To Peck At An Armful of Wood

👋 HEY!:
This article was originally written on December 11, 2013, and is being reproduced here from the original Medium post. I was the original creator of this.

One of my favorite writers of all time is Henry David Thoreau. I value him most not for his wit or his subject matter, but for his uncanny ability to describe some of the most fleeting moments with the melodic patience of a novelist. Through even the meanest separations, I always seemed to return to this same quote from Walden:

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way.

And that is what has always stuck with me — Thoreau’s reverence for the trust that the tiniest hearts have in him. Even if that trust is fleeting, Thoreau saw it as the divine machinery of nature smiling at him — and even that brief glimmer of a connection was rarer than any stone pulled out of the soil and brushed clean.

Trust and love is hard. There’s no way around acknowledging that. But, despite the struggle of it all, the privilege of watching the tiny birds feed on the plaza behind my house is enough to make me see that, even for a fleeting moment, these birds trust me enough to not fly away as soon as they saw me with their little eyes.

If a person loves you, even for a second, see yourself more distinguished by that circumstance than you should have been by epaulet you could wear. Even for a moment, when a person trusts you, you are the helical that drives the lives of everyone around you forward. You are a king in his domain, like a figurine in a closed terrarium.

Source: Brooklyn Craft Camp