AND GLADNESS OF HEART: BY NATURE GRATIFIED
“…there is a nurturing power in any natural environment, and a
healing touch, which the soul of man sorely
needs. Every one of us
needs to feel
beyond self: to feel small measured
against distant
horizons; to
feel powerless against the winds; to feel voiceless against
the thunder of
the storm.”
-Nan
Turner Waldron
Karen A. Martin
Plymouth
North High School
Plymouth,
Massachusetts
THE INNER EYE
In Nan Waldron’s Journey to Outermost House, she describes the cabin as “a quiet place
for what Viktor Frankl called ‘creative loneliness,’ where anyone can learn the skill of seeing
with the inner eye. This special dimension of the human brain takes time to cultivate. It is a
gradual process which can begin by letting the quietness seep through the skin like a fog drifting
unexpectedly over the land to encompass the setting. In the quietness is found the language for
a conversation between man and earth.” p.81
By or About Thoreau
“I want to go soon and live by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?”
(from Journals, Dec. 24, 1841)
“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.”
(from “Walking”)
“The health of his [Thoreau’s] body, mind, and soul were dependent on walking in nature, where nature’s restorative influences could affect the saunterer without interference. The physical act of walking combines with the rejuvenating powers of the environment to ensure the walker’s physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.”
(from The Transcendental Saunterer, p.118)
“Thoreau’s saunterings followed the general transcendental pattern of converting from the external to the internal. They involved a very important internalization process that enabled him, after first making contact with nature and studying it, to explore new worlds within itself – to probe his own emotions, thoughts, and spiritual dimensions as he sought correspondences between the external landscape and his own private world.”
(from The Transcendental Saunterer, p.130)
“Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”
(in letter to Harrison Blake, March 27, 1848)
“He [Thoreau] believes strongly that nature is essential to man. Like Antaeus of old, modern man must derive his strength from his contact with the earth and with nature. Deprive man of that contact and he becomes weak physically, spiritually, and morally. Let him commune directly with nature and he becomes sturdy.”
(from A Thoreau Profile, p. 212)
“One thing that Thoreau’s walking experience reveals is how easily the physical elements of the landscape affected his thinking processes. Open space led to open thinking; confined space hampered his thinking.”
(from The Transcendental Saunterer, p. 140)
“If any part of nature excites our pity, it is for ourselves we grieve, for there is external health and beauty. We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow. Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character. It is the exception that we see and hear.”
(from Journal, December 11, 1855)
“I am not afraid that I will exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable…visited Olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods.”
(from letter to Harrison Blake, April 3, 1850)
“…such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
(from “Conclusion,” Walden)
“The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them.”
(from “The Ponds,” Walden)
“To be a
philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school,
but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of
simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only
theoretically, but practically.”
(from
“Economy,” Walden)
By or About Beston
“Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more than a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach. (last paragraph of The Outermost House.)
“This outer arm of Cape Cod …stands thirty miles or so out from the continental main, yet there are land birds, little birds, going south along it as casually as so many arctic geese.” (from Outermost, p. 32).
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals….In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” (from Outermost, p.25).
“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.” (from Outermost, p.10).
“When a real nor’easter blows, hawling landward through the winter night over a thousand miles of grey, tormented seas, all shipping off the Cape must pass the Cape or strand. In the darkness and scream of the storm, in the beat of the endless, icy, crystalline snow, rigging freezes, sails freeze and tear – all of a sudden the long booming undertone of the surf sounds under the lee bow…” (from Outermost, p.126).
In a letter to his future wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth,
during his stay on the beach:
“I went patrolling there [Monomoy Point] in a wild rainstorm that died away into a fog. You would have laughed to see me in my costume. I wore an old blue suit, husky shoes, socks pulled up outside my trousers, my Navy knitted cap, my Navy blue jacket, and my French army belt buckled on outside….You wouldn’t see a house or another person all the six miles. But it was great fun swinging along with my pack, and the utter loneliness was part of the experience.”
(from Especially Maine, p.34)
“The next day was as cold and desolate a day as I have ever seen upon the beach. The ocean was purple-black, rough and covered with sombre whitecaps; the morning light was pewter dull, and over earth and sea and the lonely sands hung a pall of purple-leaden cloud full of vast, tormented motion as it crossed the Cape on its way to the Atlantic.” (from Outermost, p.74)
“Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea. And not only is the great sound varied in the manner of its making, it is also constantly changing its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm, being now loud and thundering, now almost placid, now furious, now grave and solemn – slow, now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous with a sense of purpose and elemental will.” (from Outermost, pp. 43,44)
“Henry sought connections, the same connections we all need within our lives, which would bring a sense of harmony between man and earth.” (from Journey to Outermost House, p.35)
Bronson Alcott had written that “the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; [the spirit] actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and fall.” (noted in Journey to Outermost House, p.58).
“Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.” (from introduction to Outermost, p. ix).
COMPARATIVE
“STATS”
Thoreau Beston
First name: Henry Henry
Tinkering with name: David Henry Ô Henry Beston SheahanÔ
Henry David Henry Beston
Born/died: 1817-1862 1888-1968
Birthplace: Concord, MA Quincy, MA
Education: Harvard University Harvard University
Fluency: Fluent in Greek Fluent in French
and Latin
Passion: Naturalist Naturalist
Significant Sojourn: Walden Pond, Concord Nauset Spit, Eastham
How? Gained permission from Leased (later purchased)
Ralph Waldo Emerson to 50 acres of dunes
build a cabin on his land on barrier beach
Dwelling: Built a one-room cabin Designed and had built a two-
(10’x15’) with two room cabin (16’x20’)
windows and a chimney with ten windows and a chimney
Now? Cabin exists only in Cabin exists only in photos and
replica in memory
Power? Helped to designate Helped to designate itself
a National Historical a National Literary Landmark
Landmark (1965) (1964) and to catalyze a
and to catalyze a State Park
State Park
COMPARATIVE “STATS”
Thoreau Beston
First name: Henry Henry
Tinkering with name: David Henry Ô Henry Beston SheahanÔ
Henry David Henry Beston
Born/died: 1817-1862 1888-1968
Birthplace: Concord, MA Quincy, MA
Education: Harvard University Harvard University
Fluency: Fluent in Greek Fluent in French
and Latin
Passion: Naturalist Naturalist
Significant Sojourn: Walden Pond, Concord Nauset Spit, Eastham
How? Gained permission from Leased (later purchased)
Ralph Waldo Emerson to 50 acres of dunes
build a cabin on his land on barrier beach
Dwelling: Built a one-room cabin Designed and had built a two-
(10’x15’) with two room cabin (16’x20’)
windows and a chimney with ten windows and a chimney
Now? Cabin exists only in Cabin exists only in photos and
replica in memory
Impact? Helped to designate the area Helped to designate the
a National Historical the seashore a National
Historical Landmark (1965) Literary Landmark (1964)
and to catalyze the making and to catalyze the making
of a State Park of a National Park
Irony Publication of Walden at Publication of The Outermost
first only mildly successful House at first only mildly
successful
FACILITATING GOOD DISCUSSION DUE: ___________
Be thorough and specific in your responses. Give illustrative examples whenever you think of a
few.
§ What makes a discussion “good”? Explore this idea.
§ Do “place” and “participants” affect the value of a discussion for you? How? Why?
§ Are good conversation skills transferable – beyond peculiar place and peculiar participants – to be successful anywhere? Identify skills that make the most solidly-reliable transfers and speculate why.
§ Can you think of an instance in your life wherein your consciously and successfully transferred speaking skills from one social circumstance to another with ease? Describe and discuss such a transfer.
§ Conversely, identify several dynamics of a “discussion” which can completely numb you or disrupt the gentle flow of your thoughts/words.
§ Prioritize those identified dynamics, from Worst, through Less Worse, to Bothersome. Note, where you can, why each causes you duress.
§ Identify one of those non-helpful traits you have sometimes found in yourself (in discussion) that you will work to mitigate – even eliminate – between now and the end of your year in this course.
Being the facilitator means that you:
§ Asking q’s
§ Ask follow-up questions, gently nudging
the speaker towards more detail
§ Wonder about something aloud
§ Are sure to vary the “callees” ---
to be fair, to enrichen the discussion
by varied perceptions
§ Make summarizing statements from
time to time
§ Offer no direct praise—finding other
ways to heighten the pleasure of the
participants, of the group
§ Very occasionally, offer a personal perception or insight
Use this format to clarify the organization and the substance of your student-led facilitation. Present it, typed, at the end of your presentation. All should be prepared by______.
“ “ from Thoreau’s Walden (pp. - )
(title of assigned
chapter)
Facilitator (s):____________________________________
Satellite-Support*:________________________________
Selected co/tape of instrumental music
(title/composer/other details):_______________________
Reason for Selection (Detail the role
the music plays in your selection):____________________
Summary of chapter (a condensing-significantly shorter than the original – offering its salient
points):
Three-Five Selected Philosophies (obviously, with discussion-potential
a. Copy idea
b. Paraphrase it (Simplify. Translate word for word. End-product will be longer and more clear than original.)
c. Indicate certain “teasers” and “anticipated follow-ups” you plan to use to begin and to sustain discussion
*Satellite Support
§ Don’t interrupt the give-and-take of the facilitator with participants to call attention to a different stream of thought.
§ Do Support the stream of thought the facilitator is trying to establish/explore.
§ Do enter into “the shallows” of the discussion (the dead or dying spaces), by inviation only (a specific nod from the facilitator), to pick up/enrichen the discussion, or to get it back “on track”
I. THE NARRATIVE
The centerpiece of this unit is a parallel study of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and
Henry Beston’s The Outermost House. The places these best-regarded naturalists took to mind and heart both lie in Massachusetts. Thoreau (Thore’-o) lived out an experiment at a kettle-hole pond (technically a lake) called Walden, in Concord, keeping track of seasonal changes, bird and animal visitors, and all measurable aspects of the pond and its woods, during his stay of two years, two months, and two days. Beston stayed a year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, at Nauset Spit, making similar record of Nature’s faces, powers, and changes, studying the grinding forces of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. In limited living space, alone, relying on common sense,
both men attained security and satisfaction in their lives. In journals, later to evolve into the books under study, both men often broke from pure, scientific observation to higher planes of thought – to metaphor, to allegory, to spiritual musings – to try to explain the interplay of connections each felt in being in nature, in acknowledging partnership with nature, in “learning,” as the English romantic poet William Wordsworth had earlier enthused, “from Nature’s teachings.” Using keen observational senses and techniques, they distilled from the natural world, spiritual knowledge and instruction and thereby uncovered Nature’s own regenerating powers and concomitant joys.
By examining the works of these two writers, this curriculum encourages students towards their own original relationship with nature, helps build in them keener observational skills, stimulates them to record – through journalizing – what they see, hear, feel and intuit. To those ends, students are invited to visit, often and independently, a distinctive “face” of nature – a lake, a forest, the sea – in their own home-territory, then to observe, ponder and record in their journals their findings and musings. With them, for ready consultation and identification of the species and specimens they find there, they should bring either of these recommended secondary sources: the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to New England (Peter Alden) or The Seaside Naturalist (Deborah Coulombe). As well as field experiences, students’ journals would come to reflect their multi-leveled understanding of the concept of place, including the importance and effect of creating “place,” imbibing “place,” transporting a sense of “place” with them. They would be called to explore in their journals their own “Waldens,” places of personal significance and sustenance (See Mary Oliver’s “Going to Walden,” and other relevant pieces, in the Appendix). Finally, as students read the primary sources and listen to discussion, they should note in their journals the likenesses and differences they observe between Thoreau and Beston, in preparation for a comparison/contrast essay.
Of course, courteous listening in discourse is only one role a student needs to learn. Just as important, the student should find comfort in leading discussion, in prompting, nudging, and helping to expand and deepen the discourse. Providing an arena of comfort and offering clear guidelines about the facilitating of a discussion can help the student work towards expertise. Thus, besides the anticipated small-group and classroom discussions about points and issues the texts and ancillary activities raise, the unit imbeds specific skill instruction in facilitating a discussion. (See materials on facilitating a discussion in the Appendix)
Finally, this unit asks students to design a children’s book, a book that would demonstrate clear awareness of “voice,” of “audience” and of Thoreau’s or Beston’s philosophy, one that would challenge them to exhibit a panoply of understandings and skills. With a decidedly different “voice” and “audience” from those of the children’s book, students would also write an epitaph or eulogy for one of the men. This task would offer yet another opportunity for students to demonstrate their understanding of “voice” and “audience” as they seek to identify and cohere the salient markings of Thoreau’s or Beston’s well-lived lives.
The very expression “well-lived lives” seems to coax a retrospection, that examines beginnings, that weighs the influences and philosophies affecting one’s approach to life, that recognizes the shortness, the significance and the preciousness of each life. In the end of a well-lived life, no matter how long or short, surely one finds inherent instruction for the launching and the guiding of a nascent life, soon also to be well lived. Thus, this unit ends as it will have begun, with disparite ideas examining these very matters – some pessimistic, some optimistic, some realistic – ideas that will have activated earlier in the unit, one supposes, a fury of response and that will later, one hopes, on re-examination, reveal in all participants a seasoned maturity and thoughtful posture.
II. THE OUTLINE
Thoughts on life and death
- Remorseful
a. “George Gray” (E.L. Masters)
b. “LIVE! Life is a banquet and most [poor suckers] are starving to death. (Auntie Mame Burnside from the play Auntie Mame).
- Endorsing
a. “Lucinda Matlock” (E.L. Masters)
b. “Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how
that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.”
(Carl Sandburg).
c. “However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard
names…. The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.” (H.D. Thoreau).
d. “It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy”. (H. Beston).
- Death
a. Defined
b. Responses, anticipatory and retrospective
c. William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”
1. Emphasizing nature as teacher and healer
2. Emphasizing serenity over anxiety
3. Emphasizing Bryant’s injunction, “So live…..”
4.Life is a series of experiments, organically connected, which completes its circle in death.
The Men and their Work
- Comparative “stats” (See Appendix).
- Thoreau
a.
Walden
b. Words by or about Thoreau (See Appendix).
- Beston
a.
The Outermost House
b. Words by or about Beston (see Appendix)
4.. Comparison/Contrast essay
The Journal
- A place to
a. Pose questions
b. Explore thought
c. Sketch/draw (“Drawing,” notes painter/ illustrator Jeannie Abbott, “is teaching yourself to see – and translating with your hands.”)
d. Test and develop a personal “voice”
e. Discover personal identity
f. Raise and argue theory and philosophy
g. Reveal playfulness in word and illustration
h. Collect field samples
i. Invite and comment upon relevant newspaper clippings
j. Outline, paraphase, summarize
k. Write poetry
l. Make a collage
m. Store “seed” for later germination, tending, and fruiting
- Examples (Appendix)
a. Abbott’s
b. Thoreau’s
- A means to sharpen skills
a. Observation
1.) See Odell Shepard’s piece, Appendix
2. See Nan Turner Waldron’s piece, Appendix
3.) Read “Looking Around” in Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird
b. Focus (See Thoreau’s piece, taken from A Thoreau Profile, Appendix)
c. Discipline
A sense of place
- Geographically
a. By map
1.) Thoreau: Massachusetts, Concord, and Walden
2.) Beston: Cape Cod, Eastham, Nauset Spit (A Geologist’s View of Cape Cod, p.50 and In The Footsteps of Thoreau pp. 66-69).
b. By word
1.) Ron Hoag’s “Walden: The Place” (Appendix)
2.) Beston’s description of his house (pp.6-9, Outermost)
3.) Tom McGuane’s “West Boulder Spring” (Heaven Is Under Our Feet)
4.) Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (excerpt in Finch’s Norton Book of Nature Writing).
- Scientifically
a. By its geologic history
1.) Continental Shelf
2.) Glacial Till
3.) Bedrock
4.) Moraine
5.) Kettle Pond
6.) Water – table Pond
7.) Groundwater
8.) Dune
9.) Scarp
10.) Bern
b. By its habitat
1.) Bog
2.) Marsh (Freshwater/Salt)
3.) Lake
3.) River
4.) Barrier Beach
5.) Tidal Flat
6.) Garden
7.) Forest
c. By its flora
1.) Pondside
a.) Mushrooms
b.) Ferns
c.) Eastern Hemlock
d.) Oak Trees
e.) Poison Ivy
f.) Lesser Duckweed
2.) Oceanside
a.) Beach Grass
b.) Sea Lettuce
c.) Bladder Wrack
d.) Irish Moss
e.) Beach Rose
f.) Seaside Goldenrod
d. By its fauna
1.) Pondside
a.) Birds
i. Scarlet Tanager
ii. Yellow-throated Vireo
iii. Wood Thrush
iv. Tufted Titmouse
v. Black-capped Chickadee
b.) Amphibians and Reptiles
i. Bullfrog
ii. Woodhouse’s Toad
iii. Common Box Turtle
iv. Milk Snake
c.) Insects
i. Yellow-Legged Meadowhawk
ii. European Caterpillar Hunter
iii. Crane Flies
iv. Eastern Pine Elfin
2.) Oceanside
a.) Birds
i. Least Sandiper
ii. Ruddy Turnstone
iii. Great Blue Heron
iv. Snowy Egret
v. Herring Gull
b.) Marine animals
i. Hermit Crab
ii. Sea Star
iii. Horseshoe Crab
iv. Atlantic Rock Crab
c.) Shells and Bivalves
i. Jingle Shell
ii. Slipper Shell
iii. Moonshell
iv. Surf Clam
v. Cherrystones
vi. Scallop
3.) Psychologically and Spiritually
a. E.L. Doctorow’s Remarks at the Walden Woods Project Press Conference Boston, Massachusetts, April 25, 1990 (Heaven Is Under Our Feet).
b. L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz
c. Tom Sauer’s “Pond Lessons” (Massachusetts Wildlife)
d. Sandra Cisnero’s opening to The House on Mango Street
e. Jane Hamilton’s “A Map of the World”
d.) Georgia Heard’s Writing Toward Home
e.) Helen Bowdoin’s “Acorn, Flower, Leaf or Pebble” (Appendix)
f.) Allan Gussow’s “A Sense of Place”
g.) John Hay’s The Run (see excerpt in Finch’s Norton Book of Nature Writing)
h.) Mary Oliver’s “Going to Walden” (Appendix)
4.) Politically
a.) Chief Seattle’s letter to Washington (Heaven…..)
b.) John McAleer’s “A Walk on the Gurnet” (Heaven….)
The Facilitation
1. Question students
about the dynamics of good discussion
(“Facilitating Good Discussion”, Appendix)
2. Define the role of facilitator (“Being the Facilitator”, Appendix)
3. Structure the assignment (samples, Appendix)
Children’s book
Eulogy or epitaph
III. Alignments to the Curriculum Frameworks
- To the English Language Arts Curriculum Framework
a. Guiding Principles 1,6: Language Strand/Learning Standards 2,3,4
(oral group discussion of texts and related readings. See facilitator/satellite worksheets, Appendix)
b. Guiding Principle 3: Literature Strand/Learning Standards
8,9,10,11,13,15
(learn nomenclature, cull material for comparison/contrast
essay, compare/ contrast tone of the two Masters’
poems, identify and analyze characteristics of eulogy
and epitaph, compare Thoreau’s Walden and Beston’s
The Outermost House, examine the diction and
rhythm in some prose that makes it poetic.)
c. Guiding Principle 5: Media Strand/Learning Standard 26 (viewing of “Antaeus”)
d. Guiding Principle 4,9: Composition Strand/Learning Standards 19,20,21,22,23,25 (journal writing, comparison/contrast
essay, creation of children’s book, writing of eulogy or
epitaph)
- To the Science and Technology Curriculum Framework
a. G