Mid-Winter 01.2013
Calling on Thoreau

Some days we just need a little help. I know, hallmark card stuff…but I am addicted to the fierce optimism that I can live with less struggle and distraction though each day presents challenges to this belief.

How to be transcendental, full of the gleam of life and art when you are failing badly written citizenship tests, forgot to renew your parking permit, responding to parents of students who think The Odyssey is best left unread, pushing through freezing rain and dodging angry motorists on your bike, absorbing the slings and arrows of outraged adolescence, realizing no one has any idea what’s to be done for dinner and the cat has figured out to aim his pee outside the door frame of the litter box?

But then a breath comes: I remember I can go for swim (yes freezing but AWAKE) in the nearby pond, I get an email with something that makes me giggle and think, I turn back to Ulysses for a few more delicious, cantering sentences and I remember a recent discussion in the Salon that expanded and challenged my ideas. I think, AWAKE, and remember how beautifully Thoreau explored this same state of daily struggle to be alive to our precious humanity…here is a selection borrowed from his essay, Where I lived, and What I lived for
May your day be a perpetual morning.

Full text —

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint burn of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sailing with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.