Posts Tagged ‘Henry David Thoreau’
Cindy on January 31st, 2010
I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. ~Henry David Thoreau
When I was a student at Michigan State University in the 1970s, three natural science courses were required of all liberal arts students.
An artsy kid, I’d nearly flunked math and biology in high school. So I was terrified, initially, by MSU’s rigid science requirement. But thanks to a very creative counselor who supervised my independent study track, I was allowed to replace the final natural science class with a graduate-level botany course in my senior year.
I was born with a green thumb, so this was both a thrill and a relief. The class required several field trips to outdoor nature centers, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Throughout the term, I learned to identify a wide variety of plant life, and even memorized the Latin names of species. I collected leaves, seed pods, and mushrooms. I sniffed berries and wildflowers. I learned that nature is an intelligent system; more than a thing of beauty in a controlled suburban landscape. Understanding and respecting that system — the miraculous cycle of decay and regeneration — has gotten me through some of the roughest times in my life.
But I digress. Botany was a blast — and guess what? I ended up with the top grade in the class — the first (and only) 4.0 I ever earned in a science curriculum. I’m still proud of that grade, and awed by the fact that so much of what I learned in a botany class serves me well to this day.
My love affair with plants is reflected in the Botanic Garden dish set my family uses now.
Produced by the Portmeirion Pottery company in Great Britain, the Botanic Garden pattern first caught my eye when I was outfitting my first apartment after college graduation. Durable and beautifully crafted, the designs were inspired by original 19th-century botanical drawings, replete with the Latin name of each plant. But the imported dishes were way out of my price range at the time. I was newly employed as a research assistant for a reference book publisher in Detroit, earning an annual income of $7,500.
Margaret, a favorite room mate from MSU who shared the post-grad apartment with me, bought my first Botanic Garden cup and saucer for my birthday in 1979. “If I know you as well as I think I do, then I’m sure you’ll find a way to get the whole set one day,” Margaret wrote on the card that came with the gift.
I didn’t have the nerve to register for the Botanic Garden pattern when I got engaged 30 years ago; Doug and I thought it was too much to ask of our wedding guests during an economic recession. But over the years, we managed to acquire a full set. Luckily, the price of the dishes started coming down in the last decade, and we found several pieces on sale at discount stores and Bed Bath & Beyond. We’ve also received a few of the serving pieces as holiday gifts.
Typing this, I realize it might seem silly or frivolous to romanticize plant science or a set of dishes. But at the end of a very difficult week, awaiting test results for my widowed mother’s worrisome health issues, I find comfort in these simple, ordinary pleasures. And Margaret was right. When you want something badly enough and your heart is in the right place, you’ll find a way to get it. That includes meeting academic challenges — and acquiring expensive dinnerware. — Cindy La Ferle
– Photos by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on June 8th, 2009
Build a campfire, write your own song, dance your ass off, hike 10 miles — be something that’s not just part of a machine.” — Robert Downes
One of the things I’ll miss most when the news is no longer published on newsprint is the act of cutting and saving clips of my favorite columns and articles. Whenever I read an especially good piece, I tear it out to share with a friend.
Visiting Traverse City, Mich., this spring, I picked up the April 20 issue of Northern Express Weekly. I always enjoy the “Random Thoughts” column, which is typically penned by Robert Downes, the paper’s publisher and managing editor. So I wasn’t surprised when Downes’ April 20 column, “Going Natural — Offline,” hit me where I live and prompted me to reach for the scissors.
In his column, Downes opens with an anecdote about Jack Hicks, a retired Chicago-area librarian who cancelled the Internet because he thought it was “a time-waster” and a mere “imitation of real life.” Downes went on to say that he understands where the librarian is coming from — and wonders if our lives are “being twittered away” when we spend so much time online.
“Those of us who were born long before the digitalization of childhood can recall a time when kids spent as little time as possible indoors. You ran around barefoot outdoors all summer and only came in when your parents yelled themselves hoarse, long after sunset,” Downes recalls. He also points out that we shouldn’t be surprised that we now battle the issue of obesity among four-year-olds who spend way too much time on the computer.
But today’s kids aren’t the only ones losing touch with reality. Too many adults have taken up permanent residence in cyberspace. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially since summer is approaching and I’d rather be outdoors as much as possible — and not on my laptop or cell phone.
These days, veering off the information superhighway is akin to Thoreau dropping out of “society” for his Walden sabbatical. I have to admit, it’s tempting. As much as I appreciate the Internet as a writing tool, and as much as I enjoy the time I spend reading and responding to various blogs, I worry that my Internet use is interfering with my “real life.”
Back in the day before e-mail, blogs, and Facebook, I spent A LOT more time moving around in the world — especially in the summer and fall. (And kids, it really wasn’t that long ago.) I lunched with friends at outdoor cafes, interviewed people “in person,” read more books and magazines, took my son to the park and played with him, met with editors at the newspaper office, took long walks with friends or my husband, worked more hours in the garden, and generally led a busy three-dimensional life. And I didn’t check for new messages every 15 minutes.
Now, I’m nearly compulsive about my time on the computer. I’ve barely poured my first cup of coffee before I’m in my office checking blogs and e-mail. I never travel without a laptop, so I’m never really disconnected on vacation. Thanks to all the hours I spend online, I finish reading fewer books, newspapers, and magazines — and have let many of my subscriptions lapse. And whether I’m in town or out, it seems, my friends and I send e-mail messages more often than we chat on the phone or visit in person. This can’t be such a good thing.
Recently, a couple of my neighbors and I decided to establish a weekly dinner date at a local restaurant — within walking distance — for some real community contact. This is long overdue. While I’d never cancel the Internet or disconnect from the online friendships I value, I need to devote more attention offline to family, friends, and neighbors. I need to be in touch — literally — with what’s going on around me.
As Downes suggests, “It might be good for the soul to take an annual vacation from your iPod, Internet, cell phone, Twitter, MySpace, and all the other electronic strings attached to your life for a week or so, if only to reboot your sense of humanity and become a ‘real person’ once a year.”
My only question is: Why only once a year? –CL
– Garden photo copyright by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on November 11th, 2008
This essay appeared in slightly different form in the Christian Science Monitor and is included in my essay collection, Writing Home. Though I wrote the piece in 1997 when my son was young and I was working at home, I think its message still works today, given our current economic crisis…
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Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I now have a mind-boggling array of options. A mother who works as a journalist, I can choose to conduct my business in an office building or work at home on my computer while caring for my child. Without leaving the house, I can e-mail relatives in Scotland, read nearly any newspaper in the country, and order a complete fall wardrobe online.
Every day I have more choices than I can reasonably consider. And so, like other tired Americans, I carry the burden of complexity — a burden so overwhelming that there are times when I imagine trading places with Henry David Thoreau.
It’s only fitting that I rediscovered Thoreau the week I purged my home office with a dust rag and a vacuum cleaner. The autumn mornings felt ripe for pitching and sorting, for creating blank space where none existed before. Walden, Thoreau’s famous treatise on simple living, was jammed behind a pile of unread paperbacks on an overcrowded shelf.
Like other writers with good intentions, I’ve always admired Thoreau but hadn’t read Walden since it appeared many years ago on a required reading list at my state university. I’d retained only a few pithy quotes, and recalled only sketchy details of Thoreau’s Spartan cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. But suddenly, here was the book, whispering to me across the century — “Simplify, simplify”– and begging me to take another look.
Glancing through the pages, I realized Thoreau’s words had been wasted on me when I first read them. At the time I was a young college student living in a cramped dormitory, eager to graduate and buy enough furniture to fill a spacious suburban apartment.
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind,” Thoreau warned in the chapter titled “Economy.” Only an overworked adult — one who is drowning in the debris of modern life and pressed by the weight of too many commitments — could truly appreciate Thoreau’s genius, I mused as I kept reading.
Yet it also occurred to me that things were vastly different for Thoreau. The “comforts of life” in the 1840s were not exactly cushy by today’s standards. His concept of luxury might have been taking tea in his mother’s bone china saucers. So what had he given up to commune with nature?
Even before he moved to Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t accumulated three television sets or a closetful of designer clothes. He didn’t own several pairs of expensive athletic shoes for all those philosophical walks he took. He didn’t wonder where he’d store his blender or Tupperware while he roughed it in the woods. His cot in the cabin couldn’t have been lumpier than the straw-filled mattresses in most mid-19th-century homes. And Thoreau never had to trade a personal computer for a pencil.
So, how tough was Thoreau’s sabbatical with simplicity? Is it true that he occasionally walked from Walden Pond back to Concord, where Emerson’s wife had a home-cooked supper waiting for him?
As Andrew Delbanco notes in Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), reading Thoreau can make us feel “accused of hoarding comforts.” We might even try to find holes in Thoreau’s impassioned pitch for the simple life. And yet Thoreau is, as Delbanco says, “an irresistible writer; to read him is to feel wrenched away from the customary world and delivered into a place we fear as much as we need.”
Just as Thoreau did, I’d like to weed out, pare down, live deliberately, be a resident philosopher. (Would the family miss me?) A life devoid of clutter sounds positively blissful, especially when there are no empty spaces on my calendar. But making this choice is so much more difficult in a culture fueled by sheer busyness and commercialism. There are few places, few wooded Waldens, where one can escape the incessant bombardment of to-do lists or product advertising.
Visiting the “real” Walden Pond in Concord for this first time this fall, I was amazed and disappointed to find the place overrun. Locals were strewn on its small beach. You couldn’t walk the path around the pond without rubbing shoulders with other curious sightseers; there wasn’t a spot left for solitary reflection.
If nothing else, my rendezvous with Thoreau got me thinking. What — and how much — do I really need? What price have I paid for modern technology and convenience? In which landfill will all my stuff end up?
And how would I fare if I were delivered into a place I fear as much as I need, as Delbanco put it? Could I survive in a one-room cabin with barely more than chair, a wooden table, a bowlful of raw vegetables, and my laptop? Honestly, I wish I could. – Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on October 20th, 2008
October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes ’round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint before they fall, so the year makes its setting. October is the sunset sky; November the later twilight.” – Henry David Thoreau
There’s nothing like taking a break from routine to enjoy the fall colors throughout Michigan. Autumn road trips are the sure-cure for almost anything that ails me. I’m also following the lead of another inspirational writer who once advised that everyone should take a “news fast” to relieve stress. (And this was long before the presidential campaigns were in full swing.) Not seeing Sarah Palin on TV — for two glorious days in a row — has worked wonders for me. I’ve regained my peace of mind, and my stomach suddenly stopped hurting. I started feeling hopeful and happy again, and all the colors around me look richer and brighter.
And speaking of autumn, I have a new column posted on Michigan Women’s Forum. It’s a reflective piece about savoring precious moments as the seasons change. — Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on July 14th, 2008
I wanted to look for NeHi Pop and Burma Shave signs and drive through the kind of small towns that Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney used to inhabit in the movies….I wanted to see America. I wanted to come home.” — Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
Practically everyone I know has tried to convert me. My family has taken me on fabulous trips to some of the most incredible cities in the world — London, Paris, Rome, Glascow, New York City, Boston. I’ve admired the great museums and portrait galleries, photographed the landmarks where famous people drank or slept, oooohed and ahhhhed the awesome architecture, sampled the famous restaurants, shopped the world-class department stores and … complained about the god-awful traffic and wished I could go home.
All-knowing friends and editors try to shame me for being so provincial; for favoring quirky rural villages and small college towns. I should know better. But that’s just who I am. I’m the sort of person who cranks up the volume every time John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” is playing on the radio; the sort of person who admires Henry David Thoreau for truly believing that his own neighborhood in Concord was the most fascinating place on Earth. And, yes, I like living in a town where everybody knows my name.
Which is why I was honored when an essay of mine was chosen for Hometown America, a new collector’s anthology of writings just published by Ideals (a Guideposts company). The essay was selected from my own book, Writing Home, and it’s the one about the neighborhood kids who’ve grown up with my son and become part of our family. Other excerpts in Hometown America include pieces by Faith Andrews Bedford, Garrison Keillor, Chris Bohjalian, Susan Allen Toth, Philip Gulley, Edgar Guest, Marjorie Holmes, and many other writers and poets with whom I’d love to shoot the breeze on a front porch. — CL
I was born with a green thumb, so this was both a thrill and a relief. The class required several field trips to outdoor nature centers, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Throughout the term, I learned to identify a wide variety of plant life, and even memorized the Latin names of species. I collected leaves, seed pods, and mushrooms. I sniffed berries and wildflowers. I learned that nature is an intelligent system; more than a thing of beauty in a controlled suburban landscape. Understanding and respecting that system — the miraculous cycle of decay and regeneration — has gotten me through some of the roughest times in my life.
Margaret, a favorite room mate from MSU who shared the post-grad apartment with me, bought my first Botanic Garden cup and saucer for my birthday in 1979. “If I know you as well as I think I do, then I’m sure you’ll find a way to get the whole set one day,” Margaret wrote on the card that came with the gift.
