Epiphany Through Nature
The following excerpt is from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an American essayist, poet, and philosopher, and one of the founders of the Transcendentalist movement. “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years . . . and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods we can return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity . . . which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”
This excerpt is from Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), an American philosopher and writer. Walden is considered one of the major piece of Transcendentalist literature by scholars. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. . . .”
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?”
Epiphany: A sudden insight, an important understanding about life in general and/or about yourself and your meaning and purpose in the world.
Assignment
A) Go out into nature: into your backyard, down the street or into a field, through a park or across your campus. Observe a creek or pond, leaves falling from trees, a blooming flower, a weed, a soaring hawk, or a blade of grass growing in an unlikely spot. As the Transcendentalists would say, "Commune with nature." Get out into nature and observe carefully.
B) Think about some lesson you might learn from your observation. Strive for an epiphany. Try to learn something about yourself or life by thinking about the way things happen in nature. Look for similarities between nature and people.
C) Write about your experience. In your first well-developed paragraph, explain where you went, what you did, and what you observed. Include descriptive details by appealing to the senses. In your second paragraph, explain your epiphany, i.e., the insight or lesson you learned from nature. Explain how nature suggested the lesson. (When I noticed this, I realized . . .)
Note: Try to avoid clichéd epiphanies. For example, we see squirrels gathering and burying acorns in the fall so they will have food in the winter, when nuts will be scarce. However, this example of how we can learn from nature has been used over and over. It has lost a great deal of its original freshness and meaning. But by observing how flower buds open slowly, we might learn that beauty is a reward for patience. It suggests that immediate gratification is a lesser reward. Or by seeing that a gorgeous wildflower can grow in the crack of the sidewalk, we might understand that there is a way to thrive even if one's surroundings are not ideal.