*
Today, I walk it alone. All is changed. In the grass, a brown bunny waits still as a yard ornament. And I notice the world’s littlest mud puddles filling the name “Thomas” carved into the concrete path and a bed of purple lilies taller than children and the creek entirely strange from all the rain. Its strong current beneath the footbridge builds to angry rapids at the wide bend by the storm drain.
In his essay Nature, Emerson says, “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?” With solitude and a rainstorm: All is changed.
My parents did not bring me up in a church-going tradition. But nature is church, my great-great-great grandfather believed—and I was raised to go into the woods. “[Nature] always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us. . . . The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”
He taught his children to go into the woods for communion—and they taught theirs to do the same, and so on.
*
“I actually hate nature,” I once confided to my mom when I was about nine after a buggy week at Audubon camp. I preferred to cozy up with a book or use my stuffed animals to act out scenes from Little Women.
“Ha,” she laughed. “Just don’t ever let anyone from Dad’s side of the family hear you say that. You’ll probably be excommunicated.”
The thing is, Emerson himself probably would have been fine with it. As his son wrote, RWE’s “own attitude in the matter was, that it was only a question for each person where the best church was,—in the solitary wood, the chamber, the talk with the serious friend, or in hearing the preacher.”
To be honest, growing up I didn’t much care for Emerson either. In his portraits he looked bossy and a little stern. I didn’t understand his essays or poems at all, although my teachers often assumed I would when they discovered my heritage. As an aspiring writer, I kept a detailed thought journal and a record of all the books I read, just as I’d been told he did—and I memorized a number of his poems. But I was a faker: I cared way more about what was happening in the Baby-Sitters Club series and what I could do to my bangs with a curling iron.
Something shifted in college at UNC. I began walking outside again—on the deep woodsy paths that surround Chapel Hill—and I took a small seminar-style class on nineteenth-century American literature. I didn’t mention my Emerson connection. I discovered the beautiful, intimate, messy honesty of his journals as a way to start loving his writing.
*
This morning on my walk—with the creek full and all the wildlife energized by the rain—I’m thinking about an essay by another one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard: “Seeing” from her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There she writes: “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.” Dillard enters nature with a giant Emersonian eye—reverent, rhapsodic—almost ecclesiastic. She reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.
Pilgrim is a beautiful word. I love the thin rhyming i sounds in both syllables. And the surprising seriousness of “grim.” It’s from the Latin peregrinus—meaning foreign. Same root as peregrine, like the falcon. Bird of prey, fastest member of the animal kingdom. Adventure married to strength and purpose—tinged with the strange.
Growing up in Massachusetts, pilgrim meant pageants with songs and construction paper buckle hats and white collars. Also: field trips to Plymouth Plantation and cramped old ships and too much salt-water taffy on the bus ride home.
Later, in college, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress—that desperate, tortured journey, I associated it with the idea of walking with sacred purpose. The idea of seeking. The ominous landmarks: the Valley of Humiliation, the Doubting Castle. There is always room and time for a journey: Every road trip of my twenties justified in this way. Emerson called the guest room in his house the Pilgrim’s Chamber. Some of its prominent pilgrim residents: Margaret Fuller, Thoreau.
“After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests,” Dillard writes in “Seeing” as she watches dusk come to Tinker Creek, night knitting an “eyeless mask” over her face.
When it comes to illness, dying, death—those darknesses—it seems we are still so very much Plymouth Pilgrims—all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong sense of our own alienness in a hostile land. We don’t begin to know what to do with ourselves. We cross our arms over our chests and try to look on the bright side as we starve.
I think the tumors in my breast are getting bigger instead of smaller. They ache. They protrude. At least I imagine that they do. One more month: I can hardly wait to get them out.
*
One of the best things I’ve read about that puritanical pilgrim lot is that—aside from God—they really loved wine and clean laundry.
My favorite pilgrim is the poet Anne Bradstreet. She was torn from her homeland and family and she spent three months seasick belowdecks coming to America. She suffered smallpox, paralysis, and tuberculosis. She gave birth to eight children in ten years—and they all lived. She was the first woman to publish a book of poems in the New World (at age thirty-eight), despite being relegated by her community to an intensely domestic role. And she gave her poems wonderful solid names like “By Night when Others Soundly Slept” and “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666” and “A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Publick Employment.”
She and her husband arrived from England with Governor John Winthrop and his company of Puritans on June 14, 1630, on the flagship Arbella—a ship that reportedly carried three times as much alcohol as water on its passage across the Atlantic. Nearly all ten thousand gallons of wine had been consumed by the time they set their sea-weary feet on soil in Salem, Massachusetts.
Before they left England—as they waited anchored just offshore aboard the ship for the right weather conditions to begin their crossing—a small group of them braved the white-capped swells to row back to Yarmouth to scrub clean their linen neckerchiefs one last time before setting out for the ultimate wilderness. I just love that. It’s a beautiful, human kind of coping.
Clean laundry, wine.