I woke with an insight that excites me. Though it may seem obvious, it’s taken me seven decades to get here, so I thought I’d share it. No thrill, for my money, matches discovery, that startling a-hah when two plus two suddenly make four, not because a schoolbook says so, not by rote, but because one’s ceaseless brain has somehow figured it out. Sadder than death is the death of curiosity, how the world works beneath its inexhaustible appearances, how everything connects, this moment with all moments past and to come, this place with all places, I to you.

I was thinking about Thoreau and Emerson and the group history labels Transcendentalists, busy in the 1830’s and ‘40’s, in New England mostly – not for any practical reason, to compose a missive, say, but because that’s where my mind decided to meander in my semi-sleep. I say “my” mind, as if I owned it, which I guess I do, but it goes where it will when it will without my guidance, often in defiance of any discipline. Minds refuse to obey, which annoys pedants and dictators, who prefer repetition to revelation. My mind reminds me of pooch Henry sniffing where he will, my stern injunctions notwithstanding. The adventure of my life is following my mind, wherever it noses.

I’ve been thinking about the Transcendentalists pretty much continually for more than fifty years since I first met Thoreau – on a lonely rainy autumn afternoon in college – an encounter I’ve recounted – for such moments – of enchantment – are our most durable. Most of what we experience slides off us like shower-water leaving no trace, but the few times we fall in love we never forget. I fell in love with Thoreau before I fell in love with any breathing body. He took my hand – and has been holding it ever since.

Transcendentalism, by common consent, is where and when Americans began to think for ourselves. We’d acted for ourselves by sailing here and taming this wilderness and founding our own king-less nation, but thinking for oneself takes longer, if it happens at all. Most grown-ups, I suspect, would advise against it, for what can it lead to but trouble? If we’ve a difference between us, it might lead to friction, faction, rancor. Group-think is more convenient and less hazardous. What the congregation proclaims – loudly in unison – must be right!

Thoreau thought for himself, as did his mentor Emerson. And what they thought – I am simplifying grossly here – was that God is everywhere – and we can discern the divinity of being if we only look. I agreed with that – I thought – only God and divinity stumped me as supernatural concepts I didn’t get. Until a couple of years ago I hadn’t met God or He me: God was a notion, not an event.

The a-hah that greeted me this morning was how everything we perceive connects. Peer past appearances as you might past a flower to its roots, and past its roots to its soil, and past its soil to the eons of rot and chance that extruded that soil, and beyond those eons to some original eruption, a Big Bang, say, where life began, and you glimpse the dizzying connectedness of all, which you can call God if you like, for a name is just a name. And my mind and yours are particles in that vast intricacy we can never compass though we can glimpse – and what a giddying thrill, that each belongs to each, you to me to that flower to our hour, none independent or alone, but bound by invisible threads.