As you know if you’ve been following me on Instagram, my sister is up in the Northwest Territories having the time of her life. She’s been sending me quotes from various books she’s reading and this one happened to jump out at me so I thought I’d share it with you here. It’s from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. He spent two years, two months and two days living in a cabin on Lake Walden in Massachusetts and Walden is what he wrote while he was there. It’s pretty special. 

“We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow castward, as if we were the only motes in its beams.

It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow.

When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still. “

– Henry David Thoreau [Walden]