Silence and Stillness

"When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life - how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook.

...

Silence is the communion of a conscious soul with itself. If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence. She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, and if we will we may always hearken to her admonitions.

...

The gods delight in stillness, they say ’st-’st. My truest - serenest moments are too still for emotion -they have woolen feet. In all our lives we live under the hill, and if we are not gone we live there still."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Liminal Beauty

"The question is not what you look at,
but what you see. It is only necessary
to behold the least fact or phenomenon,
however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth
aside from our habitual path or routine,
to be overcome, enchanted by its
beauty and significance."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Lake Te Anau

"This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hilltop near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Walden

Note. While Lake Te Anau in New Zealand - a glimpse of which appears in the image above - is considerably larger than Thoreau's Walden pond (133 vs. 0.1 sq. miles, respectively), it inspires the same soothing stillness and serenity. This (or, more precisely, an Airbnb in the town of Te Anau) was our first stop in New Zealand, and anchored the exploration of parts of Fiordland National Park during the first part of our stay in this beautiful country. The photo itself was taken a few hours after sunrise near the trailhead for Kepler Track, a popular (albeit long and challenging) trail a few minutes away from the center of town. My younger son (Josh, a photographer extraordinaire) and I spent a blissful hour or two communing with - and reveling in - lake Te Anau's tranquil beauty. 

Mysterious and Unexplorable

"Every blade in the field -
Every leaf in the forest -
lays down its life in its season
as beautifully as it was taken up.

...

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth.

...

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Contemplating this World

 

"The sea-shore is a
sort of neutral ground,
a most advantageous point from
which to contemplate this world."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Cartesian Fallacy

"The universe is wider than our views of it."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

"Logic does not lead us from the fact that we are an integral part of the web of life to certain norms of how we should live. However, if we have the deep ecological experience of being part of the web of life, then we will (as opposed to should) be inclined to care for all of living nature. Indeed, we can scarcely refrain from responding in this way. 

By calling the emerging new vision of reality 'ecological' in the sense of deep ecology, we emphasize that life is at its very center. This is an important issue for science, because in the mechanistic paradigm physics has been the model and source of metaphors for all other sciences. 'All philosophy is like a tree,' wrote Descartes. 'The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.'

The systems view of life has overcome this Cartesian metaphor. Physics, together with chemistry, is essential to understand the behavior of the molecules in living cells, but it is not sufficient to describe their self-organizing patterns and processes. At the level of living systems, physics has thus lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. This is still not generally recognized today. Scientists as well as nonscientists frequently retain the popular belief that 'if you really want to know the ultimate explanation, you have to ask a physicist,' which is clearly a Cartesian fallacy. The paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level, involves a perceptual shift from physics to the life sciences."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) and Pier Luigi Luisi (1938 - )
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

"Nature is an infinite sphere
whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere."

- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

Autumnal Tints

"I am struck by the simplicity of
light in the atmosphere in the autumn,
as if the earth absorbed none,
and out of this profusion of
dazzling light came the
autumnal tints."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Tonic of Wildness

"We need the tonic of wildness...
At the same time that we are earnest
to explore and learn all things,
we require that all things
be mysterious and unexplorable,
that land and sea be indefinitely wild,
unsurveyed and unfathomed
by us because unfathomable.
We can never have
enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Wonderful Triangles

"The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Walden

Rejuvenative Pleasures of Sauntering

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country,' in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Walking

Postscript: Little did I know back in November of last year (in this post) that the word "saunter" would come back and haunt me - haunt all of us; unexpectedly, to be sure, and not in a bad way, but mindfully and full of joy. For what better way is there of dealing with today's unrelenting virus-induced stressors than succumbing to the gentle pleasures of Thoreau-ian sauntering? And so, my younger son (having now advanced far beyond his early Polaroid experiments and maturing quite nicely as an budding-artist with a Fujifilm XT-2 in hand) and I have been taking daily saunters to rejuvenate our sequestered souls. The impressionistic image above (which captures the gentle swaying and swirling of reeds of grass in a shallow creek along a footpath near our home in northern VA) may not be a Wagnerian panorama of, say, the Scottish highlands, but it is no less able to depict the ineffable effervescence of our lives. Though I started our saunter in a decidedly dour mood (minus my normal commute time, my "work days" are now effectively 3 hours longer!), it took but a few precious moments immersed in a gentle forest breeze, the soft burbling of water and the glimmer of the day's last sunlight on a tiny reed of grass to put smiles back on our faces. Thank you, Mr. Thoreau, for reminding me of the timeless - and rejuvenative - pleasures of sauntering!

What You See

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Unfathomable

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Earth's Eye

"A lake is a landscape's most

beautiful and expressive feature.

It is Earth's eye;

looking into which the

beholder measures the

depth of his own nature."

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Simplicity

"When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. "

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Mysterious and Unexplorable

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Intellectual Rays

"Many an object is not seen, 

though it falls within our range of visual ray,

because it does not come within the

range of our intellectual ray,

i.e., we are not looking for it.

So, in the largest sense,

we find only the world we look for."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Reawakening

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn."
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

I have experienced just such a (spiritual) reawakening during a 10 day sojourn with my family to my roots on Long Island, NY. The image above was among the first of a series of images captured during our first night in Riverhead, following a major storm that passed through the area. This is the view east along the ocean beach at Shinnecock County Park, in Southhampton, NY. As I process images from our trip, more are sure to appear on my blog. In the meantime, all I can say is, "Gosh, it was great to just walk around eastern Long Island with my camera!"