Tuesday

I saw a loon in the lake, diving under to catch some fish, and I saw some lantern flies, and I saw evidence of birds, feathers. I heard insects and frogs and birds, and I’m not sure if I smell or taste anything, but there’s definitely a biting fly at the park, when my daughter played in the sprinkler, they ate out of me.

Supposedly you can eat juniper berries but they’re astringent.

Cock’s Comb

Walking back we noticed onions around trees, and asked google, why put onions around yards. Supposedly they're natural bug repellents, and there's lots of lantern flies these days. I swear, I'm just learning so much. 

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden (1811-1889) escaped slavery and worked in the abolition movement and the underground railroad. In this day and age you can focus on him and not Thoreau, but Thoreau's mother's house was a secure station in the underground railroad and Henry would escort escaped slaves to the train station and buy them a ticket north. There were meetings of the minds as they would visit him at Walden.

Civil Disobedience

I'm to the part in the bio of Thoreau by Walls where he spends some time in the clink. Jailer offered to pay his back taxes, but he refused. Scholars speculate that it was his aunt Marie. He didn't spend much time there, and came out to attend a huckleberry party. I have to reread and reacquaint myself with the essay, but I've been asking myself what is worth withholding money from the government in form of protest. Thoreau was protesting the Mexican-American War I think, but honestly it's not fully clear. He could also protest slavery. 

For me, the loss of reproductive right in women is something. The tardy prosecution of Trump is another. He should never have gotten as far as he got, and he should already be off ballots, and unable to run for president. The idea that his prosecution for crimes is political is hooey. The lack of effort to curb global warming and the illegitimate and corrupt supreme court is another. The loss of middle class, and the control of the rich in politics is another. I think a lot about Wynn Alan Bruce.

Now I don't think you should just go and not pay taxes willy nilly, just because you're a little disgruntled. I had a logic professor who withheld a percentage of his taxes spent on military budget. I thought that was cool and principled. Never knew what happened to him about that. I google him and no info. Anyway, I think it has to be a highly considered principle stand. 

I think more often than I would like to admit about the show The Good Place. That you can't be ethical in this day and age, you participate unwillingly in too much bad stuff. Thoreau wanted to live a deliberate life, and standing up for his distaste for the Mexican-American War and Slavery was a deliberate stand against them. It may have been puny, but it inspired Gandhi and MLK, so maybe it wasn't that small.

I don’t really agree that the government should always do less. To me roads, garbage removal, the 1,700 parks in New York City, and many efforts are in our own best interest. Still, a fascinating essay.

Links:

Sonlit: Her point is that Thoreau is often view from a narrow viewpoint regarding his night in jail. "This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a microcosm of a larger partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined the connections for all of us (so few have been able to find Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site. It banishes certain thoughts, including the thought that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland — a very social and political space indeed, then and now — and especially the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail."

I like this bit: "Conventional environmental writing has often maintained a strict silence on or even an animosity toward the city, despite its importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between the two." 

Moving to the country and cutting down trees to live in a new house, has more impact than staying in the city and reducing human impact on nature. 

Trivia: Robert E. Lee wrote a play about Thoreau's night in jail. Wonder if he understood that he was doing it because of slavery, in part. I'll have to read it. Turns out it's not that Robert E. Lee who wrote it.

Sunday

 Ironweed 

Crowded at the park.

Tecumse by Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags on the yellow branches
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to write
to Washington, and even then
whatever they said,
would you believe them? Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow
to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting at Thames
it was over, except
his body could not be found.
It was never found
and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night,
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home again down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.'

Like Thoreau, she's interested in Native American experience, maybe wishes she could know more about them. 

Tecumseh (1768-1813) "was a Shawnee chief and warrior who promoted resistance to the expansion of the United States onto Native American lands. A persuasive orator, Tecumseh traveled widely, forming a Native American confederacy and promoting intertribal unity. Even though his efforts to unite Native Americans ended with his death in the War of 1812, he became an iconic folk hero in American, Indigenous, and Canadian popular history." 

John Chapman by Mary Oliver

He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.

No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
everything, all God's creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.

Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of women and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. "Some
are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.

Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.

Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845) was alive when Thoreau was alive, though he was much older, and died when Thoreau was on Walden Pond. Leominster MA is 24 miles from Concord, where Chapman was born.

I think of John Chapman as an American Bodhisattva, the way Hotai, the fat laughing Buddha, became a Buddha, though he was perhaps a folk hero before Buddhism came to China. The way Kwan Yin evolved from Avalokita, from Green Tara. 

Supposedly he noticed insects were killing themselves in his fire, so he put it out. That seems like a Bodhisattva move. He planted a lot of trees, and I'm sure many of those trees really sustained the world for many years. He was into planting apple trees for cider, there was an element of intoxication to his work. Maybe divine madness of a sort. He was an American Dionysus.

He planted nurseries of trees, he didn't just plant seeds and keep wandering, he would fence off and tend to his nurseries. 

He was also a preacher of Swedenborgian faith, he would preach to avoid extravagance. Even though he had some money to buy land, he wore rough clothes and walked barefoot, even in the snow.To me one of the coolest things about Buddhism is the middle way. You don't have to go nuts in either direction on the extravagance to asceticism continuum. And the practice of meditation helps you see the power of minimalism and asceticism, it doesn't just prescribe it or foist it on you, you can evolve towards it. 

I find it so fascinating that Swedenborg (1688-1772) was so popular in early America and yet you rarely hear of him outside that context. Swedenborg was an inventor and scientist until he was 53, when he switched to spirituality and wrote 18 books.

Johnny Appleseed heard a horse was about to be put down so he bought it, and put it on some of his land. He was also single. Supposedly he was a vegetarian at times during his life. 

I love monsoon weeks

“It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape- between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. We need the field from which the lark rises bird that is more than itself, that is the voice of the universe: vigorous, godly joy. Without the physical world such hope is: hacked off. Is: dried up. Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could open its wings and become buoyant, adventurous, valorous beyond even the plan of nature. Nor could we.”

Mary Oliver, Long Lives p. 91

pp. 90-91

"And here I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don't mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better. I mean whatever real rejoicing can do! We all know how brassy and wonderful it is to come into some new understanding. Imagine what it would be like, to lounge on the high ledge of submission and pure wonder. Nature, all around us, is our manifest exemplar. Not from the fox, or the leaf, or the drop of rain will you ever hear doubt or argument."

pp. 92-3

Carrying The Snake To The Garden

In the cellar

was the smallest snake

I have ever seen.

It coiled itself

in a corner

and watched me

with eyes

like two little stars

set into coal,

and a tail

that quivered.

One step

of my foot

and it fled

like a running shoelace,

but a scoop of the wrist

and I had it

in my hand.

I was sorry

for the fear,

so I hurried

upstairs and out the kitchen door

to the warm grass

and the sunlight

and the garden.

It turned and turned

in my hand

but when I put it down

it didn't move.

I thought

it was going to flow

up my leg

and into my pocket.

I thought, for a moment,

as it lifted it's face,

it was going to sing.

And then it was gone.

Mary Oliver

"Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and it was the most casual of moments_ as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity-the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since."

(pp. 33-34 Long Life)

The news from Willow Lake

Anyone who can takes their vacations in August in New York City. The city is pleasantly unpopulated. I wasn't invited on the camping trip with my ex, which is fine, even if my daughter cries. We've been apart for more than 2 years now, and the years before that we weren't really together. I think I've adjusted to being alone, and quite like it at this point. I do crave intimacy, and I can get a hug on request from my daughter and my ex. 

I'm reading Long Life by Mary Oliver, her prose, essays, and she wrote about how her dog gobbles up mice babies, crunch crunch, that it finds in a nest.

I'm cat sitting Ella and she made me the present of a dead mouse that I squished into my bare foot this morning.

I noticed the wild teasel on my walk today.

And the creek was clear and I saw a fish.

I stayed on the main path but got a shot of the lake.

I looked for the eagles in the willow tree but couldn’t see any.

I picked a lovely bouquet of wildflowers for my shrine, no photograph, just for me.

Yesterday Indian landed a ship on the moon. It's a moment of pride for Indian politicians and those involved (source). Meanwhile Japan dumps radioactive waste into the ocean (source). Giuliani, former mayor of NYC, is going to be booked in the case in Georgia racketeering case. American adults 35-50 are binge drinking and using cannabis, 30%, up from 23% in 2012. Cannabis use went from 13% to 28% (source).

Radiance and Results

Mary Oliver writes in Long Life p.23, "The mountain and the forest are sublime but the valley soil raises richer crops. The perfect gift is no longer a house but a house, or a mind divided. Man finds he has two halves of his existence: Leisure and occupation, and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results."

She knows that appreciation of nature is over run by the struggle for existence. A tree isn't beautiful, it's timber or firewood. 

"...the experience led him, led his mind, from simple devotion of that beauty which is harmony, a kindly ministry of thought to nature's deeper and inexplicable greatness. The gleam and tranquility of the natural world he loved always, and now he honored also the world's brawn and mystery, it's machinations that lay beyond our understanding--that are not even namable. What Wordsworth praised thereafter was more than the arrangement of concretizations and vapors into appreciable and balanced landscapes; it was, also, the whirlwind."

Thoreau and larger events: Mexican American War and James Polk

"The Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 marked the first U.S. armed conflict chiefly fought on foreign soil. It pitted a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “Manifest Destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. A border skirmish along the Rio Grande that started off the fighting was followed by a series of U.S. victories. When the dust cleared, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico." (History Channel)

Polk (1795-1849) was the 11th president of the United States of America. He was born in North Carolina. Wikipedia: "A property owner who used slave labor, he kept a plantation in Mississippi and increased his slave ownership during his presidency. Polk's policy of territorial expansion saw the nation reach the Pacific coast and almost all its contiguous borders. He made the U.S. a nation poised to become a world power, but with divisions between free and slave states gravely exacerbated, setting the stage for the Civil War." 

He had urinary stones as a child, and the operation to remove them might have left him sterile. He was a Tar Heel and went to UNC. He became a lawyer in Nashville Tennessee. He moved back home to Columbia Tennessee, and prospered in part because of the Panic of 1819. Global markets adjusted to the Napoleonic Wars and excessive speculation. He joined the state legislature, and he married Sarah Childress. "Following her husband's death in 1849, Sarah had a 42-year widowhood, the longest of any First Lady." And, "Rawley noted that Sarah Polk's grace, intelligence and charming conversation helped compensate for her husband's often austere manner."

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ended the war, and increased the land of America substantially. USA marched into Mexico City and defeated them there. It's hard to believe that actually happened.

The victory in the Mexican-American War led to the Gold Rush in California in 1849. 300k people rushed to California when gold was discovered in Coloma California, between Lake Tahoe and Sacramento. 

I have to say, it's weird to think of Thoreau leaving Walden and then there being a Gold Rush, those things seem to be from different eras. And yet the Civil War hasn't even happened. I find it so weird that I'm interested in history later in life, I found it quite tedious when I was younger. 

Willow Lake

I started walking to the library and I thought about intimacy. The last time I felt intimate with my ex maybe was the sex but it was when she told me that the heavy utensils hurt her wrist. That felt like an intimate moment.

At the library I put my five books in. It's a complicated technological transaction. I put the book down and a door opens. A green light goes on and I push a book in. It somehow scans it, and then pushes it in further, and asks for another one. When I'm done it registers 5 books. I have them email me the recept. I returned my 6th Mary Olive book, I started my 7th today.

I walked down to Willow Lake. I walk through orthodox Jewish suburban houses. It’s funny to see the Jewish women running in dresses, in full length black long sleeve, and then tights under the dress. Probably a wig too.

I walk past the place where I go in by the pond because it’s so overgrown. I waid through the weeds to the shore and wish I had brought a machete with me to clear the path. My fear brain tells me it’s not safe to be in the bushes like this. I think I would freak out somebody else if they found me where they were an animal or human. Humans are animals too. I don't feel like sitting down and meditating.

I’ve been thinking about the intersection of Buddhism with Concord Transcendentalism and the love of nature. When I enter the park, I bowed. I think parks are my temple. The Buddhas is specifically human psychological techniques towards becoming more mindful. Now the result oriented world focuses on enlightenment and it’s good to know the goal, but just becoming a little more mindful, this is precious. What the transcendentalist did was they shocked off all the complicated theology and hair splitting of Christian theology and said Nature, that’s enough we don’t need all this schisms and hair splitting and orthodoxy and "this is the only way" kind of thinking. Nature will let us know. In a way it’s almost Taoist, a kind of mysticism it doesn’t really have a creed so much as it’s just about being natural. For me anyway, I’m sure there are academics that can sniff out creeds, but I’ve read a lot of Taoism and I don’t think it’s more than misterioso talk about just trying to be one with nature.

The Buddha was outside when he got enlightened. 

I read a poem by Mary Oliver where she talks about turtles, sticking their heads up out of the water. When I sit and meditate by the pond, it sometimes happens to me. I see those turtle toes.

Closer to home I pick some weed flowers that nobody wants. I can put them on my shrine. I’m gonna meditate with a great master at noon on Zoom. He probably wouldn’t want me to call him a great master and that’s kind of why I like him. He’s humble and unassuming. He wrote a book on meditation and he obviously has spent a lot of time meditating and teaching meditation.

The Ponds by Mary Oliver

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them --

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided --
and that one wears an orange blight --
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away --
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Trees

Heaven knows how many
trees I climbed when my body
was still in the climbing way, how

many afternoons, especially
windy ones, I sat
perched on a limb that

rose and fell with every invisible
blow. Each tree was
a green ship in the wind-waves, every

branch a mast, every leafy height
a happiness that came without
even trying. I was that alive

and limber. Now I walk under them—
cool, beloved: the household
of such tall, kind sisters.

"...plant life is the foundation of all human intellection." p.203 of Laura Dassow Walls' biography of Thoreau.

He planted 7 miles of beans and groundhogs ate an eighth of a mile. So he ate one. He struggled at eating animals and his friendship with Bronson Alcott could have influenced that.

"always I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished." Walden. He defends vegetarianism as a higher law.

I find trying to not hurt others the most beautiful aspect of the spiritual life, living deliberately. 

Thoreau could imagine some of the lives of escaped slaves who lived in the area, he could imagine the Native Americans who lived nearby and were no longer there. There was evidence of dwellings and arrowheads when he ploughed the fields. 

Cast of neighbors

The three most frequent visitors to Thoreau on Walden pond were Edmund Hosmer, a farmer, Poet Ellery Channing and Bronson Alcott, early vegan, educator and prophet. Emerson would visit, as would French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien. Nearby was an Irish sharecropper named John Field, his son and infant and wife Mary. Irish Ditcher Hugh Coyle lived on the other side of the pond. He was an alcoholic and died while Thoreau was living on Walden Pond. Thoreau studied the inside of his house before the town burned it down. Cato Ingraham, a slave of Duncan Ingraham lived nearby even though the house built for slaves was in ruins. John Wyman was a potter who squatted in Hugh Coyle's house before he was there, Wyman's field was sold to Emerson to expand his land. Zilpah White, former slave until the Revolution, had a one bedroom hermitage nearby. She spun flax for brooms and made linen. In 1813 arsonists burned down her house. She rebuilt and lived to 1820 and the age of 82. In 1845, when Thoreau was there, the structure perhaps existed in ruins. Thoreau borrowed a few bricks from the ruins. Brister Freeman, who declared his freedom with his name, bought an acre on what's called Brister's hill. He fought in the Revolutionary War. He planted apple trees, which Thoreau would get apples from. John Breed was the town barber and lived near Brister Freeman. A local boy burned Breed's house down in 1841. The area might have been a small grouping of freed slaves, Thoreau explored ruins and found evidence of larger past population. Since it was marginal land, too rocky to farm, they didn't bother to evict the settlers. Peter Hutchinson the butcher and Jack Garrison and his wife Susan Robbins might have lived there. There might have still be some African American squatters around the time Thoreau was there. The Emerson family later deeded the land to the town as a park. Walden Pond ended up preserved instead of settled. 

Got bio back

 Phlox

I borrowed Ellery Channings bio, and got Walls. I do want to read Channing but after I finish Walls. 

Thoreau has just moved into to his Walden home. He craves solitude and is a little irritable when his sisters visit him. It seems like he didn't want to be taken care of, which must have been so confusing to them, they loved taking care of him. 

He bought the wood from the Irish laborers who built the railroad. 

I read a really fun book Hermits. Solitude is wonderful, I quite love it. 

I really need to read Walden again. That might be better than just reading about what he did when he wasn't writing it. This is a problem I have, I can always imagine a better book to read than the one I'm reading. What is the ultimate best book, the most optimal book to be reading in each moment?! Leading a purposeful life, I guess you just follow your interests, but also you have to batten the hatches to get through some longer things. 

I have been reading about Memoirs in Mary Karr's book The Art of Memoir. In a way memoirs are about examining life.

Thoreau was 28. He's still close to home, he still works, he still has visitors, and many people would visit the pond at the edge of town. Nobody is under the illusion that he's not in an edge of town situation, he's not out in the wilderness isolated. 

But he's self sufficient in a new way for him. He's mother and sisters aren't taking care of him. Well, they will perhaps do his laundry occasionally. He is living more rough with self determination. Some people find it helpful to spend a fair amount of time alone to discover themselves in important ways. 

Was his ostentatious simplicity performance art as Wall's wonders? He was hospitable to everyone who visited and explained his mission of living deliberately. 

P.195 Walls: “Meeting Thoreau became an Event, the kind of thing one retailed to posterity. As a consequence, all those harmless and loving dinners at home, where he dropped off his laundry, caught up on the news, packed in a good meal, and maybe carried away a pie for breakfast laid him open to endless charges of hypocrisy. No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry. But from the very beginning, such charges have been used to silence Thoreau.”

What does is develop his voice as a writer, writing he eulogy to his trip with his brother without even naming his brother in the book, and then the confrontational prophecy of Walden.