Tea With Emerson

            

Ralph Waldo Emerson very kindly accepts my invitation for a cup of tea each morning around 8:30.  He sits across from me at the island in our kitchen looking distinguished in his black suit and matching cravat, which barely covers the top button of his neatly pressed white shirt.  His penetrating eyes, framed by dark brows, search my face wondering what I have gleaned from today’s meditation. 

“I read it twice,” I say.  “But I’m not sure I totally understand the part about….,” and the discussion begins, in my head and the pages of my journal. But unfortunately, not in the presence of the man himself. I’m 128 years too late.

His serious expression faces me from the cover of my copy of Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Into the Green Future, which lies beside my teacup and half-eaten piece of toast.  I bought the book earlier this year when my friend, Marian, and I visited Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson lived for close to 50 years.  Reading one of his mediations has been part of my morning routine since I returned to Greenbrier a month ago.  With our house surrounded by acres of nature, I wanted to think more deeply about Emerson’s larger view of Nature, how it touched and shaped his life and beliefs.

If Mr. Emerson were to join me, I am confident that he would say, “Let’s take our cups of tea outside and sit on your front porch or wander among your trees,” reminiscent of times he spent with his contemporaries wandering the meadows, rivers, trails, hillsides or pond called Walden.

“Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau.  Warm, pleasant, misty weather, which the great mountain amphitheatre seemed to drink in with gladness.  A bird’s voice, even a piping frog enlivens a solitude and makes world enough for us.”

-       Meditation # 17, World Enough for Us

Just think of it! Emerson and Thoreau sitting together on a cliff. Do you wonder whether Henry knocked on the Emersons' door, or perhaps walked right in and said, "Morning, Ralph, want to take a walk?” 

Marian and I climbed not a cliff, but a ridge, Author’s Ridge, on a frosty morning in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Enveloped in February grayness and swirling snowflakes, we were the lone visitors searching for the graves of these famous friends and their equally renowned neighbors.  Bare branches, aging gravestones and a feeling that the Headless Horseman (though not really associated with this Sleepy Hollow) was lurking close by on his velvet black horse, gave our quest a slightly spooky quality.  That feeling was soon replaced, however by a sense of awe as I stood among a community of authors whose words have so often translated into emotions, actions and inspiration in my life.  Walking by the names, “Henry D. Thoreau,” “L.M.A.” (Louise May Alcott), “Hawthorne,” and finally “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” I marveled at the fact that persons possessing such insightful and far-reaching thinking shared everyday lives, down the street, across town, or beside a pond from each other.

“Today’s meditation, what are you thoughts?”  Mr. Emerson asks in a tone resembling a teacher who has discovered his student daydreaming in class.  I reread it. . .  

“. . .[I] found a sunny hollow where the east wind would not blow, and lay down against the side of a tree to most happy beholdings.  At least I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul.”

-Meditation #2, The Noble Earth

I open my journal to start a reflection, as if dutifully beginning a writing assignment, but just as quickly close it.  Heading out the front door into a couple of acres of oak trees, I reply to Mr. Emerson’s question,  “Excuse me, sir, while I find a comfortable spot beside a tree.”