As friends return from this year’s Pilgrimage, I am drawn back to the sights and learnings of my own travels to Massachusetts in 2022 and especially our memorable day in Concord. We followed the same amble that Emerson would have walked to visit his friend Ralph, who had gone “…to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” And, it provides the perfect opportunity to re-visit Mary Oliver.
Going to Walden
It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!
Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But 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.
On this third Thursday, check out the poetry Bonnie and Kat are sharing.
Bibliographic credit: Oliver, Mary. Devotions: The selected Poems of Mary Oliver. Penguin Press, 2017, pg 430.
Knit+ Librarian 
I remember that trip you took and how much I envied the adventure. Thanks for this lovely poem.
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Thank you for sharing such a lovely poem.
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