Nature

Posted by DJL on Aug 9, 2014 in Poetry | 0 comments

On this day, one hundred and sixty years ago (1854, for those who struggle to do math on the weekend 🙂 ), Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden was published. In it he chronicled the two years he spent living in a one-room cabin he’d built for himself by Walden Pond on the property of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. There’s much we could muse about from Thoreau’s time there, but apart from the accident of this date (I didn’t even know Walden was published today until I was reading about Thoreau), I was thinking about him as I drove through Massachusetts yesterday on my way to Camp Calumet in Freedom, New Hampshire, one of a network of wonderful Lutheran summer camps spread throughout the country.

On Monday I’ll write a little more about why I think church camps are so incredibly important, but for now let me just draw this brief comparison between Lutheran church camps and Thoreau’s adventures on Walden Pond. In a nutshell, both Thoreau and church camp directors and counsels recognize a) that you learn best by doing and b) that nature is a pretty cool place to do that kind of learning. Again, I’ll write a little more on Monday, but for now I’ll simply draw attention to Thoreau’s recognition that in the modern world nature offers a retreat, a chance to get away, not simply “back to” something more primitive or natural or pure, but rather just away at enough distance to reflect upon our life in the industrialized world of towns and cities.

Camps invite that kind of retreat as well. It’s never as simple as saying “I wish camp could go on forever,” because then of course it wouldn’t be camp. Part of what makes camp special is precisely that it is a break from the norm, a chance to retreat from the routine and immerse ourselves in God’s wonderful natural world and, in that environment, to reaffirm our identity as God’s beloved children. Again, more to come, but for now, just enjoy Thoreau’s poem “Nature” and have a great weekend.

Nature

O Nature! I do not aspire
To be the highest in thy choir, –
To be a meteor in thy sky,
Or comet that may range on high;
Only a zephyr that may blow
Among the reeds by the river low;
Give me thy most privy place
Where to run my airy race.

In some withdrawn,
unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do, –
Only – be it near to you!

For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care;
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.

“Nature,” by Henry David Thoreau, can be found in Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America). There are may versions of Walden available. This is one of the more recent and quite nice.