Jessica Porter (5:20)
Tonight I'll be reading from his chapter called the Pond in Winter because, well, it's very beautiful and powerful writing and it describes winter. Now, sleep magic goes all over the world, but apparently about 90% of us are going through winter right now. Some kind of winter. I mean, I know for some of you that's a pretty mild thing with rare or sparse snow. I'm looking at you England, or even no snow. How's it going? Mumbai. And I have to say I live in Southern California, so there's no snow here either. But for others, winter is an icy dominatrix who governs everything about life for several months. I'm looking at you Scandinavia, Canada, Eastern Europe, Russia, and parts of the U.S. like New England, where Walden Pond is situated among many other places. So you know, if you're going through winter right now, I can't name them all, but if you go through what I call real winter and you Know what that is? You know, its beauty, its intensity, its stillness, and the patience it requires to make it through. In this chapter, Thoreau is describing the pond in winter and the fact that it becomes seemingly still, iced over. And I love that. You see, in traditional Chinese medicine, the season of winter corresponds with the water element in the body, running deeply and invisibly within the body. Winter is a time to support our kidneys, bladder and reproductive organs, the parts of us that handle fluid throughout our bodies and nourish our deepest vitality. So in winter, we become still internal and sort of hibernate so we can connect with the water flowing below the ice. And Thoreau does exactly that. He looks down at the pond through the ice, and it gets him reflecting upon great depths and ideas about life itself. The pond is not so much a body of water, but a mirror. So I hope that gives you a way of enjoying winter in a different way. As always, you're not really here to hear this story. If you want to enjoy it from your conscious mind, feel free to read the book. It's a great book. But tonight, as I read and you connect with my voice, you will feel the lovely, simple rhythms of Thoreau's writing, his opinions and observations, and obvious love for nature and life itself in all its seasons, as it takes you deeper and deeper into relaxation and into winter. I hope you enjoy it. Now, get yourself into a safe and comfortable position, and let's begin. Allow your eyes to close easily and gently. Although I realize most of you probably closed your eyes a long time ago. Keep them closed and bring your awareness to your breath now. Hmm? We're not here to manipulate the breath. We're here to bring focus to it, to bring your awareness to it. We're reeling in the awareness, like reeling in a fishing line or tugging on the leash of a puppy and pulling your awareness back home, back home to your breath, back home to your body. Now, the awareness loves to move around, so don't worry about it. We're just training it one second at a time, inviting it to follow your conscious lead. But its nature is to move around and explore, and that's okay. But every time, you invite it back to the breath, just as you are inviting it back right now, everything slowing down a bit. Everything's coming home a bit. And that feels nice at the end of the day. So bring your awareness now up into your eyelids. Just imagine for a moment that your eyelids are feeling very, very tired and relaxed. Sleepy, maybe. They do, but I'd like you to really reinforce that in Your mind, like, oh, my eyes are so heavy. And if they don't feel that way, pretend that they do. And now I'd like you to accept the weird suggestion that your eyelids are so relaxed and sleepy that they won't open. And now I'm going to ask you to test your eyes to make sure they won't open by wiggling your eyebrows while your eyelids remain closed. And I know you could open your eyes if you wanted to, but I'm asking you to imagine that you can't. And by wiggling your eyebrows, you're sort of saying to your body, oh, look, I can't open my eyes. But we're just playing a game here. Good, done. The wiggle. Great. Some of you are checking out already, going deeper and deeper already, or maybe didn't even make it through the intro. That's great. But this lovely, relaxed feeling that you have around your eyes, this warm, relaxed feeling, this is the same quality of relaxation you will soon have throughout your entire body. As you imagine that warm, relaxed feeling moving back now into your head. Just imagine that warm, relaxed feeling. Let's imagine it's a mistake. Let's imagine it moving back inside your brain. Allow your brain to be completely taken over by this lovely, warm mist of relaxation. And now your head is feeling heavy on the bed. And that's good. As you go deeper, deeper and deeper. And your head is feeling like a bowling ball on the bed. As your head sinks into the pillow, the muscles of your face are softening and letting go. Relaxing, because the day is done and your face is on vacation. Cut. As the lovely, warm, relaxed feeling moves down your neck into your shoulders. And imagine your shoulders becoming wide, warm and soft, the muscles of your shoulders completely letting go. And as your shoulders are letting go and your arms are becoming heavy, all of the responsibilities you carry on those shoulders are falling to the floor. Responsibilities you feel at work, responsibilities you feel in your waking life to your loved ones, responsibilities you feel to the world, to the future, and even responsibilities you may feel to the past. They've all fallen to the floor now, and you can pick any or all of them up in the morning, but for right now, you're free. This is your time. You are being nourished from the inside out. Out. And it feels wonderful as you go deeper and deeper. And your arms are very heavy now, and the heaviness is moving all the way down into your hands and your fingers. And you tune in now with any sounds that may be going on around you. Just notice them. And as you relax you simply let them be. Because from now on, any sound that you hear will actually take you deeper, deeper into relaxation, as the sound simply moves through you as a vibration taking you deeper and deeper. And sounds that may have in the past bothered you or disturbed you even, they are taking you deeper and deeper because you use your mind in a new way now. Your mind is working for you all the time, making your life better and better, As you imagine that warm mist of relaxation moving into your torso now inside of you. You may have been guarded most of the day, you may have been repressing feelings for work or obligations, but now you get to imagine that mist moving into your chest. Imagine that mist now is spiraling inside your ribcage, gently, lovingly, softly. Now you notice that that warm mist of relaxation is surrounding and supporting your. And any tension that may have built up around your heart today has disappeared. As the mist moves down deeper, deeper through your middle organs, softening, supporting. And as it moves down now deep into your belly, And your breath follows by dropping into your belly, You imagine that mist inside of you, surrounding and supporting. Your lower organs, Moving all the way down to the bottom of your spine, and your buttocks are relaxing, your lower back is softening, and the muscles of your belly are letting go. And you feel soft and relaxed and safe on the inside, Because you have a relationship with your inside, and you are in charge of how you feel. As the warm, relaxed feeling moves down your legs now all the way down your legs, and your legs are feeling heavy, heavy because your legs are on vacation and the warm, relaxed feeling is moving down into your feet and toes, your whole lower body feeling heavy. THE Pond in Winter After a still winter night, I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep. As what, how, when, where? But there was dawning Nature in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face and no question on her lips, I awoke to an answered question to nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth, dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed seem to say, forward Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. O Prince. Our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation. But day comes to reveal to us this great work which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether. Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search of water. If that be not a dream after a cold and snowy night, it needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an even equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots and the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more, Standing on the snow covered plain as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way further, first through a foot of snow and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light, as through a window of ground glass with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer. There a perennial waveless serenity reigns, as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch. Wild men who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fearnaughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore. As wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never consulted with the books and know and can tell much less than they have done. The things which they practice are said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home or knew where she had retreated. How prey did he get these in midwinter? Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper into nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate. Himself a subject for the naturalist, the latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects. The former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to Fish, and I love to see nature keep carried out in him. The perch swallows the grub worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel. And so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather, I was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some rude fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and, having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked halfway round the pond. Ah, the pickerel of Walden. When I see them lying on the ice or in the well, which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I'm always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes. They are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our conquered life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor grey like the stones, nor blue like the sky. But they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through, are themselves small waldens in the animal kingdom. Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here, that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaise and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market. It would be the sinosure of all eyes. There, easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully before the ice broke up early in 46, with Compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond, without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such bottomless ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the elusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes into which a load of hay might be driven, if there were any body to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the infernal regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a 56 and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom, for while the 56 was resting, by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvelousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual depth. I fathomed it easily with a codline and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath. To help me, the greatest depth was exactly 102ft, to which may be added the 5ft which it has risen since, making 107. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area, yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could not be true, for judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills, for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its center, not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of London Loch Fyne in Scotland, which he describes as a bay of salt water, 60 or 70 fathoms deep, 4 miles in breadth and about 50 miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, if we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it before the waters gushed. In what a horrid chasm must it have appeared. So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low down sunk a hollow bottom, broad and deep capacious bed of waters. But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fine when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a horrid chas chasm from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the farsight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plane has been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is the imagination give it the least license. Dives deeper and soars higher than nature goes. So probably the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. As I sounded through the ice, I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than 1 foot and 30 rods, and generally near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each 100ft in any direction beforehand within 3 or 4 inches inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes, even in quiet sandy ponds like this. But the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and his conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar and plain, shoal and valley and gorge, deep water and channel. If we knew all the laws of nature, we should need only one fact or the description of one, one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect. But the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting but really concurring laws which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view. As to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form, even when cleft or bored through it, is not comprehended in its entireness. What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breath breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors. And waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies a bold projecting brow falls off too, and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also. There is a bar across the entrance of our every cove or particular inclination. Each is our harbor for a season in which we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes perhaps from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet smell sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into this life, May we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true. We are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part stand off and on upon a harborless coast, Are conversant only with the bites of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry. And go into the dry docks of science. Or they merely refit for this world. And no natural currents concur to to individualize them. Sam, It. It.
