“In wildness is the preservation of the world” ~ Henry David Thoreau
Recently, I came across The Walden Woods Project’s brief film, “Walden,” by the Ewer Brothers, executive produced by Ken Burns and narrated by the late and great Robert Redford. It is a short, tender, and poignant brief narrative focusing on the life of H.D. Thoreau and his short stay (two years, two months, and two days) at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It moved and touched me deeply, bringing me back to my early days when one of my few salvations was to spend five summers as a camper at Camp Thoreau in Wallkill, New York. As soon as the film ended (it’s only 24 minutes total), I knew I’d be writing about my reflections on it.
What especially resonated was the line from Don Henley, founder of The Walden Woods Project, “Where is your Walden, what’s a place that’s special to you, and how is it doing?” These days I think a lot about our individual and collective preservation, sanity, and safety — how do we protect ourselves and one another, how can we live better within the constructs of our precious world. Though Walden Pond is not now what it was 180 or so years ago when Thoreau took up short-term residency there, it is still a wonder of nature and the natural world. That life there provided him a place, a home, wherein not only did his body dwell, but his soul, psyche, and mind. Life is complex; he tried to distill and simplify it to make it understandable for us all. For him, Walden was a place and a time where he could sate his curiosity, sense of wonder, and his desire to seek out and understand his/the world. In return, he felt safe, secure, connected, and committed to this world and all that it held.
What, and where, is your Walden? Where can you feel safe, protected, fully alive, rich with voice and agency, able to be wholly yourself? Where can you scream and let go of the toxicity within and surrounding you? Where can you shout out the pain and suffering that exists within and all around you? Does such a place exist for you? Finding, creating, and maintaining such a space may be our sole and soul preservation. Noxious news, people, relationships, and environs push us toward our edge — we live the nefarious results and consequences of a world going amuck. We need the safety and protection of a place that can hold us fully and embrace our anger, outrage, and terror of the state of our world without dropping us. The natural world can sustain us if we show it ongoing respect and care.
Where is your place where you can feel your deepest sadness, face your deepest fears, and express them through tears of hurt and despair? Where and to whom can you go to express the emotional pains caused simply by living a human existence? Where do you go to feel safe making your hurts known and being able to excavate and arise out of them? What must you do — must we all do — to find and create safety both within and without to liberate ourselves while acknowledging the depth and depths of sorrow and broken-heartedness that are endemic to our lives throughout our lifespans? Holding in and holding on to grief on our own often begets only deeper psychic pain. Have our communities, our culture, and our planet begun to desecrate such places and spaces? And in the ever-deeper cost to simply survive — let alone thrive — are we left to struggle to find such places only by ourselves? We’re all better off if we create and build such safety structures that enable us to protect and feel protected, to feel safe and have trust and faith in others and our planet itself.
And where is your place to share laughter, joy, and happiness freely and openly, without fear, pain, anger, or retribution? Where’s your space to fully own your passion and the delight that can come with being fully human? Is there a place where you can express such without inhibition? What circumstances in your world allow you to share these wholly human emotions, borne from those people, relationships, and situations that enable each of us to shine with the exquisite delight and jubilation? Marianne Williamson has written, “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us”. Where can you — we — go to show and share (and not hide) our elation and exaltation, our tears of joy and celebration? The world needs to see, hear, and experience us in these moments, the same as we need to have and savor them.
May this year ahead help us each and all to find our own Walden. And let that place be a space where you can invite others you know and care about, and those whom you’ve not yet met, to be fully human and alive and open with you. Invite yourself “out” while inviting others “in.” Let’s hope, pray, and act on building and sustaining those beautiful and sacred places and spaces in our world, on our earth, that are truly open, safe, and able to hold us through it all. Let’s take this on one at a time, and hopefully, with others, together. May this be the beginning of a new year of bringing people together rather than pulling us apart.
Daniel Cantor Yalowitz writes a regular column in the Recorder. A developmental and intercultural psychologist, he has facilitated change in many organizations and communities around the world. His two most recent books are “Journeying with Your Archetypes” and “Reflections on the Nature of Friendship.” Reach out to him at danielcyalowitz@gmail.com.