Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

Finding Walden - What Henry Found on the Mountain

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

September 17, 2006

You may have heard of Henry David Thoreau. He was a very well-known writer in Massachusetts about a hundred and fifty years ago. His family was Unitarian. Henry was famous for writing about nature and working for justice.

He is especially well remembered today for a year he spent living alone in a small house he built in the woods on Walden Pond near where his family lived. He wrote so beautifully about his time at Walden that people have been learning from him ever since what it means to live close to nature.

During his time at Walden Pond Henry took a few days off to travel to Maine, to wander someplace really wild. He climbed Mount Katahdin, a very high mountain there. Thoreau didn’t bother with a path or trail up the mountain; he and a few friends just started out by climbing up a waterfall near the bottom, on the Penobscot River.

After only a little while, Henry left his companions behind. Apparently he was always doing that. He felt at home in nature. Once Henry was alone, he came to the edge of the woods and started up the steepest part of the mountain. Later he wrote about what happened next:

“I climbed alone over huge rocks,” he said, “a mile or more, edging toward the clouds, for although the day was clear elsewhere, the [top of the mountain] was concealed by mist.” He said that the mountain was like a huge collection of loose rocks, “as if some time it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides. . . .”

Things began to feel strange, as if this landscape wasn’t part of the ordinary earth he knew. He kept going up. By the time he got to the top of the mountain, the clouds hid everything, just blowing aside a little every now and then to show him some huge boulders or dark cliffs. It was so wild that it made him think of ancient stories about Greek Gods and monsters who created the earth out of rocks and then fought over it. It seemed like he was in a place where human beings didn’t really belong. Suddenly he felt he was hearing the voice of Nature talking to him, and it said “Why did you come here? This ground was never prepared for you. Isn’t it enough that I smile in the valleys? I can’t be gentle to you here. If you freeze, or starve, or fall, I won’t help you. Why don’t you go back down to where I’m kind?”

There on top of Mount Katahdin, with the rest of the world hidden in the mist, Thoreau suddenly felt that all the fences and town and state lines we use to divide up the land don’t mean a thing to Nature. “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful,” he wrote later. “Here was no one’s garden, nor lawn, nor pasture, nor meadow, nor woodland, nor farmland. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.”

Henry began to feel like he was really just part of Nature, and that Nature was much bigger and wilder than just a friendly Mother Earth. And suddenly everything around him seemed wonderful and magical and mysterious. “Think of our life in nature,” he said, “rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! Who are we?” he wondered. “Where are we?”

When Henry came down, he thought differently about nature than he had when he started his stay at Walden Pond. He found on the mountain that you don’t really know nature until you’ve seen until you’ve seen that Nature doesn’t obey human beings. Nature doesn’t belong to us. We belong to Nature. And he never forgot that lesson.