Finding nourishment during seasonal depression: words for the soul

PHILOSOPHY, Nature

May your soul be refreshed upon reading this. May this be the elixir for your winter seasonal depression.

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The following excerpt is taken from The Portable Thoreau, Revised Edition, Edited by Carl Bode.

“Within the circuit of this plodding life,

There enter moments of an azure hue,

Untarnished fair as is the violet

Or anemone, when the spring strews them

By some meandering rivulet, which make

The best philosophy untrue that aims

But to console man for his grievances.

I have remembered, when the winter came, 

High in my chamber in the frosty nights,

When in the still light of the cheerful moon,

On every twig and rail and jutting spout,

The icy spears were adding to their length 

Against the arrows of the coming sun,

How in the shimmering moon of summer past

Some unrecorded beam slanted across 

The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew;

Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,

The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag

Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,

Which now through all its course stands till and dumb, 

Its own memorial–purling at its play

Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,

Until its youthful sound was hushed at last

In the staid current of the lowland stream; 

Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,

And where the fieldfare followed in the frear,

When all the fields around lay bound and hor

Beneath a thick integument of snow.

So by God’s cheap economy made rich

To go upon my winter’s task again. (32)

I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of service-berries, poke-week, juniper. Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glories? ….

In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.

There is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures.

I would keep some book of natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the system. To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health. To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty no harm nor disappointment can come.” (33)

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