Thoreau is my homeboy: Strap on your hiking boots and step up your writing.

by Merry Gordon

When I’ve stared at the blinking cursor so long it’s burned a permanent vertical line in my retinas, I think of my favorite inspirational writing quote:  “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” I remember the first time I read that, how it resonated with me. I poked around a little until I found attribution for it in the form of one Henry D. Thoreau, author of Walden and all those other things I pretended to read but didn’t in AP lit.

So I finally picked up Walden for real this time and soon I was crushing hard on Henry David…he of the original hipster neckbeard, the skinny-dipping and cabin building, the civil disobedience. This guy had a solution for writer’s block, one that hadn’t occurred to me in the asphalt jungles of suburbia:

N A T U R E.

I don’t generally do nature. First off, I’m from Cleveland. It wasn’t too many years after I was born that the oozing Cuyahoga River was so polluted you could set fire to it. When we went swimming as kids, it was in our underpants in a plastic kiddie pool in the driveway, not in any of Ohio’s less-than-pristine waterways. I have always lived within ten minutes of a Target, I wore hiking boots with lace slouch socks only when the outdoorsy/vintage look was hip, and the closest I got to the forest was the Woodland Pine scented candle we put out every Christmas. I didn’t even go camping (without flushing toilets and suitcases and a 3-jet hot tub on the balcony) until I hit my mid-30s.

But this year I slung a backpack over my shoulder and resolved to try the Thoreauvian approach to writer’s block anyway.

Step one:  Get into nature. Not just get out into nature…get INTO it. Nature is messy. It’s beautiful mountain vistas and trailside wildflowers, but it’s also mud and pine sap on your adorable new L.L. Bean boots and a cloud of mosquitos swarming across your perfect blood orange sunset. Embrace the less-than-National Geographic moments. The unexpected contrast between the mundane and the sublime is often enough to jar your mind back to inspiration.

Step two:  Write. Journal, blog or blurb like crazy. Thoreau would have killed it in the blogosphere (in fact, he is…over 150 years after his death). His journals filled 47 manuscript volumes, and most of the time I can barely manage a 140-character tweet. Thoreau observed and recorded everything…some really sweeping, epic stuff, like the divinity in a snowflake, and some really boring stuff, like tables of plants blooming and water levels. Point is, he mined the little, sometimes tedious details in flora and fauna until he struck literary gold with such nuggets as, “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” That’s deep.

Step three:  Look for connections and metaphors. Ultimately, going out into nature is as much an inward journey as an outward one. If we look at the natural world as a microcosm of the infinite and search to see our connection to it, our once barren creative fields suddenly emerge white and ready to harvest (ooh!—see what I did there?). Thoreau was acutely aware of this. Even humdrum rural sights like the stream he walked by nearly every day of his life provided food for thought:  “Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.”

Getting my nature on didn’t come naturally. At first, stripping myself of the suburbs to connect with Mother Earth seemed a little too granola for a girl whose hiking is generally confined to full parking lots at outlet malls, but being outdoors lent a meditative quality to my thoughts that the agitation of day-to-day life in a major metropolitan area never would have allowed.

I still live in the sprawl, but I don’t restrict my headspace to my zip code anymore. My “woods” consist of a few vacation snaps on the fridge and a half-dead succulent on my kitchen table, but if nothing else Thoreau has taught me a little more about how to simplify and live deliberately, and that’s something worth putting on paper.