Straight from The Horse’s Mouth

It is fall, the light has changed and tones are golden. Glenn is on a motorcycle vacation, and I am alone. There is a quieting now, a settling in. Sunday is a good day for a book and a walk, so I pick up Walden and allow for an easy afternoon.

When I start out I walk for a long time, trying not to think, just simply be. I walk not in order to arrive somewhere, but to experience the mind clearing walking affords. "It is a great art to saunter" Henry David Thoreau told us. I pause to notice trees and vines, and to study the tracks of deer. I walk in quietude with my dogs, no sound track on the iPod, just hearing the symphony of the place, the play of footfalls against forest floor. I head deeper into the woods and the trail I follow is the one less traveled. No pond in sight, but definitely Walden-esque.

"We need the tonic of wildness.... We can never have enough of nature," Thoreau wrote. He who "went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. "

Most people do not have enough time in their busy schedules to slow down and absorb their surroundings. This is the premise for Thoreau's book Walden. Within it's 300 pages, he delightfully makes his argument that in order for man to ever evolve as human beings, we must first simplify. Written in the years 1845- 1847, Thoreau was observing a time period where society was changing and growing at an incredible rate. Believing that society was headed in the wrong direction all together he made a decision to do something about it. He left civilization and wrote of his two year experiment in the woods at Walden Pond.

The emphasis is of great confidence and joy, a proclamation of the richness and fullness of his life there. He will brag lustily, with a fullthroated voice, that he, like the rooster that greets the dawn has successfully created a way of living that has enabled him to find a "new day" in his life. It is a new world and a new self that he has discovered through his thought and activity at his woodland retreat. He feels as though he has been reborn into a fresh and new, more satisfying life; he celebrates the feeling of having left behind his old self, the spiritually asleep creature made lifeless by "the dead dry life of society."

Thoreau concludes his book: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." By doing these things, men may find happiness and self-fulfillment. My walk in the woods with Thoreau's book under my arm was a reminder of how fortunate we are to live in a place where we are free, and can still saunter for an afternoon alone among the trees.