A Walk in Walden Wood

Dear Diary,

I have been so enjoying my video game, Walden.  I keep discovering new bits of wisdom and inspiration as I virtually walk the shores of that enchanted place.  A fellow Blipper suggested a new biography of Thoreau, by Laura Dassow Walls.  It is the first comprehensive biography of him in 50 years.  I ordered it and this morning a started reading it. 

I have paired the photo of the cover with an image I made in Walden Woods in 2012.  Sadly, all the photographs I made at that time were lost when my computer crashed recently but I had printed this one out so this is a photo of a photo!  Still, it gives a feeling of the lovely wooded paths that wrap around the pond and on which I have walked more times than I can count since I began regularly visiting this place 40 years ago.

The book has already given me some wonderful insight to this complex man and I found this passage especially enlightening: "...he meant not an ascetic's renunciation, but a redefinition of true wealth as inner rather than outer, aspiring to turn life itself, even the simplest acts of life, into a form of art."  Thoreau was no hermit but a man who found society in nature and nature in the people of Concord.  For him, the two were inextricably linked.