Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

July 31, 2005

“A Ramble With Henry David Thoreau”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

GRACE NOTE: “The Impossible Dream”

GRACE NOTE: The Impossible Dream

Last weekend I was at a reunion in Louisiana for a group I’d belonged to as a child, and I hadn’t seen most of those folks for well over 30 years. This was a residential summer program which I attended for 7 weeks, for each of 4 summers. We had become very close way back then, and some of those relationships have endured the decades. What has also managed to survive and thrive is the “impossible dream”.

We will be singing the song, “The Impossible Dream” later today. Some of you likely remember this stirring song from “Man of La Mancha” – it was popular in the late 60’s, I believe. We used to sing it as the closing song for that program each summer, and we’d hug and cry as we said goodbye to our dream of a summer, and looked ahead to an impossible time of separation. We sand it this year too, along with the current kids in that program – it is a custom that has survived.

This is an enrichment program, with academic classes and fine arts, as well as fun activities, and it is also a program in which we were encouraged to dream dreams, no matter how impossible they seemed. It was there that I was first exposed to Henry David Thoreau, as we read Walden and realized that it was okay to march to the step of a different drummer.

During our reunion we met with the aging and wise director of the program, thanked him profusely for the great gift of that experience, and asked him a few questions. In the end, he said he wanted to ask us a question too. But first, he told us that the staff had been deliberate in structuring into the program a strong sense of the need for seeking the truth, for promoting justice, and for protecting freedom. He asked us if we would continue with these goals, pointing out that it was very needed now.

The impossible dream was not just a song! We hadn’t known it when we were 12 years old, but the program’s goals included helping us to do what Henry David Thoreau has also asked – to advance “confidently in the direction” of our dreams, to go ahead and build “castles in the air” and then “to put the foundations under them”. I am inspired and I feel called by that director, and by my past, and by the present need. I hope you also continue to hear the call to live the impossible dream with all the valor and integrity of your own life.

A Ramble With Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau dreamed dreams and walked to his own drumbeat. His contribution to society was mighty, and involved numerous areas of life – amazing for someone who only lived to age 44, dying of tuberculosis. Admittedly, though, while he often did lend a voice, he did not lead the way as much as the others around him did.

For example, although he wrote “Civil Disobedience”, which would go on to influence Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and though he did spend a night in jail protesting a slave tax, he will not be remembered as a great activist. He was certainly not as influential in changing his society as other Unitarian friends and contemporaries of his were, such as Theodore Parker and Margaret Fuller. In some sense, he was less an activist than a writer who inspired activists. He was an abolitionist, but even the reluctant Rev. William Ellery Channing was more effective in that fight. He wrote a whole treasure chest of quotable quotes, but his friend, neighbor, and mentor, the one time minister and Unitarian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is the one who will be remembered as the great philosopher of Concord. Though Thoreau’s journals and books were filled with incredible nature writings and observations about the wild and verdant land he lived in so completely, his contemporary liberal religious writer and friend, Walt Whitman, is probably better remembered for his nature writing than Thoreau is, and it is John Muir who will endure as the great American naturalist. Thoreau taught, and wrote poetry, but his student and friend Louisa May Alcott is the truly famous fictional writer from his neighborhood.

I am not alone in suggesting that what Henry David Thoreau is most remembered for is that he lived and sauntered in the woods, and wrote about the depth of those experiences with such simple joy that everyone has wanted to follow him.

Let me tell you a sweet story about him and Louisa May Alcott, from a time when he was a young man, and she an eight year old girl. Thoreau was teaching her older sister Anna at the time, but Louy, as she was called then, (who was truly the pattern for her fictional character Jo in Little Women), was drawn to Thoreau as though he were the pied piper. In fact, he did play the flute, (Eileen plays) and he often led children on adventurous outings into the wild.

The first time Louy ever went with him was when Henry gathered the children to go huckleberry picking. They went by wagon, and then walked a woodland path. One of the children was suddenly sad because he’d forgotten his tin. Henry quickly stripped birch bark and made a neat berry box in a flash. As they walked along, he stopped to point out wildflowers and moss; then showed them a toad. He also stopped to write in his notebook, and Louy was beginning to wonder if they’d ever pick berries.

Finally they reached the berry patches and Henry exclaimed about the joy of wild fruit – a great gift from nature! Then as the children picked, he played his flute (Eileen plays) with such sweet music that Louy closed her eyes and dreamed of a bright, beautiful world made of that sound.

Henry took his students and the neighbor children on Saturday field trips. He told them stories about fairies and Algonquins, and he showed them where to look out for spider webs and how to charm birds. Sometimes the Alcotts were too busy to allow Louy to go on the trips, and sometimes she snuck off anyway to join Henry. When she was eight years old, after following that saunterer for a few months, and listening to his ramblings and music, she wrote her first nature poem. A little later, she visited Thoreau at Walden Pond, delighting in the Concord woods as the best place for her spiritual life. The Fairies he’d filled her head with became the subject of her first published writing.

She became a great friend of Henry’s, and when he died she wrote a poem, “Thoreau’s Flute”, mourning the loss of “the Genius of the wood.” We also heard the letter she wrote about his last days, and another one that Henry’s sister wrote. I read those letters at his grave this past March, and I wept, as though I had known him for years, and had lost that great spirit from my own life.

When I came to the cemetery, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and a whole host of other Unitarian luminaries are also buried nearby, I had just taken “a ramble in Thoreau country”. That is what the interpretive guide is called which our own Jose Garcia gave me, and that I’ve been using for the readings today. He designed it for walking around Walden Pond, and on other nearby trails, while reading great reams of the words of Henry David Thoreau, and a few writings from others about him. I felt suffused with Thoreau’s light and spirit. I was mostly alone in the woods – it was March and very icy – and not much of that area has changed, so I was seeing what Henry wrote about, and it was magnificent, and simple.

We hope to arrange a trip for the congregation to take this Thoreau walk in the Fall, and it will be a great joy for any who come. I felt I really was rambling with Henry, sauntering in his footsteps.

May we walk with Henry’s sweet spirit sometimes, and dream the impossible dreams that are cultivated by spending time in solitude and with the wildness of nature. I will close with these words of Henry David Thoreau, from his book Walden:

“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me.” And finally, this sweet and wild man wrote in August, some 165 years ago, “Surely joy is the condition of life.” Thank you, Henry David!