![photo of a brook](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-10/Baptist%20Brooka.jpg?itok=hfDYEkVy) # Transcendental Murmur November 02, 2026 [ Richard Higgins ](/people/richard-higgins) I lost myself on a small wooden bridge in a secluded wood near my house, and I’m not sure I want myself back. The bridge spans a brook in a glen on seldom-visited conservation land in Concord. The Transcendentalists lived here, but Baptist Brook speaks to a different local legacy, the people who were once baptized in it—people who likely thought Transcendentalism was moonshine. But it hops over logs and zigzags left and right with all the whimsical crookedness of the other waterways in town. The bridge is really just a narrow elevated ramp about twenty feet long, barely high enough to suspend you in the air but just big enough on which to sit down, listen to the murmuring water and wonder where it goes. It’s the kind of bridge for people who want to begin their life, not end it. I like this solitary glen because it takes a truly concerted effort to worry or obsess there, not that I’ve haven’t succeeded once or twice. The beech and birch branches bending every which way seem to want to reach down and lift me up from all my quotidian concerns and make me feel small—but small in a good way, like I am part of something larger. Like, despite my occasional subconscious delusions, I am not holding up the world, or even, it seems when I sit on the bridge, myself. Take off your shoes, the glen says, be still and know that I am here. Teach me no words, I say in reply. Teach me how pallid and papery they are. I visited the glen one still, buzzing, humming day in last July. It wasn’t Walden Pond, but I felt I had come upon an eternal scene, a primordial place unchanged since Eden. Scientifically speaking, the opposite is true, as Thoreau knew even as he mythologized Walden. The glen undergoes ceaseless, if slow and subtle, change. It had been shaped and reshaped by geomorphic and ecological changes large and small not only over the millennia, but also since I was a boy seventy years ago. Being but a nanosecond in geologic time is humbling to say the least. But it was quiet, and it was beautiful, and the sense of something eternal persisted. I felt that the brook and its mossy banks, the pines, birches, beeches and maples around it, the lichen-covered rocks, even the bridge itself, were all part of that thin current that slides away in the river of time, as Thoreau puts it in *Walden*, leaving a bedrock immortality beneath its sandy bottom. I had left my office to take a break from something I was thinking about or doing, but all of sudden there was nothing to do, nowhere to go. The break had taken me. The rustling leaves, the birds flitting about, the bubbling current, the breeze on my skin, the hum of insects and other pulsations in the glen became distinct. The closer I paid attention, the more the present moment slipped into deep awareness of timelessness, and then into gratitude for what I have been given. My gratitude in such moments is sometimes followed, however, by a kind of existential terror that I am here and this is it. What, I wonder, have I done with the great gift? Once an uncle gave me a check for my birthday. Months later my ears burned when he asked me why I hadn’t cashed it. I had lost it. But here I am, now, cashing the present, the one we can’t lose. Here I am in nature, and this moment has been happening and happening again all the while I was doing other things. Something about the brook disappearing somewhere beyond the bend struck me, as if it was pointing beyond itself—a Transcendentalist belief if ever there was one. I peered into the moss and examined the lichen covered with a million microscopic green and yellow crinkled cups. I dipped my hand in the water. I lay down on the bridge and felt it hold me up, my big accomplishment that day. I watched the pine tops sway and their waxy needles reflect the sun. My “suncatchers,” Thoreau called them. As the clouds drifted overhead, I was transfixed by the dappled light and dark greens painted on and shining through the undersides of the canopy of leaves. Then I rose and knelt on the bridge and said the 23rd Psalm. Thou preparest a place before me, I said, and thou anointest my head with water. I uttered bits of other old prayers, because it was a time to hear what they say, a time for remembered words, spoken slowly, to come alive in my mouth. Associate, Transcendentalism Initiative ### Richard Higgins Richard Higgins is a writer, book coach and the author or editor of five books, including, most recently, *Thoreau’s God*, from the University of Chicago Press, which explores Thoreau’s iconoclastic religious quest, and *Thoreau and the Language of Trees*, about Thoreau’s multifaceted love of trees. A *Boston Globe* staff writer for 20 years, Richard is a member of the Thoreau Society board. A graduate of Holy Cross College, Columbia Journalism School, and Harvard Divinity School (MTS), Richard has written for *The New York Times*, *Washington Post*, *Christian Century*, *American Scholar,* and other publications. ![Photo of Richard Higgins](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-10/Richard%20Higgins.jpg?itok=Tv0sFzLm)