Walden. A classic about nature and humans' relationship to it. Written by the American philosopher and author Henry David Thoureau. His magnum opus.

This is the literature of slowness. No quick shifts, no dramatic turns.
Thoreau wrote Walden on the basis of a two-year and two-month retreat to the woods around Walden Pond in Massachusetts. On the shore of the lake, he built his own small log cabin and lived there from 1845 to 1848. He summarizes his motivation for this radical life choice in the following quote from the book:

“I moved into the woods because I wanted to live consciously, to concern myself solely with the basic facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach me, so that when my death approached I would not discover that I had not lived. I did not want to live without living, because life is so precious.”

Here he downsized and lived in nature, by nature and with nature. Walden describes Thoreau's days and nights in this landscape. In a calm rhythm, the reader gains insight into his deep devotion to the animals and birds. With great care he depicts how his inner world moves, and how the relatively few external events take shape.

“My days were not days of the week, bearing the mark of some heathen deity, nor were they broken into hours or slowly whittled to dust by the ticking of the clock, for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that they have but “one word for yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and they express the difference of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and skyward for today.” To my fellow-citizens this doubtless appeared as sheer laziness, but if the birds and flowers had weighed me in their scales I do not think I would have been found too lightly. A man must find his motives within himself, it is true. Nature’s own day is very calm, and it will hardly reproach him for his slowness.”

As a reader, you also get the opportunity to slow down with this book. It inspires alertness and presence in relation to our surroundings, down to the smallest detail. And if, in the reading process, you occasionally let yourself fall into the space between the words, you might be able to call Walden a three-hundred-page meditation.

With a final quote from the book, I wish you a good reading and meditation!

“Once it so happened that I happened to stand right where a rainbow touched the earth; it filled the lower atmosphere, colored the grass and leaves around me, and dazzled me as if I were looking through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which I lived for a moment like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer, my affairs and my whole life might have taken color after it.”

Hanneli Ågotsdatter, cand.arch., meditation teacher and psychotherapist. She is Kontemplation's daily manager and teaches at retreats, courses and on our eight-week course in mindfulness-based stress reduction.

She lives in an alternation between an outward-oriented working life and withdrawal in longer retreats.

Hanneli lives at the Growth Center in Nørre Snede and receives practical guidance from Jes Bertelsen.