"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil -- to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society...
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least -- and it is commonly more than that -- sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements...
I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together...
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is -- I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses...
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar...
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind...
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea...
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him...
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog -- a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me...
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp...
Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it: "Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded...
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for men and for trees...
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild -- the mallard -- thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East...
In short, all good things are wild and free."
-- from "Walking," Henry David Thoreau, published in The Atlantic, June 1, 1862.
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Spring is a time of year when many of us feel a strong longing to reconnect with nature and wilderness. Thoreau lived in a very different world, and yet his words excerpted above, published 155 years ago, have by no means lost their relevance.
Today’s “civilization” is obviously a vastly more complex and more demanding one than in Thoreau’s time, and yet peoples’ problems aren’t altogether different.
Especially the problems of indoor living, wherein we’re almost totally separated from the natural world and from so much in nature that can bring balance to our lives.
For some of us, the obvious solution is to hike and otherwise spend as much time as we can in natural surroundings. Which isn’t always easy to accomplish.
Given the endless demands made on us by work and other responsibilities of everyday life, this may only happen if we give “time in nature” an especially high priority.
If we do, of course, we’re almost certain to experience a huge reduction in stress, to sleep better at night, and to feel a greater sense of fulfillment and contentment.
Summer is a season when many people plan annual vacations. But right now is an ideal time to respond to the countless refreshments and enticements of spring, when the natural world is at its most gloriously and memorably beautiful.
-- Charlie Cook