Bowing to Walden: Finding the Sublime in the Small

To fellow visitors at Walden, our group must have been a strange sight—a distant silhouette moving with measured steps across the ice, toward the setting sun, melting occasionally into the tree line, only to kneel suddenly, hands pointed toward the sky. Another figure might throw itself prostrate on the ice, outstretched legs and arms forming a stark contrast to the frozen landscape. Others—one, two, sometimes as many as five—could be seen bowing near the shore, our heads toward the earth. Our faces felt frozen in the biting cold, as well, ineffably frozen in awe and quiet exaltation.

We weren’t seeking a mystical experience, yet, unconsciously, our bodies yielded to the sublime around us, adopting postures often associated with spiritual traditions, unbound by space or time.

What had brought us to Walden was a photography workshop, structured around two prompts: seeking the place “where the two seas meet” and capturing a still-life portrait. These prompts, open to interpretation yet restrictive, felt unnatural to the typical experience of nature photography—often organic and spontaneous, driven by our surrounding’s call to our senses. Here, the challenge was to truly think through photography, to apply a lens that filtered what we saw, aligning it with a deliberate inquiry.

Initially, the constraints felt limiting. But gradually, we embraced them as invitations to look more closely, to attend deeply to our surroundings. Those silhouettes—kneeling, bowing, lying prostrate on the ice—were not just striking poses but engaging with the minutiae. While other visitors strolled along the shore, oblivious, we marveled at the suddenly uncovered wonders, noticing, perhaps for the first time, what had always been there but had just begun to speak to us.

“How happens it that we reverence the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones which belong to this?” wrote Thoreau.(1)

That we were at Walden was no coincidence. This is where Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days living in his cabin. It is where many of his fellow philosophers and writers walked these same paths, reveling in the beauty of Walden Pond. The scenery may have changed since Thoreau’s time. Old maps suggest meadows, cliffs, hollows, and coves—an openness now replaced by equally enchanting woods, where the sea of dense green trees embraces the sky-reflecting vastness of the water. Yet something about this place compels both body and soul to bow in wonder, seeking meaning in the smallest details.

“Pliny says, ‘In minimis Natura praestat’ (Nature excels in the least things),” Thoreau quoted in one of his journals.(2)

Thoreau found the spiritual in the small, the singular, the seemingly mundane aspects of nature. His journals are rich with descriptions of individual trees, birds, or even a bending pine, which he saw as metaphors for the human condition and our experience of the divine.

We, too, were following in his footsteps—seeking meaning and depth in the small: the mosaics of pebbles, bubbles, and leaves; the rivers of red-tinged roots flowing across the paths; the contrasts of light and shadow, smoothness and harshness, surface and depth, whiteness and darkness.

There are few stories of Thoreau’s childhood, but one tells of him, lying awake at night while his  brother slept soundly next to him, sharing with his mother that he was looking through the stars to see if he could see God behind them. I was reminded of this as I walked along Walden’s shores with Sarah Schorr, our artist-in-residence at the Center and the workshop’s organizer, reflecting on children’s ability to lose themselves in nature. Perhaps they can see and experience something we adults must relearn. This thought brought me to snow angels—a long-forgotten vestige of childhood for those of us from colder climates. As adults, we often dismiss snow angels as playful and childish. But now I wonder if they hold deeper significance. Could they represent the angelic or the supernatural breaking into our everyday experience?

The transcendentalists emphasized the importance of the senses and nature. Imagine closing your eyes and falling into deep, soft snow. The cold powder engulfs you, rising and falling, burning your skin before melting into droplets that tickle your neck. As you open your eyes to the vast expanse of sky, you feel yourself dissolve into the snow, the air, the moment—a fleeting but deeply profound unity with the world around you. A brief moment of hierophany, where the sacred breaks into the profane.

In his famous Divinity School Address, Emerson called for a new kind of spirituality centered on individual and intuitive experience. In his essay Nature, he asserted the unity of man and nature within the divine mind.

For barely an hour on a chilly winter afternoon, Walden revealed many of us as transcendentalists. Consciously or not, we can all become like Emerson’s “transparent eyeballs,” welcoming the divine and the spiritual into ourselves—if only we allow it.

(1) Henry Thoreau, Journal, August 30, 1856.

(2) Henry Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1861.