As my peripatetic fate beckons once again, I have been drawn to the voice of Mary Oliver. She roamed and wandered in her region of the cosmos, but she was attentive, respectful, and caring as she did so.
In her early poem “Going to Walden,” she responded to people that told her she must go, as a pilgrim, to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau once lived deliberately in a cabin, in the woods, near the water. But Oliver knows that it is not the geographical journey to a pond named Walden that matters.
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Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from going here and there!
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In a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
Going to Walden is an inward journey, just as Thoreau writes in “Walking” that he preferred for his daily walks to the wilderness to be symbolical of his inner life.
If I may dare to interpret and rephrase Oliver’s verses, going to Walden is the art of living and finding Walden where you are.
As I respond to the summons of my ambulatory fate, may I be mindful that the deeper and truer journey is an inward one.
Daniel G. Campos 