To effect the quality of the day.

(The art of spending a day)

I went to the woods because

I wished to live deliberately

to front only the essential facts of life, and

 see if I could not learn what it had to teach, 

and not, when I came to die,

discover that I had not lived.

Walden

One does not soon learn the trade of life. That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work.   December 29, 1841.

I find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself . . . but to see over and above myself, entertain sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. November 23, 1850

Resolve to read no book, to take no walk, to undertake no enterprise, but such as you can endure to give an account of to yourself. Live thus deliberately for the most part. August 23, 1851

It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. September 2, 1851

I don’t remember 

a page to tell me how to 

 spend this afternoon.

The art of spending a day . . . I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it, that the day may not have been in vain. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. September 7, 1851.

I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days. December 12, 1851

What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us by letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle. December 29, 1851

We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short. January 11, 1852

Do the things which lie 

nearest to you – but which are 

difficult to do.

January 12, 1852

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. January 20, 1852

Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature, make a day to bring forth something new? April 18, 1852

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something. April 29, 1852

The world can never be more beautiful than now. May 18, 1852

A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one. December 15, 1852

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body, — that so the life be not a failure. March 13, 1853

The sun is now warm on my back, and when I turn round I shade my face with my hands. Nature is beautiful only as a place where a life is to be lived.  July 21, 1853 

All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love, — to sing. May 6, 1854

To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts . . . Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature . . . determined to make a day of it. Walden

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. October 18, 1855

The advantage of having some purpose, however small, to be accomplished . . .  for only absorbing employment prevails, succeeds, takes up space, occupies territory, determines the future . . . any little enterprise . . . a thing to be done, — some step to be taken, however slight, out of the usual course.  [O]ur days should be spent . . . carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him [and] the flavor of your life to that extent . . . will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy. August 30, 1856

The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become. August 30, 1856

Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of. November 18, 1857

It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else. September 8, 1858

If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow. September 18, 1860

Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, -- the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountain- top through some new vista, -- this is wealth enough for one afternoon. November 22, 1860

To know and possess

the wealth of this afternoon,

get the most of life.

To see the sun rise

or go down every day

full of news to me.

To see what transpires

in the mind and heart of me,

go where my life is.

To attend each thought

every phenomena and

oratorio.

To grow green with spring

yellow and ripe with autumn,

to live each season.

So I help myself,

loving my life as I should –

a day's devotion.

~zphx 20150118

See also 

Walden, An artist in the city of Kouroo

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2022

In the crucible of my celibate life

purified of all desire,

I enter truth from behind

and call her name --

Simplify!

tinyurl.com/HDTTO-DAY

https://tinyurl.com/HDT-DAY

I hear the Hermit Thrush for the first time. Have I heard it before and not noticed? -- The Spring Arrival of the Hermit Thrush

April 16, 2017

 I hear the Hermit Thrush for the first time. Have I heard it before and not noticed?

Walking the dog just after 7 AM I notice that I am hearing a hermit thrush singing a call so familiar it seems like it had always been here.  The world can never be more beautiful. 

It’s hard to explain. I was present with the song until a moment when I noticed it. Then there was a flood of excitement and confusion whether the bird had been singing all along, or even yesterday. But clearly now later as I write, the bird has just first arrived. And, as I walk around the trails near the house with the dog this song both stops and starts —as the bird does not sing constantly— and the song also comes in and out of consciousness -- especially returning up the stairs, projecting my thoughts forward into the day and room ahead, the voice  comes to me again: it is here in my presence but I hear it only now. To hear without listening. To listen without hearing. To hear with the side of the ear.  zphx ~April 16, 2022 7AM

I am a body

connected to all bodies

awake in the world.

See   May 10, 1853 ("All at once a strain that sounds like old times and recalls a hundred associations. Not at once do I remember that a year has elapsed since I heard it, and then the idea of the bobolink is formed in my mind.”);May 23, 1841 ("All nature is a new impression every instant"); April 5, 1860 ("Thus gradually and moderately the year begins. It creeps into the ears so gradually that most do not observe it, and so our ears are gradually accustomed to the sound, and perchance we do not perceive it when at length it has become very much louder and more general."); April 15, 1859 ("[W]hether he is conscious of it or not, that the world is beautiful and life a fair enterprise to engage in . . . If you yield for a moment to the impressions of sense, you hear some bird giving expression to its happiness in a pleasant strain. We are provided with singing birds and with ears to hear them "); April 30, 1856 ("I was trying to get the exact course of a wall thickly beset with shrub oaks and birches, making an opening through them with axe and knife, while the hillside seemed to quiver or pulsate with the sudden melody. Again, it is with the side of the ear that you hear. The music or the beauty belong not to your work itself but some of its accompaniments. You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work."); January 12, 1855 ("What a delicious sound! . . .for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him; if he has voice, I have ears. I can hear when he calls.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A body awake in the world.
I

The Spring Arrival of the Hermit Thrush

Aprill 6. l hear my first hermit thrush sing east of the house while walking the dog in the morning. April 6, 2025. 

April 10. Hear my first hermit thrush midafternoon at the fort. Vreee vreeen; then the song. She is looking at a trillium at the noisy stream and does not hear. April 10, 2021

April 10. I hear the vreeen call at sunset north of the house after a drizzly day, distinctly as a new sound and think hermit -- but no song.  April 10, 2024

April 11. On the way back on the road for the first time this spring  we both hear the hermits' song in the hemlocks  We stop and listen.  Heard the call note last night.

We stop and listen -

the song of the Hermit Thrush

among the hemlocks

April 11, 2024

April 12. The ice is out on Lake Champlain. April 12, 1856.  

April 12. This morning  it comes to me that I am listening to a hermit thrush while walking the dog. April 12, 2023

April 14. Hear my first hermit thrush of the season this morning before dawn on my way to work -- later I learn the ice is out of the Broad lake and it reaches 80° in Burlington. April 14, 2014

April 14. Just at dusk we hear the hermit thrush ( I for the first time) and then later in Eastland its clucking sound. I have to be reminded it is the hermit.  April 14, 2017 

April 15. Open the garage early this morning and hear the hermit thrush after a night of rain. April 15, 2019

April 16. She says that hermit thrush is back. Not singing, but clucking. April 16, 2016

April 16. A quarter moon in the sky follows us back through the old growth trees, coming home after our walk at dusk,  orange sky in the west, to end a perfect day we first hear the hermit thrush. April 16, 2016

April 16. I hear the hermit thrush singing it’s familiar song near the driveway first thing in the morning. April  16, 2022 

April 16.  I first hear the Hermit thrush singing this morning, west of the house. April 16, 2026

April 18.  Was surprised to see a wagtail thrush, the golden-crowned, at the Assabet Spring, which inquisitively followed me along the shore over the snow, hopping quite near. I should say this was the golden-crowned thrush without doubt, though I saw none of the gold, if this and several more which I saw had not kept close to the water. May possibly be the aquaticus. Have a jerk of the forked tail. April 18, 1854.

April 18. Coming back next to the pond. There we stop and listen to the Hermit Thrush. The first clear song. Evoking memories. April 18, 2024 

April 19.  First thrush heard in the morning. April 19, 2015.

April 20. H. Mann brings me the hermit thrush. April 20, 1861

April 21. At Cliffs, I hear at a distance a wood [sic] thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selves.  April 21, 1855

April 21. The hermit thrush loudly sounds it's vreeen note but does not sing. April 21, 2017.

April 21,  At the top of the upper ramp She sees a hermit thrush.  April 21, 2018

April 24. Returning, in the low wood just this side the first Second Division Brook, near the meadow, see a brown bird flit, and behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches. I saw the fox-color on his tail-coverts, as well as the brown streaks on the breast. Both kept up a constant jerking of the tail as they sat on their perches.  April 24, 1856

April 25. Hermit thrush is back! The first day. Perhaps five in one spot. She teaches me how to distinguish its voice from the wood thrush. Aprill 25, 2009 

April 27. What a shy fellow my hermit thrush!  April 27, 1854

May 4.  Several larger thrushes on low limbs and on ground, with a dark eye (not the white around it of the wood thrush) and, I think, the nankeen spot on the secondaries. A hermit thrush?  May  4, 1855 

May 6. And on the way home at dusk the hermit thrush and Woodthrush (ee-oo-LAY) alternate.  May 6, 2017. 

May 7. A wood [sic] thrush which . . . betrayed himself by moving, like a large sparrow with ruffled feathers, and quirking his tail like a pewee,  on a low branch. May 7, 1852 . 

May 12. Hermit thrushes are still singing in the woods in the nearly complete darkness. May 12, 2016 

 

May 29. Dusk. We go out after the rain to find the Lady's slipper.  The woods are dripping wet, the hemlocks' bright new growth just beginning to show.   The hermit thrush sings. Along the cliff edge three Lady's slippers in bloom.  May 29, 2016

.

HDT needed brushing up on his thrushes. See May 7, 1852 ("A wood [sic] thrush which. . .betrayed himself by moving, like a large sparrow with ruffled feathers, and quirking his tail like a pewee, on a low branch.”); May 22, 1852 ("On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so.”);; April 18, 1854 ("Was surprised to see a wagtail thrush, the golden-crowned, at the Assabet Spring,”); September 29, 1855 ("At Natural History Library saw Dr. Cabot, who says that he has heard either the hermit, or else the olivaceous, thrush sing,—very like a wood thrush, but softer. Is sure that the hermit thrush sometimes breeds hereabouts.”); April 21, 1855 ("At Cliffs, I hear at a distance a wood [sic] thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selves..”); May 4, 1855 ("Several larger thrushes on low limbs and on ground, with a dark eye (not the white around it of the wood thrush) and, I think, the nankeen spot on the secondaries. A hermit thrush?).

 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present.

December 28.

Brought my boat from Walden in rain.

December 28, 2019

No snow on ground. Grass in the churchyard and elsewhere green as in the spring.

I omitted some observations apparently between the 18th and 22d, to the effect that the berries that hold on into winter are to be remarked, — the winterberry, alder and birch fruit, smilax, pyrus, hips, etc. 

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. Embrace health wherever you find her.

A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree.

The rosettes in the ice, as Channing calls them, now and for some time have attracted me.

It is worth the while to apply what wisdom one has to the conduct of his life, surely. I find myself oftenest wise in little things and foolish in great ones. That I may accomplish some particular petty affair well, I live my whole life coarsely.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? 

We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food.

We consult our will and understanding and the expectation of men, not our genius.

I can impose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I am but too inclined to do.

One moment of life costs many hours, hours not of business but of preparation and invitation.

Yet the man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a leader, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while, which shall surely be opened to him.

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.

How much, what infinite, leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single phenomenon! You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. It must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all things.

The least partialness is your own defect of sight and cheapens the experience fatally.

Unless the humming of a gnat is as the music of the spheres, and the music of the spheres is as the humming of a gnat, they are naught to me.

It is not communications to serve for a history, — which are science, — but the great story itself, that cheers and satisfies us.

As I have not observed the rainbow on the Juncus militaris nor the andromeda red the past fall, it suggests the great difference in seasons. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 28, 1852

Brought my boat from Walden in rain. No snow on ground. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it. I took my new boat out.”). Compare December 27, 1857 ("Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night”); December 28, 1856 ("Walden completely frozen over again last night.”; ); December 28, 1858 (“The ice is about six inches thick.”) ee also A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, Annual ice-in at Walden; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Boat in. Boat out.

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. see January 7, 1851(“I must live above all in the present.”); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages."); April 24, 1859 ("Find your eternity in each moment. Live in the present. On any other course life is a succession of regrets.")

Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? See August 19, 1851 ("The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind, as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise? The humblest observer would see some stars shoot. A faithful description as by a disinterested person of the thoughts which visited a certain mind in threescore years and ten, as when one reports the number and character of the vehicles which pass a particular point.")

A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree. See January 9, 1860 ("I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond")

The rosettes in the ice. See December 21, 1854 ("What C. calls ice-rosettes, i.e. those small pinches of crystallized snow, . . .I think it is a sort of hoar frost on the ice. It was all done last night, for we see them thickly clustered about our skate-tracks on the river, where it was quite bare yesterday"); January 7, 1856 ("It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, — a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter"); February 2, 1860 ("The new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is covered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized."); February 13, 1859 ("Ice which froze yesterday and last night is thickly and evenly strewn with fibrous frost crystals . . . sometimes arranged like a star or rosette, one for every inch or two; . . . I think that this is the vapor from the water which found its way up through the ice and froze in the night"). 

Moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe.  See  June 22, 1851("My pulse must beat with Nature"); December 12, 1851 ("I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days."); January 11, 1852 ("We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short. Catch the pace of the seasons; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes."); January 26, 1852 ("Let us preserve, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature.");  May 28, 1854 ("To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe."); April 29, 1854 ("Find your eternity in each moment.");September 24, 1859 ("Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created.") See also notes to September 7, 1851 ("The art of life") 

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline. See December 29, 1841("That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work."); December 15, 1852 ("A man should not live without a purpose"); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts . . . .Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, . . .— determined to make a day of it.") 

As I have not observed the rainbow on the Juncus militaris it suggests the great difference in seasons. See October 27, 1858 ("The bayonet rush also has partly changed, and now, the river being perhaps lower than before this season, shows its rainbow colors. . . .Though a single stalk would not attract attention, when seen in the mass they have this singular effect. I call it, therefore, the rainbow rush.")

 The highest aim in 

life requires the highest and 

finest discipline.

To appreciate

a single phenomenon 

requires a lifetime.

You must give yourself 

with divine leisure wholly

every moment

and your life becomes 

coincident with the life 

of the universe. 

One moment of life 

costs hours of preparation 

and invitation.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-521228 

Now I am ice, now I am sorrel

June 6

8 a. m. — To Lee's Cliff by river. 

Salix pedicellaris off Holden's has been out of bloom several days at least. So it is earlier to begin and to end than our S. lucida. 

This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and revealing how dark they are. 

Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. 

June 6, 2012

Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. 

I see a man grafting, for instance. What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner or bread to the grafter, but a certain mood or train of thought to my mind. That is what this grafting is to me. Whether it is anything at all, even apples or bread, to anybody else, I cannot swear, for it would be worse than swearing through glass. 

For I only see those other facts as through a glass darkly. 

Crataegus Crus-Galli, maybe a day. 

Early iris. 

Viburnum-Lentago, a day or more. 

Krigias, with their somewhat orange yellow, spot the dry hills all the fore noon and are very common, but as they are closed in the afternoon, they are but rarely noticed by walkers. 

The long mocker-nut on Conantum not yet out, and the second, or round, one will be yet later. Its catkins are more grayish. 

I see many great devil's-needles in an open wood, — and for a day or two, — stationary on twigs, etc., standing out more or less horizontally like thorns, holding by their legs and heads(?). They do not incline to move when touched, and their eyes look whitish and opaque, as if they were blind. 

They were evidently just escaped from the slough. I often see the slough on plants and, I think, the pupa in the water, as at Callitriche Pool. 

As I sit on Lee's Cliff, I see a pe-pe on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. Regularly, at short intervals, it utters its monotonous note like till-till-till, or pe-pe-pe. Looking round for its prey and occasionally changing its perch, it every now and then darts off (phoebe-like), even five or six rods, to ward the earth to catch an insect, and then returns to its favorite perch. If I lose it for a moment, I soon see it settling on the dead twigs again and hear its till, till, till. It appears through the glass mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail. 

There is a thorn now in its prime, i. e. near the beaked hazel, Conantum, with leaves more wedge-shaped at base than the Cratcegus coccinea; apparently a variety of it, between that and Crus-Galli. (In press.) 

A kingbird's nest, with two of its large handsome eggs, very loosely set over the fork of a horizontal willow by river, with dried everlasting of last year, as usual, just below Garfield's boat. Another in black willow south of long cove (east side, north of Hubbard's Grove) and another north of said cove. 

A brown thrasher's nest, with two eggs, on ground, near lower lentago wall and toward Bittern Cliff. 

The Ranunculus Purshii is in some places abundantly out now and quite showy. It must be our largest ranunculus (flower).

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857

Salix pedicellaris off Holden's has been out of bloom several days at least. See May 4, 1858 (“Salix pedicellaris at Holden's Swamp, staminate, out apparently two days.”); May 28, 1858 ("The Salix pedicellaris, which abounds in the Great Meadows, is a peculiar and rather interesting willow, some fifteen inches high and scarcely rising above the grass even now."); May 28, 1859 ("S. pedicellaris long out of bloom.")

Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts. Compare Walden ("Solitude") ("Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled")

Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Reminiscence and Prompting

Each season is but an infinitesimal point. See  May 23, 1841 ("All nature is a new impression every instant");August 19, 1851("The seasons do not cease a moment to revolve, and therefore Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); January 26, 1852 (" The moment always spurs us. The spurs of countless moments goad us incessantly into life."); Walden:  Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.") and Economy, ("In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”);  April 24, 1859 ("The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.") December 8, 1859 ("Only the poet has the faculty to see present things as if also past and future, as if universally significant.”)

I see many great devil's-needles in an open wood, They were evidently just escaped from the slough. See June 10, 1857 ("Many creatures — devil's- needles, etc., etc. — cast their sloughs now. Can't I?") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau.the Devil's-needle

As I sit on Lee's Cliff, I see a pe-pe on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. . . .mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail. See June 10, 1855 ("Nest of the Muscicapa Cooperi, or pe pe, on a white spruce in the Holden Swamp . . ."); June 5, 1856 ("The Muscicapa Cooperi sings pe pe pe’, sitting on the top of a pine . . .”); June 8, 1856 ("At Cedar Swamp, saw the pe-pe catching flies like a wood pewee, darting from its perch on a dead cedar twig from time to time and returning to it. “); May 15, 1855 ("I hear from the top of a pitch pine in the swamp that loud, clear, familiar whistle . . . I saw it dart out once, catch an insect, and return to its perch muscicapa-like.”).

A brown thrasher's nest, with two eggs, on ground. See May 23, 1858 ("Brown thrasher's nest on ground, under a small tree, with four eggs."); ,June 5, 1856 ("A brown thrasher’s nest with four eggs . . . under a small white pine"): See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Brown Thrasher

June 6.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 6.

The trembling aspens

offer me a new summer –

fluttering my thoughts.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Now I am ice, now I am sorrel

 A Book of the Seasons , by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-570606

To improve the nick of time.

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. 

But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. 

And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.

H. D. Thoreau,  Walden, Where I lived and what I lived for

See Economy, ("In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”); April 24, 1859 ("Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this.”); May 12, 1857 ("Our past experience is a never-failing capital which can never be alienated, of which each kindred future event reminds us. If you would have the song of the sparrow inspire you a thousand years hence, let your life be in harmony with its strain to-day.”);  June 6, 1857 ("Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. ")

May I dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.

March 11

Thermometer at 7 A.M. 6°, yet, the fire going out, Sophia’s plants are frozen again. Dr. Bartlett’s was - 4°. 

When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub off some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. 

If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss. 

I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. 

Only that travelling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better. That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

I hear that Goodwin found one of his traps frozen in this morning, where it has not frozen before this year. 

P. M.—3.30, thermometer 24°. 

Cut a hole in the ice in the middle of Walden. It is just 24 1/4 inches thick, 1 1/2+ being snow ice, 12 3/4 water ice; and there is between 3 and 4 inches of crusted snow above this. The water rises to within 2 1/2 inches of the top of the ice, i. e. between a ninth and tenth of the whole thickness. The clear ice has therefore gained 2 1/2 inches beneath since the 16th of February. It has gone on freezing under 2 3/4 inches of ice. Yet people very commonly say that it will not continue to freeze under half that thickness of snow and ice. It is a job to cut a hole now. 

Snow and ice together make a curtain twenty-eight inches thick now drawn over the pond. Such is the prospect of the fishes!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 11, 1856

I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events . . . dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. See April 24, 1859 ("There is no other life but this, or the like of this. Nothing must be postponed.“); January 11, 1852 ("Let me not live as if time was short. Catch the pace of the seasons; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes.")

Only that travelling is good which reveals to me the value of home. See August 19, 1851 ("As travellers go round the world and report natural objects and phenomena, so faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his own life."); January 11, 1852 ("The question is not where did the traveller go?. . . but who was the traveller? . . . the question is how do you live and conduct yourself at home?");  May 6, 1854 ("It matters not where or how far you travel, — the farther commonly the worse, — but how much alive you are."); November 20, 1857 ("A man is worth most to himself and to others, whether as an observer, or poet, or neighbor, or friend, where he is most himself, most contented and at home"); November 1, 1858 ("Take the shortest way round and stay at home. A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are.")

That travel is good 

only which reveals to me 

the value of home.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, May I dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560311

***

I fear the dissipation that travelling, going into society, even the best, the enjoyment of intellectual luxuries, imply. If Paris is much in your mind, if it is more and more to you, Concord is less and less, and yet it would be a wretched bargain to accept the proudest Paris in exchange for my native village. At best, Paris could only be a school in which to learn to live here, a stepping stone to Concord, a school in which to fit for this university.

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him?

The sight of a marsh hawk in Concord meadows is .worth more to me than the entry of the allies into Paris . In this sense I am not ambitious . I do not wish my native soil to become exhausted and run out through neglect . Only that travelling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better . 

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. 

It is strange that men are in such haste to get fame as teachers rather than knowledge as learners.

A walk through the mist

December 16

Steady, gentle, warm rain all the forenoon, and mist and mizzling in the afternoon, when I go round by Abel Hosmer’s and back by the railroad. 

The mist makes the near trees dark and noticeable, like pictures, and makes the houses more interesting, revealing but one at a time. 

The old apple trees are very important to this landscape, they have so much body and are so dark. 

It is very pleasing to distinguish the dim outline of the woods, more or less distant, through the mist, sometimes the merest film and suspicion of a wood. On one side it is the plump and rounded but soft masses of pitch pines, on another the brushy tops of maples, birches, etc. 

Going by Hosmer’s, the very heaps of stones in the pasture are obvious as cairns in one of Ossian’s landscapes. 

See two red squirrels on the fence, one on each side of his house, particularly red along their backs and top of head and tail. They are remarkably tame. One sits twirling apparently a dried apple in his paws, with his tail curled close over his back as if to keep it warm, fitting its curve. How much smothered sunlight in their wholesome brown red this misty day! It is clear New England, Nov-anglia, like the red subsoil. It is springlike. 

December 16, 2025

As we go over the bridge, admire the reflection of the trees and houses from the smooth open water over the channel, where the ice has been dissolved by the rain.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 16, 1855

The mist ...makes the houses more interesting, revealing but one at a time. See November 29, 1850 ("As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist and take form before your eyes.”); April 22, 1852 ("The mist to-day makes those near distances which Gilpin tells of."); August 4, 1854 ("Rain and mist contract our horizon and we notice near and small objects."); September 20, 1857 ("The outlines of trees are more conspicuous and interesting such a day  as this, being seen distinctly against the near misty background, – distinct and dark."); See also note to February 6, 1852 ("mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker, and more imposing.")

See two red squirrels . . . one sits twirling apparently a dried apple in his paws, with his tail curled close over his back. See October 26, 1855 ("I see a red squirrel dash out from the wall, snatch an apple from amid many on the ground, and, running swiftly up the tree with it, proceed to eat it, sitting on a smooth dead limb, with its back to the wind and its tail curled close over its back.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel

Admire the reflection of the trees and houses from the smooth open water. See December 16, 1852 ("Observe the reflection of the snow on Pine Hill from Walden”);  See also December 15, 1856 "The smooth serenity and the reflections of the pond, still alone free from ice.”); January 7, 1855 (“The channel of the river is quite open in many places, and . . . a certain dormant life awakes in me, and I begin to love nature again.")

December 16. See A Book of the Seasons, By Henry Thoreau, December 16 

Reflection of trees  

as we go over the bridge.

Smooth open water.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A walk through the mist

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt551216