More Thoreau trivia

Reading Laura Dassow Walls biography:

Emerson advanced him $75 to search for Margaret Fuller on Fire Island after her boat crashed into a sand bar. 

I went to Fire Island today.

The one foreign country Thoreau visited was Canada in 1850. He never traveled really far, though read quite widely and traveled important steps for himself. In a way it's really cool that he traveled locally.

Thoreau was furious when an editor changed his essay. He wouldn't have much Reddit karma because he'd say what he wanted and dam everyone else if they didn't like it. He would not change it. 

I take something down quickly if there are even 3 downvotes more than upvotes. I still think I can think those thoughts and that I'm right given the context of my life, but I'm not into getting downvoted, I simply remove the offending comment or post. I have not sufficiently wrought out a message that is empathetically received on Reddit. There is a time and place and style for every thought to be expressed, but I don't imagine I'm always right and the public is wrong. 

The public and the private are different. I want to learn what the public doesn't like, so I can tailor my presentation to the world. I don't imagine there will be a equal line up with private and public. And I value my private experience beyond compare, I just don't assume everyone else has to. There are things I snap judge quickly as harmful to society and I downvote. That is my vision. 

On November 8th 1850 Thoreau quit cutting out paper from his journal and began to write an entry every day.

The fugitive slave act of 1850 offended Thoreau's sense of morality and beauty, which he combined. The land grabe of the Mexican-American War was offensive to him as well. The compromises of the new states not having slavery meant that the fugitives had to be seen as property and the whole nation had to return slaves. It was a national law. But the whole nation didn't agree and protected escaped slaves.

Henry David Thoreau

I got the biography by Laura Dassow Walls back from the library. It's a long book and I have a big pile of books I mostly ignore, but I hope to finish it.

He's just published his first book, and he assumed the risk of publishing and his first book ended up costin him $290 in a time when the square hut he built on Walden Pond cost him $28.12 and 1/2. It took him 4 years to pay it off. Meanwhile his sister Helen dies in 1849, the 4 siblings are down to 2 now. Helen had refused to go to church because slaveholders were allowed in, but the minister performed her funeral at her home. He got some bad reviews, but couldn't get anything but faint praise from Emerson. 

That reminds me of my stalling to read a friend's book, and in a way that kind of hindered our friendship. I wasn't into it. He eventually got it published and friends bought it, but I'm pretty poor and didn't buy it. My friend hasn't answered emails as he moved away, and perhaps it's his wrong email address, but it's quite possible we don't know what to say to each other any more. Publishing is a strain on friendships. It was a real source of pain for Thoreau. All great writers have to write a few bad works before they can hit on their masterpiece. Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman all published substandard books before they hit on their masterpieces. To me it would have been a mistake to write about his brother and not confess his grief that he lost his brother. This is my problem with Transcendentalism, the writing is just really hard to read. I like the ideas, but the execution is difficult. A difficult birth to the first literary movement in America.

Ruins

 

Dusk

 

Kathleen Raine poem

 

Afternoon

 

Dec. 25th

According to the saga of King Haakon Haraldsson of Norway, who ruled in the 10th century, the Norse Yule celebration and Christian Christmas celebration were merged during his reign.

The winter solstice, also called the hibernal solstice, occurs when either of Earth's poles reaches its maximum tilt away from the Sun. This happens twice yearly, once in each hemisphere (Northern and Southern). For that hemisphere, the winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight and longest night of the year, and when the Sun is at its lowest daily maximum elevation in the sky.^[1] Each polar regionexperiences continuous darkness or twilightaround its winter solstice.

Double tulip

 

Winter Solstice

 

Winter

 

There were a lot of branches that were blown down with the nor'easter that blew in Sunday and Monday. It was wet too, puddles to negotiate in the wrong shoes. It's been cold so I haven't gone down as much. The turtle wasn't there today. 

I got stuck in a thought cycle as I watched birds coming in to land. Not sure where they go, but it seems like hanging out on the lake is a daytime event. 

Thoreau's Journal: 19-Dec-1859

When a man is young and his constitution and his body have not acquired firmness, i.e., before he has arrived at middle age, he is not an assured inhabitant of the earth, and his compensation is that he is not quite earthy, there is something peculiarly tender and divine about him. His sentiments and his weakness, nay, his very sickness and the greater uncertainty of his fate, seem to ally him to a noble race of beings, to whom he in part belongs, or with whom he is in communication. The young man is a demigod; the grown man, alas! is commonly a mere mortal. He is but half here, he knows not the men of this world, the powers that be. They know him not. Prompted by the reminiscence of that other sphere from which he is so lately arrived, his actions are unintelligible to his seniors. He bathes in light. He is interesting as a stranger from another sphere. He really thinks and talks about a larger sphere of existence than this world. It takes him forty years to accommodate himself to the carapax of this world. This is the age of poetry. Afterward he may be the president of a bank, and go the way of all flesh. But a man of settled views, whose thoughts are few and hardened like his bones, is truly mortal, and his only resource is to say his prayers.

Cosmos flowers

 

Thoreau’s Journal December 8th

 "When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I am not surprised that certain of my neighbors speak of John Brown as an ordinary felon. Who are they? They have much flesh, or at least much coarseness of some kind. They are not ethereal natures, or the dark qualities predominate in them, or they have much office. Several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light? They are true to their sight, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and then let me hear what noble verse he can repeat."

-From Thoreau's Journal; December 8, 1859.

Found information source for identifying birds at Willow Lake

I found the Willow Lake Preserve page on Instagram and it has a lot of good bird photos:

Sharp-shinned Hawk

Lincoln’s Sparrow

cormorants

chickadees

Hairy Woodpecker

Common Yellowthroat

Prairie Warbler

Ruby-crowned kinglet

Common grackle

Great blue heron

Tree swallow

Osprey

Other wildlife:

Garter Snake

Muskrat video

Eastern Mud Turtle

Plants

Japanese honeysuckle

Plus great old pictures of when there were ball fields there.

Thoreau’s Journal: December 7, 1856

Thoreau’s Journal: December 7, 1856 — Winter is an epic poem in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes

That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine. As I sit under Lee’s Cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frost-bitten catnep, I look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene. I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflecting water. I see the holes which the pickerel-fisher has made, and I see him, too, retreating over the hills, drawing his sled behind him. The water is already skimmed over again there. I hear, too, the familiar belching voice of the pond.

It seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and I was prepared to see it flit away by the time I again looked over my shoulder. It was as if I had dreamed it. But I see that the farmers have had time to gather their harvests as usual, and the seasons have revolved as slowly as in the first autumn of my life. The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was summer, and now again it is winter. 

Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty. It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended.

Tree reverence

Not sure what the story of this is, an ancient relief from a stupa in India at the Met, but trees are important in early Buddhism. The Buddha got up from 6 weeks of intensive meditation that led to his enlightenment, and bowed to the tree.

I counted 11 new trees planted in my neighborhood, thank you NYC.

Michael Kenna - Spring Poplar Trees, Pavia, Italy (2019)

.......... 

When I Am Among the Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.

Monday

 

Henry the tortoise wasn't there today and not lurking under the water when the sunlight came up. The wind goes north to south, right to left, across the lake today. Plans fly in and bank to land into the wind at laguardia. When it's busy one plane ever 45 seconds, and depending how buys in 45 second chunks like 90 seconds, and so on. 

Lake meditation, I just look at the lake, the birds, the trees in the distance. I think about eagles dropping carp that are too big and heavy on land to eat later. There was mouse on the trail, bloody, so I thought maybe a bird left a snack for later. 

Ran into Eric the fisherman and his wife, and he said the third racoon passed away, and he told the rangers. 

Racoon

There was a racoon who didn't run away, and just shirked when I walked by. I talked to the fisherman and he said there were 2 dead racoons down the path. He even wondered if the 3 hobos living under the bridge had been trapping them. He asked them and they denied it. This guy seemed to shake the in the cold. I thought for a while to call 311, he might be rabid. I searched for a while to see if I could fill out an online form, but I couldn't find it. So I resolved to meditate and if he was still there on the way out, I would definitely call. He wasn't there on the walk out. No point in reporting a sick racoon whereabouts unknown. 

Been thinking about the 3 marks of existence, impermanence, suffering and no permanent self, and this racoon wasn't long for this world, he seemed sick. I watched the second half of Lion King last night. My daughter watched it up to Mufasa being killed, but deprived herself of the recovery from the loss with Hakuna Matata. I had to look at the recovery, and see Simba raise his son the way Mufasa raised him, to the pride. The point is there's a cycle of life. I'm not going to save every sick racoon. 

Henry was in the water today when I arrived for my 20 minute lake meditation. I offset lake meditation with my 30 minutes of anapanasati and the occasional metta, karuna, mudita and upekkha meditations, and pure awareness, and 6 elements. As the sun became more tempting he wrestled his way up onto the reeds and out of the water. He's definitely a sun lover, and will move to the best of his ability as a tortoise to catch sun rays. I was tempted to help him out and lift him into a sunny spot, but invasive red eared tortoise carry many bacteria and germs that don't effect them, but effect humans.

 Today the lake had lots of birds, more than usual. You can hardly see them in this terrible phone camera photo. These perhaps loons sit low in the water and often go under water. There are other birds too, geese, ducks and seagulls. They flew over and then flew away. 

First freeze

 

Cori calls him Henry. I kind of wanted a Buddhist name, but I don't want to ask the hive mind.

Fairies and Elves

Reading Thoreau's journal, he mentions ferries and elves. 

My tortoise meditation friend. He's a red eared slider, same species as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Supposedly it's a pet species, and thus fairly invasive since humans are messy. They're from the midwest. They're on the list of the top 100 invasive species. "Red-eared slider turtles are the world's most commonly traded reptile, due to their relatively low price, and usually low food price, small size, and easy maintenance." And, "Reptiles are asymptomatic (meaning they suffer no adverse side effects) carriers of bacteria of the genus Salmonella."

My birder friend helped me to identify the hawk as a Coopers Hawk. Ran into the birder and the fisherman. I'm the meditator. There's a joke in there somewhere. Or a loan.

Tracked down a renaming of birds article.

Fall day

The quarter waning moon is just out of frame to the right. Lots of planes in the air. Planes seemed to be taking off from La Guardia. 

Water was low, I check and it's low tide, peaking around 1pm.

My picture of him flying away is too blurry, I think it's a hawk. My birder friend says it's a Cooper Hawk.

Little guy wasn't scare of me. Getting some sun. Not the one I met nesting and laying eggs this summer.