This photo was taken from the truck, on the road, with an iPhone …………. no wonder I don’t own a spiffy new camera.

In the morning when my husband gets a little extra sleep and after I put my feline torturer outside …………… I read Henry David Thoreau’s Journal. I indulged myself and bought the set minus volume 1. I had been kicking myself because all of them were available at my most favorite used bookstore in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan and I was too tight to pay $25 a volume. Let’s rephrase that ……………. I was too broke to pay $25 a volume. Money always seems to fly through my fingers ……………..

But now I have them. I found a lone volume 1 and added it to the set even though the binding is different, the issue date is different ……………… the words will be just as unforgettable.

I am almost finished with the second volume from my original set, I read volume 4 first and now am finishing volume 2. Then I will pull out volume 1 …………… there really is no particular order, just the dates change, His musings, nature studies, and truisms remain the same no matter the month or year.

I first read Thoreau’s Walden in 1993. I was in high school during the Civil Rights movement and we read things like Manchild in the Promised Land and Soul on Ice. Somehow, I get more from the 1840s and 50s literature ………………….

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are inummerable avenues to a perception of truth. Henry David Thoreau, September 4, 1851

A perception of truth. That is what I absorb while reading Thoreau. Truth. These are the opinions of a man who spent more time in his third eye than in his root chakra. He was a man who questioned life, tried to understand it, and tried to show his contemporaries that there was more than one way to be rich.

He speaks of being a witness to the earth, to nature. In this assertion, I see that he has found The Witness, the silent witness, who resides within us and directs our attention. The witness is what the world calls God and who the world looks for outside of themselves. God is not outside, but in. Finding the witness is the best adventure one can have.

I despair if I focus on the world confusion. Several years ago, I read the Yoga Vasishta after learning of this while reading Deepak Chopra’s The Book of Secrets. This is 768 pages of the same thought ……………….. The world chaos is an illusion, much as the blue sky is an optical illusion …………….. and I follow this advice as much as I can and I stay away from the chaos of the world on purpose.

For this enterprise, I find my center and stay in my center. I’m not sure if others find it so, but I can access The Silent Witness through my heart and breath. In the world we are in now – which I would call horrific, I stay there most of my time. My poor husband does not. He gets into the world confusion …………. I’m working on that, trying to keep him here, with me, out of the world that stresses him so much.

It is interesting to be a WASP from Illinois married to a Jewish man from NYC. Little did I know, until recently, that my first husband was also Jewish. I found that out from the concentration camp records released. I was told his father was a lawyer and died from tuberculosis in 1940. Nope. In 1940 he was sent to a camp and he died 4 years later from tuberculosis. My first husband was placed in an orphanage – probably to keep him away from the German authorities. He was “found” by his “mother” after WWII ended, He never believed she was his mother. I didn’t either. I was the mother of a son and I know that no mother would allow a boyfriend to abuse a son of hers. She did.

Anyway, back to the world confusion. Antidotes are required. Be they meditation, reading scripture, refusing to KNOW things, staying away from people who want to kvetch about the world today ……………… whatever it takes.

That way, we can BE HERE NOW. And here now is peace, joy, tranquility and thought …………….. Namaste, Jennifer