Friday 12 July 2019

Wildness - Henry David Thoreau.



"We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us"

Organic radical thinker Henry David Thoreau was born today on July 12 1817

He promoted a simple natural way of life and spoke out against modern civilization and the violence of the state.and his ideas thankfully  still permeate all our seasons, who reminded us that when unjust laws are made wee should bot hesitate to break them. His essay  from 1848, Civil disobedience stands as a classic statement of principled resistance, and is a beautiful manifesto of much needed intent, that appeals to  people of individual conscience to resist political authority .https://archive.org/details/CivilDisobedience-HenryDavidThoreau

I will end with this wonderful quote from him which was written in 1851, long may Thoreau's legacy grow

"We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where
the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe;
to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more
solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close
to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore
and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and
unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed
and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough
of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,
vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the
wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud,
and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life
pasturing freely where we never wander."

FROM - Walden, 1894.

https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/henry-david-thoreau/

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