Here is his grave at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetary designed my a transcendentalist. I was impressed with some of the humble acts of Thoreau against the staggering majesty of nature. I recently went walking in Concord, Massachusetts. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks-who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil-to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I always found nature walking boring until I read Thoreau’s piece. This book and that new habit has been life-changing for me. In an attempt to unplug from the noise of tech, I decided to take one day a week, turn off all my gadgets and try walking. I never really “got” the idea of walking until I read the Walking essay. If you have a Kindle App, you can download it here for free here. Henry David Thoreau’s first published essay, Walking, is well worth reading.

A fir tree on my second walk at the Quabban Reservoir in Massachusetts

Walking david thoreau