‘Watery reflections’
Dear Friends
Today’s offering for our Companionship email comes from The Reverend Dr Rob Whiteman who is the local faith contact for the Unitarian Christian Church. (See his contact details here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/chaplaincy/team/)
This is a picture of Walden Pond (near Concord, Massachussetts).
This is where Henry David Thoreau took himself off for 2 years to live a life in the woods, to live a life of awareness and reflection “to live deliberately.” He was passionate about the Pond and its efficacy for him.
Thoreau wrote in Walden:
In such a day, Walden (Pond) is a perfect forest mirror; nothing so fair, so pure, lies on the surface of the earth.
Sky water – it needs no fence.
It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs;
a mirror swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush – this the light dust cloth;
a mirror which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface . . .
It is no dream of mine to ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven than I live, to Walden even.
In the Visitors’ Centre, you are invited to add to an interactive database the location – anywhere in the world – that you feel has a similar efficacy, resonance, significance for you; answering the question “Where is Your Walden?”
Gathered around our own silent, reflective pool, I invite you to call to mind somewhere that has that resonance for you – a place for quietness, for drinking stillness, for feeling the amplitude of the wealth that is your life.
Rob Whiteman