Walden and Blue Pastures and falling asleep at night

I love falling asleep when it's dark out, when I've worked hard all day and can just fall asleep as soon as the sun goes down. As Lindsey and I passed out about 8PM in my darling little two person tent at Madewood Plantation on Thursday evening, I thought about other times in my life that I've had the luxury of matching my sleep cycle to the natural order of day and night, like other canoe trips, or working pre-season at camp-- just absolutely tired at the end of the day, and totally ready to wake up with the sun and get back to it the next day.


When I lived alone in Lakeside in 2011 and was rewriting my thesis, I would read Walden at night. It was just a few pages at a time, but I had a great sense of peace connecting with those words while living on the edge of a lake in the middle of the woods. There was no TV or internet in my cabin, and I would just come home from working, work on my thesis a little, and read myself to sleep when it got dark. These were a few of my favorite quotes--

"If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-smelling herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,-- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself." -Walden: or, Life in the woods by Henry David Thoreau

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick, too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." -Walden

"...whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist... its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods..." -Walden

"A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature" -Walden 

(I also read some Muir during that time. "This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." –Muir)




I enjoyed that same sense of peace after paddling all day. I was so tired. The sun had gone down and the crickets and night birds were singing. It was a warm evening and I brought Mary Oliver's Blue Pastures in case I could stay awake for even a few minutes of reading. I marked a few small excerpts I liked--

"The sea surrounds us. It surrounds the houses and the two long, occasionally bending streets. It surrounds the idle conversation; it surrounds the mind diving down into what it hopes is original thought."

"Occasionally I lean forward and gaze into the water. The water of a pond is a mirror of roughness and honesty-- it gives back not only my own gaze, but the nimbus of the world trailing into the picture on all sides... If at this moment I heard a clock ticking, would I remember what it was, what it signified?"

"You must not ever stop being whimsical."

"And I am too informed, dazzled, refreshed-- no longer too busy, no longer weary. Is there another glacier, an ocean, a sun-baked countryside, a dark stream, an eighteen-mile walk in my immediate future? Surely there is, and in such choice company, and I'm ready."

I think I am ready.