“All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents. You attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your own affairs in Massachusetts fields.”
–Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”
This summer I have in fact spent some time wandering in Massachusetts fields. I have walked in the hills and mountains and towns of Colorado. I went out for blues and a beer – and a pretty good bison burger – in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I swung by a UFO convention in Roswell, only to get sidetracked by cold-brew coffee and a stop at a local used bookstore, where I found a great deal on some classic seafaring stories and other tales of adventure. I attended my youngest sister’s wedding, a beautiful small gathering of family and friends high in the Rocky Mountains (where, despite our mom’s absence, we knew she was with us there in spirit, her presence still very real for us). Before heading out west for the wedding, I accompanied a group of Texas high school students on a college tour in Boston, then went, together with my dad, on a literary pilgrimage to the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, where I added a stone of my own to the great rock cairns that mark the passage of other travelers come and gone from that spot.
All in all, my days this summer have indeed been “full of incidents,” and, although things have been a bit quieter here on this site, I’ve done plenty of scribbling in notebooks and journals, and plenty of writing in my day job, too. I’ve felt a bit bad about not posting more here, but I can’t exactly say the time hasn’t been productive.
As always, there are so many things I’d love to change in my life – so many things I long to do and be – but there are so many things to be thankful for, too. It’s something I try to keep in mind at the end of a long, stressful day.
One of the nicest things, for me, about being busy with things that engage and interest me is that I find I have less time (and less interest) to spare for reading the news of the day, for keeping up with all the minute-by-minute developments that can so easily make up our world. At times like that, I’m reminded of Thoreau’s words, and the implicit message that lies within them.
“If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire – thinner than the paper on which it is printed – then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
One thing I was reminded of over and over again over the summer was just how big the world is, how wild and wide, everywhere a new vista, a new horizon to gaze off towards. Driving through Colorado, every turn in the road offered new and glorious sights to see. Walking a few steps along the Continental Divide near Independence Pass, it seemed like every bend in the trail presented a world of new possibilities and new beginnings.
We’ll probably never make it to all those distant mountain peaks, but make no mistake they are out there, waiting like ancient muses to sing us some forgotten song or hymn and beckon us ever onward.
The students I was traveling with on the college tour to Boston all came from underserved backgrounds – smart kids, truly bright and exceptional, but kids who haven’t always had the support systems that could propel them to their true potential. Many come from families that don’t have so much money, or where both parents were immigrants to the U.S., or where neither parent ever went to college and thus finds the college application and financial aid process just as confusing and overwhelming as their kids might.
Nobody knows what these kids will do or what they’ll achieve in their lives, but one point of the college tour was to dispel some of the mysteriousness around the process and to expand the students’ individual and collective sense of the possible, to invigorate within them a sense of hope and optimism about their chances, both in college and in life. Not false expectations, not false hope, but genuine and good-natured optimism, mixed in with a bit of practical know-how provided by people who know the college admissions process inside and out.
Just as I got to watch those kids open up and start to dream a little bigger for themselves, I was reminded – both during the college tour and all throughout my summer – that I can also expand my own idea of the possible, my own sacred and mystical sense of what might be. I’ll never reach every beckoning mountain peak or every horizon that seems to call out my name. But, raising my own head up from the daily grind, I can take a moment and let my eyes adjust to the higher lights and nobler visions. I can live and move and have my being in that more rarefied air, but I have to make the choice. I have to stop and take the time to breathe it in.
Thoreau had a thing or two to say on the matter. He realized, better than most, how precious is the opportunity not only to look but really to see, to observe in nature day-to-day the grandeur and beauty of our own humble, human callings.
“Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.”
So, today, I wish you all the sanity that you can manage in this crazy, mixed-up, amazing world we’re living in. Best of luck with the work of the world, and with the work of your own spirit, of your own calling, however grand or humble, whatever it may be, and wherever it may beckon.
As another great poet and philosopher of nature, John Muir, wrote in a letter to his sister, “The mountains are calling, and I must go.”
Till next time, then.
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