Friday, November 4, 2016

A day in the life, lived.

I read the news today, November 4. 


It is truly a raw and gusty day,
and I hear a tree creak sharply
 like a bird, a phoebe.
The jays with their scream 
are at home in the scenery. 


My thought is a part 
of the meaning of the world,
and hence i use a part of the world
as a symbol to express my thought.

Must be out-of-doors enough
 to get experience of wholesome reality,
as a ballast to thought and sentiment.
Health requires this relaxation, 
this aimless life.
This life in the present.
Let a man have thought 
what he will of Nature in the house,
she will still be novel outdoors.
I keep out of doors for the sake of the
mineral, vegetable, and animal in me. 

To Hubbard's Close.
I find no traces of the fringed gentian here,
so that in low meadows
I suspect it does not last very late. 

The fertile catkins of the yellow birch
appear to be in the same state
 with those of the white,
and their scales 
are also shaped like birds,
but much larger. 

The shad-bush buds
have expanded into 
small leaflets already. 

I have failed to find 
white pine seed this year,
though I began to look for it a month ago.
The cones were fallen and open.
Look the first of September. 
November 4, 1855


But those grand and glorious mountains, 
how impossible to remember daily 
that they are there, 
and to live accordingly! 
They are meant to be 
a perpetual reminder to us, 
pointing out the way. 

The true sportsman 
can shoot you almost 
any of his game from his windows.
It comes and perches at last
 on the barrel of his gun;
but the rest of the world 
never see it with the feathers on.
He will keep himself supplied 
by firing up his chimney.
The geese fly exactly under his zenith,
and honk when they get there.
The fisherman, too, dreams of fish,
till he can almost catch them
in his sink-spout.

We cannot see any thing
until we are possessed 
with the idea of it,
and then 
we can hardly see 
anything else.
In my botanical rambles
I find that first the idea, 
or image,of a plant 
occupies my thoughts,
though it may at firat 
seem very foreign to this locality,
and for some weeks or months
I go thinking of it and 
expecting it unconsciously,
and at length I surely see it,
and it is henceforth 
an actual neighbor of mine.
This is the history of my finding
a score or more of rare plants
 which I could name. 

 As I go over John Hosmer's High Level,
I notice for the first time
that peculiar blueness of the river 
agitated by the wind
and contrasting with 
the tawny fields,
a fall phenomenon. 

 White birch seed 
has but recently begun to fall.
I see a quarter of an inch 
of many catkins bare.
The birch begins to shed its seed
about the time our winter birds
arrive from the north.



A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season, 
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

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