THREE

Henry David Thoreau: Think of the Small as Large

“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “Be humbly what you aspire to be … man’s noblest gift to man is his sincerity, for it embraces his integrity also.”

There is no greater champion of dharma in American letters than Henry David Thoreau, and he is one of the few who actually used the word “dharma” in his writing and in his thought. Thoreau was an American poet, naturalist, surveyor, philosopher, and a leading Transcendentalist. He is best known for his masterpiece, Walden, and for his essay Civil Disobedience. These, and his many other works, have inspired some of the world’s greatest exemplars of freedom—giants like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

As it turns out, America’s greatest natural philosopher was also a student of the Bhagavad Gita. He studied it—along with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson—and often quoted from the majestic 1785 translation by Charles Wilkins. The Gita was one of the books Thoreau most prized during his two-and-a-half-year adventure at Walden Pond. Sitting at the side of Walden watching a sunrise, he would at times imagine himself as a yogi from ancient times absorbed in contemplation. “Depend upon it,” he wrote in a letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, “that rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully.”

Like every good yogi, Thoreau saw his entire life as a kind of trek toward dharma. “A man tracks himself through life,” he wrote. “One should be always on the trail of one’s own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.” He often quotes the Gita to himself in his personal journals, especially Krishna’s counsel about dharma: “A man’s own calling,” he lets Krishna remind him, “with all its faults, ought not to be forsaken.”

Unlike Jane Goodall, young Thoreau was not a celebrity in his own day. Far from it. He was widely seen as “an irresponsible idler, a trial to his family, and no credit to his town” (to quote one of his grumpy Concord neighbors). In short, Thoreau was seen as a loser.

I fell in love with Thoreau in graduate school. I loved how this guy had apparently embraced his inner loser. I had secretly felt like something of a loser myself, especially during the tormented social maneuvering of high school. But I had no idea there would be power in embracing this position on the social chessboard. I thought this side of me was to be hidden at all costs. So I tried all the harder to be seen as one of the elect: the winners.

Thoreau, known today as one of America’s greatest writers, was widely disregarded, overlooked, and scoffed at in his own time. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, never sold even the small, thousand-copy print run of its first edition. Walden, his masterpiece—now read by virtually every college sophomore—languished on bookstore shelves for years. Indeed, the first edition of 2,000 copies took eight years to sell, and there wasn’t a second printing until just before Thoreau’s untimely death in 1862.

Thoreau’s resolutely unconventional life as the mystic of Concord required a different kind of courage than did Goodall’s. It required the courage to acknowledge The Gift in the face of widespread disapprobation. It required the resilience to breathe air in the same town in which he was seen as a kind of community joke. And it required Thoreau to develop a fierce sense of autonomy. As a result of his steadfast loyalty to his gifts, of course, the world came to respect them as well. And that same scoffing world has now been applauding his genius—and his gritty aphorisms—for over a hundred and fifty years.

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Thoreau did come to value The Gift. But he made one largely unknown and yet fascinating stab at “fitting in” early on in his life—one attempt to be who he thought he should be rather than who he was. I find it strangely reassuring to examine this anomalous chapter in his life.

In May of 1843, at the age of twenty-six, Henry David Thoreau set off for New York City. He was intent on securing his place in the city’s sparkling literary scene. Thoreau had already begun to find his footing as a writer. He’d discovered that he was not, as he had thought, a poet, but a prose artist. By the time he left for New York, his prose had already matured beyond the influence of his highly respected teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Thoreau was aware that Emerson was not happy with his prose, and to his way of thinking, this proved only that he was indeed moving in the right direction—toward himself.) By May of 1843, just several years out of Harvard and with only a slim body of work under his belt, Thoreau nonetheless judged himself ready to mingle with the great and near-great of the American world of letters—Horace Greeley, Henry James Sr., W. H. Channing.

Thoreau was a colossal failure in the city. But the story of this failure, and of Thoreau’s thirteen months in New York, is revealing. It shows the unconventional nature lover attempting to develop a writing career in the conventional way. He was not well accepted by the New York literary world, which saw him as impossibly rough-hewn and ordinary. He was rough-hewn, of course. Nathaniel Hawthorne describes his face: “Thoreau is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous, manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior.” Thoreau himself laughingly commented on his beak of a nose, which he called “my most prominent feature.” But Hawthorne (who was himself supremely handsome) adds an important modifier to his description: “… his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.”

Thoreau tried to sparkle in the literary salons of New York. The attempt fell flat. He tried to style his prose to appeal to the fashions of the day. His work was mediocre—and widely disregarded. Throughout his entire year in New York, Thoreau never managed to publish more than one slim book review, in spite of his powerful determination to be published with the big boys. Eventually, toward the end of his stay, the pain of rejection forced him to reach even more deeply into his own unique gift. Who am I? What is my voice? What do I have to say? Digging down into his own inner world, and longing for his roots in the woods of Concord, Thoreau—from his tenement in New York—wrote the brilliant sketch on “the first sparrow of spring,” which would become one of the most famous passages in Walden. (As it turns out, an overwhelming amount of great nature writing has been written in the city by writers who long for their true homes.)

Finally, the unhappy writer—floundering, separated from himself—had to go home, tail between his legs. He returned to Concord—to his woods, to his pond, to his father’s pencil factory, and to Emerson’s house. “Be humbly who you are,” he wrote upon arriving home.

Thoreau’s failure in New York was a life lesson. Be who you are. Do what you love. Follow your own distant drummer. “A man’s own calling ought not to be forsaken!”

Failure is a part of all great dharma stories. And great dharma failures do not just happen early in life. They routinely happen throughout life. We only know who we are by trying on various versions of ourselves. We try various dharmas on to see if they fit. How do I look in this? Yes, this looks cool, and feels great. Or: egad, no! Not in a million years. When the clothes don’t fit well, it clarifies things for us. In any quest for dharma there will inevitably be lots of trying on of outfits.

Thoreau’s failure is particularly instructive, because it emerged from a dharma error most of us have made at one point or another in our lives: the attempt to be big. The attempt to be, in fact, bigger than we are. A confusion about the right size of a life of dharma.

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Remember Ellen—my friend the psychiatric nurse?

Ellen, as you recall, was in a muddle about her calling. Any of her friends could see that she had been acting from the center of her dharma for years. Even complete strangers could see it. But she saw it only fleetingly. She had never fully named her dharma, accepted it, embraced it. As a result, she had gone through too many years feeling that she had somehow not entirely won at the game of life.

Much of Ellen’s muddle was in her thinking about her dharma. She thought that her job, her calling, was too small. It didn’t match up to her fantasies of what a calling should be.

Some of her thinking, no doubt, was inspired by the views of our culture about nursing. Caretaking roles are not highly regarded by our society, to say the least. The nobility of the helping professions is all too invisible. Nurses are taken for granted—and doctors are too often esteemed not because they are wonderful caretakers but because they are good businesspeople. (Ellen, by the way, has no problem with her self-esteem in the face of doctors. For thirty years she has presided—day in and day out—over an enormously complex psych unit through which doctors merely cruised from time to time.)

But Ellen’s problems started long before her nursing career. I had known Ellen’s parents—both now long dead—and I knew how some of their ideas had inevitably found their way into Ellen’s head. Ellen’s father, Bud, was caught between the twin agonies of grandiosity and devaluing. He was a bright, entrepreneurial man, who had tried to create a business selling frozen cookies long before frozen foods were a staple of American life. His ideas were innovative and really quite brilliant, but a hairsbreadth before their time. He would have made a fortune had he tried them out a few years later. Bud’s business venture failed, and he remained caught for the rest of his career directing a school lunch program, which seemed to him a real betrayal of his potential.

By the time I knew him, Bud felt defeated. He was cynical about work, and obsessed with security, safety, and keeping expectations low. Shortly after I graduated from college he suggested that I might consider driving a truck for a living, because it was a safe and steady income. “You’ll never go hungry,” he said. He had himself tasted hunger: While Bud was perfecting the frozen cookie, his family had endured several bleak winters in a house they came to call “Hungry Hill.”

Ellen—through Bud—had come smack up against two of the enemies of dharma: grandiosity, and its flip side, devaluing. (In short, the problem of size.) Grandiosity and devaluing both represent unrealistic thinking about possibility. Grandiosity motivates us to try to be bigger than we could possibly be. Devaluing makes us think of ourselves as smaller than we actually are.

Ellen’s father often told her that his harsh discipline was “for her own good,” and that it was part of a grand (his own term for it) strategy to help her make of her life “a great work of art.” His precise words were devastating, and I wince when Ellen reminds me of them: “You are a piece of granite,” he said to her, time and again. “I am the sculptor. And I will grind you fine.” This was said with sadistic emphasis. “And if,” he continued, working himself up into a lather, “if perchance my mallet slips and the whole thing crumbles to dust, well, I will take that chance.”

This young woman didn’t have a prayer. Nursing—for which she was in every single way suited—did not in her eyes really qualify her life as “a work of art.” So Ellen remained split—as her father was—between big ideas and what seemed to be an unacceptably smaller reality. For obvious reasons, Ellen could not always embrace who she actually was. So she lived with doubt—sometimes unsure about what otherwise could have been embraced as an immensely satisfying career.

The question of the “size” of a life is tricky territory, because big ideas also have an expansive quality to them that allow us to experiment with who we can be. Big ideas are not bad. But somehow, the bigness must remain closer to the ground than it did for Ellen’s father. The bigness, must, in fact, come through the smallness. Thoreau discovered this on his trek to New York.

“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” said Thoreau—not who you think you should be. Thoreau’s early struggle was to be “right-sized.” Not too big, not too small. It was his resolute embrace of a right-sized self that became for him the doorway into a full life.

Having landed back on both feet at Walden Pond, Thoreau said, “I would rather walk to Rutland [Vermont] than to Jerusalem.” This was written at a time when there was much grand gesturing about the metaphysical Jerusalem. No grand gesture for Thoreau. No Jerusalem. Gritty (and nearby) Vermont would do.

“Think of the small as large,” wrote Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao te Ching. Thoreau is the great American genius of this aphorism. Think of the small as large. “See yourself as a grain of sand,” suggests Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan crazy-wisdom guru, “see yourself as the smallest of the small. Then you can make room for the whole world.”

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By May of 1845, Thoreau was home from New York City and back in the woods at Walden Pond—building his cabin. His feet were solidly planted back on terra firma. He was engaged in dharma that was right-sized. Thoreau now saw clearly that the journey of a writer was not the outer journey to New York, but the inner journey to his own voice. He was going to be himself, and to hell with the naysayers. He would live out the Transcendentalist view that “human nature in general is revealed to each person through his own nature in particular.” His own nature in particular. Walden Pond was where Henry David Thoreau would intentionally conduct this inner journey to himself.

At this crossroads in his life something fascinating happens to Thoreau: His powers as a writer explode. Two days after moving to Walden Pond, he wrote a lengthy entry in his journal about his personal experience of “self-emancipation.” He was exploring the idea of an exhilarating personal freedom in a passage in which he had been referring to the West Indies. He wrote, “Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man’s thinking and imagining provinces … should be more than his island territory. One emancipated heart and intellect! It would knock the fetters from a million slaves.”

After the emptiness (and “insincerity”) of his New York experience comes a freedom at Walden Pond so big it can knock the fetters from a million slaves. As young Thoreau connected once again to himself, he felt reunited with the world, and he saw clearly the relationship between his own freedom and the freedom of the world. Mahatma Gandhi would make the same discovery, imprisoned in India just a hundred years later. And Nelson Mandela’s resolute and resilient inner freedom—even while in shackles—finally did in fact liberate millions. Both Gandhi and Mandela were dedicated readers of Thoreau.

Thoreau discovered the intimate connection between the individual and the field—between the particular and the universal, between the small and the large. This was a central principle of the Transcendentalists. But Thoreau had not fully grasped it until now. It was an insight that would emerge directly from his newfound faith in authenticity. Thoreau now wrote excitedly in his journal, “The whole is in each man.”

The mystic relationship of the individual to the universal is absolutely central to the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, and we will be hearing it played as a central theme in Krishna’s teachings. But interestingly, before the principle was given its definitive explication in the Bhagavad Gita, it was the centerpiece of one of the most ancient dharma tales in the Indian oral-wisdom tradition. This is the wonderful story of Indra’s Net—a tale Thoreau and Emerson almost certainly knew. It is the most pointed ancient investigation of the relationship between the small and the large.

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Indra was “the thunderbolt God”—the greatest god in the ancient Vedic pantheon, which emerged at the dawn of yoga metaphysics in India at least 3,000 years ago. Indra lived (word had it) in the clouds at the peak of Mount Meru—the most sacred mountain of the Hindu tradition. Meru is considered the center of the world in Vedic cosmology, what Joseph Campbell sometimes referred to as the axis mundi, or “the immoveable spot.” Just the place for a great god to reside.

Around his celestial home Indra had flung a vast net—a web stretching out infinitely in all directions. Each vertex, or node, of this net was held together by a glittering jewel. There were infinite nodes, and so there were infinite jewels.

What does it mean? Just this: Each gem in the net represents a human soul. And though each of these jewels is unique (has its own fingerprint!) it also reflects in its polished surface the image of all the other jewels. American philosopher and psychologist Alan Watts imagined this web as a multidimensional spiderweb. He said, “Imagine this web in the early morning, covered with dewdrops. And every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops. And, in each reflected dewdrop, the reflections of all the other dewdrops in that reflection. And so on ad infinitum.”

Each jewel in Indra’s net represents both itself as a particular jewel, and, at the same time, the entire web. So, any change in one gem would be reflected in the whole. Indeed, the individual gem is the whole. In the words of Indologist Sir Charles Eliot, “Every object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact IS everything else.”

It is, therefore, the sacred duty of every individual human soul to be utterly and completely itself—to be that jewel at that time and in that place, and to be that jewel utterly. It is in this way—merely by being itself—that one jewel holds together its own particular corner of Space and Time. The action of each individual soul holds together the entire net. Small and large at the same time.

In another great Hindu scripture—The Mahabharata (the great epic poem of which the Gita is a part)—Krishna teaches about dharma: “Dharma upholds both this-worldly and other-worldly affairs,” he says. Krishna here introduces a fascinating new dimension to dharma. Dharma upholds and expresses the order, harmony, and essential nature of individual beings in the world, and at the same time upholds an unseen inner world order. (It is this order and harmony that had been threatened on the field of Kurukshetra, and that could only be saved by Arjuna’s faithfully playing his small role—just as Thoreau would later play his.)

Our actions in expression of our dharma—my actions, your actions, everyone’s actions—are infinitely important. They connect us to the soul of the world. They create the world. Small as they may appear, they have the power to uphold the essential inner order of the world.

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Thoreau discovered this principle through his own experience, and through his close examination of nature and of life. Sitting in the center of his own axis mundi at Walden, he was lit up with the energy of the cosmos. It all poured out in his writing. For two and a half years, Thoreau unleashed upon the world a torrent of words. Says his biographer Robert Richardson Jr., “[Thoreau] produced more writing of higher quality over a greater range of subjects while he was living at Walden than at any other period of his life. In twenty-six months, he wrote two complete drafts of A Week, a complete draft of Walden, a lecture on his life at Walden, a lecture essay on Thomas Carlyle, and the first third of The Maine Woods.”

In unleashing his own freedom, Thoreau did free a million slaves. He discovered that his authentic words had real power. When written from “the immoveable spot” they could, indeed, change the world. In the essay On Civil Disobedience, Thoreau outlined the justification for active resistance against both the immorality of slavery and the futility of America’s war with Mexico. This powerful document has reverberated through history since: It directly inspired the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. And it has inspired generations of Americans to be themselves.

The fact that Thoreau’s trek to Walden was such an altogether homespun experiment makes us love him all the more. As it turns out, his exotic experiment took place a scant mile and a half from home. Recently, scholars have discovered that his mother often brought him cookies and sandwiches. His experiment was only about two steps beyond sleeping in the backyard in a tent. It was not heroic. And, of course, he never claimed that it was. It was a small act, and that smallness was the very source of its virtue—the secret source of its largeness. Later on, capturing this paradox perfectly, he would say about his inner and outer peregrinations, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.”

It is fascinating to watch Thoreau at Walden Pond begin to take full ownership of his idiosyncratic rhythms. It was at Walden that he came to know and to embrace the ecology of his inner life. He spent his mornings reading the great European authors: Goethe, Carlyle, Schiller. And in the afternoons he sallied forth, “sauntering,” as he said, for walks that could last well into the evening. He lived a thoughtful, intellectual life, but also an appealingly simple one. There was no attempt at heroism here. No grandiosity.

Finally, Thoreau was able to fully declare himself—to clearly name and celebrate his dharma: “I am a mystic, a Transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot,” he declared. It was not easy to declare oneself a mystic in nineteenth-century Concord. In most people’s minds this translated directly into “loafer.” Still, having claimed his dharma and having felt the power of this act, he could now give his advice with authority: “Do what you love!” he wrote exuberantly. “Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”

Know your own bone!

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Ellen’s task, now, at midlife, is to know her bone—her gift for caretaking. And knowing it, to see its true largeness. For that, she will need help. She will need mirroring. I try to do this for her when I can.

Recently, I went with Ellen to visit Jane, a centenarian of whom Ellen has charge. Jane lives alone—at one hundred and two years of age—in her own second-floor walk-up. This little apartment was designed and decorated sometime in the late fifties, and nothing has changed. It is fitted out with aging wall-to-wall shag carpet of an orange color that any of us who lived through the 1960s will recognize. There is the inevitable knotty pine “early American” furniture, with lots of fabric wreaths and lime-green ceramic lamps shaped like dolphins. There is the faint smell of urine. There is plenty of dust.

And there is one-hundred-and-two-year-old Jane. Puttering around in her housecoat, drinking coffee and leafing absentmindedly through a stack of papers. There on the kitchen table are her many bills—which she is obviously paying herself, thank you—and a neat list in a notebook of bills paid and unpaid. (Why do we assume that the elderly cannot do these things for themselves?)

Jane takes us for a tour of the apartment. Kitchenette. (Also knotty pine.) Bathroom. Old-person smell. Bedroom. White-painted furniture and more shag carpet—turquoise this time. While we’re in the bedroom, Jane remembers something she wants to give to Ellen, and opens a top drawer of her bureau. As she does so, inexpertly, the whole bureau begins to tip in Jane’s direction. Ellen flies into action. She catches the bureau in her powerful nurse’s arms. She sits the shaken Jane down on the bed to make sure she is all right. Then she makes a joke of the whole thing. Fifteen minutes later, when Ellen refers to this incident, Jane says, “Well, that never happened. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ellen just laughs, and opens a probiotic-rich yogurt for Jane to taste.

All the while, I’m watching Ellen. She’s lit up. She’s having fun. She is goofing on Jane, and on the whole scene, throughout, but in the nicest way. She is taking care of little things unobtrusively. She cleans up a spill in the bathroom. As we prepare to leave, she touches Jane tenderly, smoothing back her hair. Jane squeezes her hand. “What would I ever do without you?”

Ellen chuckles as we walk back out to the car. I observe to myself, OK, she really is lit up. There are the shining eyes. She is not just making this up. She’s not just doing this out of obligation, or to be a good person. She genuinely likes this stuff. Taking care of Jane would make me crazy. I would be full of resentment within half an hour, and would be fantasizing about sending her off to the nursing home within two days’ time.

My ongoing dialogue with Ellen has helped me to realize something: I never really liked helping, even though—strangely—I chose “the helping professions.” I didn’t even like that term: helping. Thoreau said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” Yes.

But Ellen is completely herself when helping. There is none of the forced helpfulness that would characterize my efforts. This is what a real caretaker-soul looks like, I thought. This is why we all have to have different dharmas. Every base is covered somehow, but only if everyone acts on their authentic calling. Only if everyone holds together her part of the net.

On another occasion, I helped Ellen with a yard sale—schlepping mountains of tchotchkes and old furniture from the garage to the driveway, setting up long tables and hanging largely gratuitous price tags on what was now virtually junk. (Ellen didn’t really want the money. She just wanted to get rid of her stuff.) I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but every other car was full of people Ellen knew. The most fun were her patients from the psych unit in the VA. Some showed up on motorcycles. Some in soft, handworked leather vests and headbands. Some in rusted-out vans—cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, and with their latest sixty-five-year-old girlfriend riding shotgun. Ellen joked with them. “Elmer, I hope to God you took your meds before you got on that bike. I mean the meds we prescribed for you, not the ones you bought on the Internet.”

Since I have been writing this book, Ellen and I have been talking off and on about dharma. She said to me one day, “I think my dharma is to create a safe space for people. To create a safe container in which people can thrive and be themselves. To be a kind of home base for folks—especially those who have no other home base.”

Ellen and I have created an ongoing joke. I direct The Institute for Extraordinary Living at Kripalu. We decided that Ellen’s house—for many years a sanctuary for me, as for so many others—would henceforth be known as The Institute for Ordinary Living. It would be a place where I could feel both of my feet on the ground. It has been for me through the years a place where I can embrace the magic of ordinary living. Whereas my mind is often in the clouds, Ellen’s is right on the ground.

And yet, in spite of all of this, deep into middle age, Ellen is still occasionally confounded by her early demons of grandiosity and devaluing. Ellen continues to wrestle with the process of naming and claiming her dharma. What is my life really about? Does my little dharma really matter? These doubts, when their tracks have been laid down early, become remarkably intractable. And they create suffering.

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Each one of us has, at some point, been caught like Ellen between the twin perils of grandiosity and devaluing. On the one hand, we secretly daydream about being famous, being glamorous, being renowned for some great work. On the other hand, we fear that our small lives—such as they are—don’t amount to a hill of beans. So there they are: the devil—grandiosity. And the deep blue sea—devaluing. They are both unhappy ways to live.

What is really the right size for our life—for our dharma? Not too big. Not too small.

In New York, Thoreau was reaching too high. He had an idea of greatness. But it became a rigidly held concept that disconnected him from his true greatness, which was both smaller and larger than he thought. At Walden, however, Thoreau was right-sized. At Walden he undertook just a small experiment. He was near enough to home to get his daily delivery of cookies. He was comfortable enough, yes. But he was just a little uncomfortable, too. There was a stretch. Just enough of a stretch. And right in that balance, Thoreau found the correct size for his life. And his dharma exploded with energy.

Right size is everything.

Think of the small as large.