A Book of the Seasons: Going out in stormy weather we become storm men

To-day it snows again

covering the ground.

To get the value of the storm 

we must be out a long time 

and travel far in it

so that it may fairly penetrate our skin 

and we be as it were 

turned inside out to it

 and there be no part in us 

but is wet or weather beaten –

so that we become storm men 

instead of fair weather men.

The snow finally turns 

to a drenching rain.

HDT ~ February 28, 1852

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Snow Man ~ Wallace Stevens

We must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin, and we become storm men. See March 31, 1852 ("I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system."); April 19 1852 (" When it rains and blows, keeping men indoors, then the lover of Nature must forth. Then returns Nature to her wild estate.’);  August 31, 1852 ("It is worth the while to have had a cloudy, even a stormy, day for an excursion, if only that you are out at the clearing up."); December 25, 1856 ("Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”); January 27, 1858 (" The part of you that is wettest is fullest of life . . . more at home for being abroad, more comfortable for being wet.") ; March 8, 1859 ("If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will be as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Walking in the Rain

February 28.  See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  February 28  and  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February Days

Snows again to-day

covering the ground then turns

to a drenching rain.

To get the value 

of the storm we must be out 

long and travel far.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Going out in stormy weather

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