Another entry from my trip journal.
2/14 Walden
As I write this I am sitting on Walden Pond, frozen over and covered with snow.
About 150 years ago, Henry David Thoreau may have been standing in this spot, looking at the bare trees dressed in a layer of snow. Maybe he even made snow angels, like my students did.
From where I sit, I hear the traffic of a nearby busy road. The moment of solitude and silence interrupted by progress, I guess.
Still, this place is here. My kids are here, walking on the frozen water, and it seems to me no less a miracle than when Jesus is said to have done so 2000 years ago.
I hear birds still here after many flew south — perhaps to our home in Georgia. I hear snow crunching under the feet of my students.
Being here makes it so clear to me. Even though I hear and see the nearby road, it seems a place cut off — another world, frozen in time and unchanged though everything around it — the road, the buildings, the entire country, is changed.
At this moment I feel like Emerson’s transparent eyeball. I finally, really understand what it is to know all, see all, and feel like I’m part or particle of God.
The overall sense of your Walden experience is made even more ethereal by the fact that high school students were making snow angels. I love when life is greater than ourselves and you've captured it so well – in such brevity.