Our Well
From Rev. Kate Tucker's July 10 sermon, about Henry David Thoreau, one of the Transcendentalists who is part of our unique Unitarian Universalist heritage, "The Deep Green Well." You can listen to it in entirety at our First Universalist podcast page at Podbean here.
It’s dangerous reading Thoreau, because he asks something of us. And I don’t know about you but sometimes I wonder how dull I’ve become, with hurrying here and there? I’m a creature of this culture, and I suspect I’m dulled to it in all manner of ways I’m not awake to, and the point is, to be awake.
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” (Walden)
The point is, to stay awake when I leave the quiet river and reenter the world of 35W and Walmart and dust storms in Phoenix and earthquakes in Arkansas and standoffs in the legislature and sad employment statistics and oilspills in Montana.
I know the “terrible Thoreau” will hang around now and be the “unseen presence” Louisa May Alcott and Emerson promised he’d be, and he’ll ask, with Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
What? Who will you save? What will you love?
What “slow and difficult tricks of living” will help you stay awake?
So. This week I made a list, based on my reading.
It’s a four-word list. I have it handy for when the man bugs me.
They’re all P-words, to make it simple--Thoreau said: simplify.
So: Perspective, Patience, Practice, Praise
They’re all things Thoreau was good at, and they’re tricks of living that can help us stay awake:
Perspective: Do whatever you have to do to get some perspective. You don’t have to build a cabin in the woods but do something--walk, journal, travel, meditate, spend time with immigrants-- something that helps you get some distance on a commercial society that’s in your face--”The universe is wider than our views of it,” says the man.
Patience: Take the long view. It’s radical. Thoreau did it. Legislators should be urged to try it.
Practice: Those creative thoughts in our minds, let them travel from head to hands. What Emerson wrote about, Thoreau lived.
Praise: Thoreau’s life was all about praise--his work was an anthem to the mysterious surging energy at the core of life. It’s what gave him the steam for patience and practice and perspective.
“Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.”