,” the stream says. “You honor me with your questions and attention.”

“And you honor me by seeing me. I didn’t know how lonely I was.”

I overcome my reluctance to leave and pass back through the threshold. The other side feels just as sacred. It all continues to feel sacred as I make my way back to camp. I think of Wendell Berry’s observation: “There are no non-sacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Although that Wyoming stream was my first intentional encounter, I realized that I’d been conversing with places for years through my watercolor paintings. Beaches, coves and trees have called to me with their colors and light. Mixing paints and working them on paper is the same as meeting a mountain stream or choosing words for sentences. It’s no small thing that painting outdoors feels good. It gives me peace. I love it.

In further encounters with that stream and, later, a meadow and a school of tiny fish in a lake, I never felt the rebuke I might from a person so long ignored and neglected. There was only allurement, gorgeous strangeness, and the deep resonance of acceptance.

This somatic empathy, this animal alertness, is what I’m drawn to cultivate as the waters rise and swirl around this threshold of great change upon which I stand. So far, I’ve been guided to wade in, to slow down, to observe how stillness and motion co-exist, that things are always becoming something else, and that nothing is ever finished.

The whole earth is awake, aware and sensate. When I’m having an encounter or writing about one, I try to resist the temptation to mediate with metaphor. Thoreau is all about metaphor in Walden and there are some gorgeous passages, to be sure. But metaphor is an unconscious habit, a way to keep humans at the center and maintain a safe intellectual distance instead of wading in to the precarity of full immersion.

I’m learning to trust that my body is in conversation with the more than human world all the time, whether I’m conscious of it or not. My intuition is that such belonging will help me to leave the threshold of modernity and step into what’s next. Guided by experiences of welcome and wonder, challenge and awe. Glimpses of a path and a way to be on that path.

This was published in different form as “Subsidence” in Dark Mountain Journal 6.

Lake Superior sky

Immersion

An invitation for you. I’ll open a chat thread if you’d like to share your experience or insights. Or, feel free to leave a comment here.

Measure

What does science tell us about Walden Pond today? How’s the water quality, the health of the animals and plants that call the pond and forest home?  I found a recent article from the Boston Herald¹ that the swimming beaches were closed last summer due to elevated bacteria levels. And from the Concord Bridge² that the fish have high levels of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl) substances, known to cause serious detrimental effects to human health. And, one images, not great for Thoreau’s perch, shiners, pickerel or eels, either.

Recent studies have concluded that climate change and intense recreational activities have altered the pond’s ecosystem. Sad but not surprising, given that so many water bodies are similarly affected.³

Wisdom

Both Thoreau and I write in English, a language that Paul Kingsnorth has called “a tool of ecocide.” (More on that in a future post.) Language both reflects and affects how we think. Robin Wall Kimmerer notes that her native Potawatomi language is about 70% verbs and 30% nouns, whereas English is the other way around. “[Potawatomi is] a very difficult language to learn, but what keeps me going is the pulse of animacy in every sentence.”

In a podcast, she gave the example of the Potawatomi word for bay, which carries the sense of to be a bay, to convey the continual process of becoming. “There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t. I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees.”⁴

Closing

Listen to Anne Haven McDonnell’s fierce, gorgeous poem, “She Told Me the Earth Loves Us.”

Copyright © 2020 by Anne Haven McDonnell. From All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (One World, 2020) edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.

This is a phenomenal book, full of treasures—essays, poems, art, activism—that are inspiring and empowering.

Transcript of excerpt from Chapter 9, The Ponds

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, “the glassy surface of a lake.” When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. . . .

In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush,—this the light dust-cloth,—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.

Thanks for reading Talking Back to Walden. If you enjoyed it, please share. For more like this and for my regular weekly posts, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1. Boston Herald, Aug 10, 2023 — (Paywall) “Walden Pond shuts down to swimming due to elevated bacteria levels after heavy rain”

2. Concord Bridge, March 6, 2023: “Health advisory: Walden Pond fish found high in PFAS”

3. Phys.org, April 4, 2018: “Climate change and recreational activities at Walden Pond have altered its ecosystem”

4. This Orion article is a marvelous deep dive into the “grammar of animacy.”