During the fall and winter of 1850 and 1851, Henry David Thoreau, America’s great philosopher and naturalist, was deeply immersed in an investigation of his growing experience of what he would call “The Wild.” He had come to believe that the very energy and genius of humankind was to be found only in a deep, mystical connection with our own inner “wildness.” “Life consists with wildness,” he wrote in his oft-delivered lecture entitled “The Wild,” first given live to an audience in 1851. “The most alive is the wildest. . . . All good things are wild and free.”
But what is this wildness that Thoreau seeks out and longs for? Do we long for it as well? You have in your hands a book entitled Rewilding. Does this mean that you feel, as Thoreau did, some lack of wildness in your life?
Keep in mind that Thoreau was a profoundly civilized man. Only a decade before his great affair with wildness, he had graduated from Harvard University — a place we might think of as decidedly “unwild” — where he excelled in Latin and Greek, in the study of the classics, in philosophy and ancient history, and a multitude of modern languages. He was devoted to knowledge. To the highest in Western civilization. To the wisdom of the great human cultures.
But had he somehow in his vast educational journey missed a connection with his inner ape?
Yes, he had. By his midthirties, Thoreau had come to believe that the journey to the highest pinnacle of human knowledge must lead beyond all of the book learning he had mastered. It must lead inexorably to a deep reacquaintance with the natural world from which we spring. In midlife, he fairly explodes with rapture in his discovery of the sublime in nature. His writing pulsates with these discoveries. In what he calls his “newer testament,” he calls for a great awakening to nature — to The Wild. He sings out his credo: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”
Can we identify with Thoreau in his search for the missing parts of human experience? Yes, of course we can. It is useful for us to remember that by the mid-1850s, visionaries such as Thoreau were already perceiving a profound deficit in our modern ways of living — were already seeing how we had lost our connection with the natural world. Their proclamations were, of course, an early identification of what we now call “nature deficit disorder.”
But Thoreau anticipated us in more ways than this. In addition to being one of our greatest naturalists, he was, famously, one of the first American proponents of the study of Eastern religion, and, perhaps especially, of the yoga tradition. Indeed, the great yogic scripture called the Bhagavad Gita was one of the few books Thoreau always had at his side during his two-year pilgrimage at Walden Pond. “Even I,” he wrote, as he sat on the edge of the pond at first morning light, “am a yogi!”
Thoreau’s journey to Walden Pond was an outward and visible sign of his return to his deepest self, and he associated this journey home with his study of the Eastern classics. He identified himself with what yogis call “the quest for the fully alive human being,” or in Sanskrit, the jivan mukti. He would certainly have known that one of the very highest stages in the development of the fully alive human being is the recognition that “all living beings are made of the same stuff.” (That is exactly how the yoga scriptures word it: “the same stuff.”) He would have known that all of those beings in the forest and the meadow and the cornfield were made of exactly the same stuff from which he was made. He would have understood that in knowing them, he knew himself more deeply. He would have seen himself as part of the family of nature.
In this brilliant new book, Micah Mortali stands on the shoulders of Thoreau in so many ways, bringing our quest for wildness into the twenty-first century. He acknowledges our longing for this lost part of our oh-so-civilized selves. And then more: he gives us simple, useful, and elegant practices through which we can reclaim this lost part.
In Thoreau, every exterior journey — the journey into the meadow and the forest and the cornfield — is also a journey into the beautiful internal world of the human mind, the human imagination, the human soul. What is outside is inside. And what is inside is outside. And the highest stage of this homecoming in the yoga tradition is called samadhi, which literally means “bringing the world together.”
Micah Mortali writes in the highest tradition of both Thoreau and yoga, from which he himself springs. His book, indeed, “brings the world together.” The interior and the exterior. The civilized and the uncivilized. The human and the more-than-human. We are grateful for this wonderful effort.
Stephen Cope
Scholar Emeritus
Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health