Finding Our Rest and Retreat

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest

and most interminable, and to the citizen, the most dismal swamp. 

I enter the swamp as a sacred place– a sanctum sanctorum 

There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.

Henry David Thoreau

Cited in Mystical Hours

Brother Teasdale offers us these observations and insights:

… Here he tells us that to restore himself he enters the thick dark woods and finds a lonely swamp. He knows that the swamp is a sacred place, “a sanctum sanctorum” or a holy of holies. Its darkness did not scare Thoreau. 

He understood the message that remote places held: that nature is perhaps the most enduring, most significant source of vision and strength for us all. The darkness we humans fear in nature is precisely what we must confront and examine to reveal its own unknowable truth.

While Thoreau is famous for his long pensive and introspective walks, the lesson here is, as I see it, more about how to restore oneself when you feel spent, stressed, or out of rhythm and rhyme with your life’s purpose. 

To regain a sense of meaning and perspective, to restore balance and appreciation for life’s many challenges or tests, he would advise us to retreat… Retreat into nature and while there allow our deeper selves, our intuitive feelings to speak to us from out of the profound stillness and listen to the sounds of nature as you would listen for the beats of your heart…

There are many metaphors to explore here… Entering the darkness could be a desire to strain out all the sights and sounds of our culture, or it could mean to enter into a contemplative quiet so that we can look compassionately on our own unfinished lives and allow the darkness of nature to enter into us in ways that reveal our personal darkness, and that allows the dappled light of nature to give us clues towards a greater understanding and awareness of the dark and light together, the dark and light we all possess…

For me, nature will always be a wise and knowing source…

I find it profoundly contradictory when I seem to get caught up in my perceived responsibilities and further accelerated by the electronic demands that life in our society requires, and as a consequence, I forget to walk, go to the beach, saunter through a field etc. as spiritual gifts to my soul…

Thoreau has many great insights…One of the more compelling for me is that wealth is not measured by riches, it is measured by freedom and how we can choose to use our time…

Remembering that, I feel it’s time for me to go outside and take a walk!