Hypnotic Bedtime Story: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
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Hi, I'm Jessica Porter, and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better. Thank you everyone for being here. We've gotten some interesting feedback from people lately. Someone named D. Wilson says, I want a soundbite of Jessica's deep breath and sigh to keep with me through the day. You mean that one?

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I'll see you over there at Sleep Magic Premium. All right, tonight, Walden by Henry David. It is, in fact, Thoreau, even though my whole life I've said Thoreau, so if I go back and forth, forgive me. Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the third of four children of a pencil maker.

Thoreau was an author, naturalist, poet, and philosopher. He was a follower of transcendentalism, a movement that developed in the late 1820s and 30s in New England. A core belief of transcendentalists is in the inherent goodness of people and nature. Transcendentalists saw the divine experience inherent in the everyday.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the people who spearheaded transcendentalism. He was also a great American writer from New England and was a good friend of Thoreau's, had a strong influence on him. Perhaps one of Thoreau's greatest legacies was his commitment to the abolitionist movement and his belief in civil disobedience when one refuses to support what one's government is doing if you object to it along ethical and moral lines.

His writings on this topic had a direct influence on John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. So his words have made an impact. At the age of 28, he went into the woods and lived there for two years, two months, and two days, although his book about it, Walden, mashes that experience into one year.

Thoreau was nothing if not opinionated, and that's what I love about his book. He pulls no punches. It's extremely confident in its voice, and at the same time, intimate. It's like he's talking directly to you from his cabin or from the woods. No muss, no fuss, as his mind wanders all over many, many things, the benefits of simplicity, self-reliance, meditation, and civil disobedience.

So tonight we're reading from a chapter in Walden called The Pond. But first, we'll do some relaxation, and then you can just let Thoreau's words sink into you peacefully as you chat with him by the fireplace in his cabin. So get yourself into a safe and comfortable position, and let's begin. Allow your eyes to close easily and gently, and bring your awareness to your breathing.

And just let your breath be normal and natural. You don't have to do anything interesting or fancy with it. But by bringing your awareness to your breath, you're slowing down your mind, focusing your mind. Your mind is like a laser beam that's pointing all day in so many different directions, going here and there, learning, doing, fixing, deciding. And now we're here.

Bringing it back to your body, to your breath, slowing it down. And for those of you who've been listening to Sleep Magic for a while, just by hearing these initial words, these suggestions that you've heard before and before and before even that, your whole body is beginning its journey. Because relaxation is like anything else. We start to practice it.

And the whole subconscious mind begins to organize itself in this new pattern, this new experience. So you're getting really, really good at relaxation. Maybe without even knowing it. Just by showing up as you go deeper and deeper already. Now I'd like you to bring your awareness up into your eyelids and imagine that your eyelids are feeling heavy and sleepy. Imagine that.

that the muscles in your eyelids are feeling loose and limp and relaxed. And as you allow this relaxation to take over your eyelids, I'd like you to imagine that your eyelids are so relaxed, they will not open. And again, if you've been here for a while, you know what we're doing. But if you're new, we're just playing a game here. By pretending that your eyes will not open, we're engaging your imagination. So imagine that your eyelids will not open.

And now I'd like you to test your eyelids to make sure they won't open. And that's just pretending. So wiggle your eyebrows while your eyes remain shut. Look, they won't open. Beautiful. Now this lovely heaviness you have in your eyelids, this heaviness that you have around your eyes, this is the same quality of relaxation that you will soon have throughout your entire body. So let's allow that relaxation around your eyes to move.

to sink back into your head. Just feel that heaviness falling into your head. And your head is feeling heavy like a bowling ball on the pillow. Heavy, heavy. And that heaviness is taking over every single cell of your brain. Just imagine your brain kind of soaking in that warm, heavy feeling. It feels nice.

As the muscles of your face are softening and relaxing and letting go, your cheek, your jaw, good. And as you imagine this heaviness in your head, I'd like you to picture warm waves of relaxation lapping up against the beach. Feel those warm waves of relaxation lapping up against the beach of your mind. As all mental tension

disappears. And this wonderful warm relaxation is moving down through your neck, down into your shoulders as your shoulders become loose and limp and relaxed. And you drop everything from those shoulders onto the floor. As the heaviness moves down into your arms and your arms are feeling very heavy, heavy. The relaxation moving all the way down into your hands and your fingers. Heavy.

like they're made of marble. And while you're listening to me read from Walden tonight, you may also be aware of sounds going on around you in your environment. But that's okay because from this moment on, no sound that you hear will bother or disturb you in any way. In fact, from this moment on, any sound that you hear will actually take you deeper and deeper into relaxation.

So use your magic mind right now and bring your awareness to any sound in your environment and let it take you deep. Just let it move through you as a vibration and take you deeper. Good. Well done. The only sound you're paying any attention to is the sound of my voice, but even the sound of my voice as I read this story tonight will take you deeper and deeper.

And soon it will just sound, sound in the background and you'll detach from it and move into your own experience, taking yourself deeper and deeper. So let's imagine that warm relaxation moving down into your torso now, moving down into your chest, into your middle organs, now deep down into your belly as your whole torso is relaxing on the bed.

Energy you may have been holding in your chest today, letting go. Energy you may have been holding in your belly today, letting go. Your spine relaxing vertebra by vertebra as the muscles of your back soften and relax and your torso is feeling very heavy on the bed and that feels as the relaxation moves down your legs now.

Imagine that warm heaviness moving all the way down into your legs, through your knees, down your calves, through your ankle, and into your feet. Your legs are feeling nice and heavy, heavy. The day is done. Your legs are off duty and they're relaxing, relaxing. As the warm relaxation moves all the way down into the soles of your feet, down into your toes, every toe, feeling full.

heavy and relaxed. The pond, the scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore. Yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long

at a mile and three quarters in circumference and contains about 61 and a half acres. A perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of 40 to 80 feet.

though on the southeast and east they attain to about 100 and 150 feet respectively. Within a quarter and a third of a mile, they are exclusively woodland. All our conquered waters have two colors at least: one when viewed at a distance, and another more proper close at hand. The first depends more on the light and follows the sky,

In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance, all appear alike. In stormy weather, they are sometimes of a dark, slate color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another, without any perceptible change in the atmosphere.

I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue, quote, to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid, unquote. But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors.

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop, it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand, it is of a yellowish tint next to the shore, where you can see the sand.

Then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next to the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure, but it is equally green there against the railroad sandbank. And in the spring, before the leaves are expanded,

and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris. This is that portion also where, in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal above the still frozen middle.

Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated in clear weather so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there's more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself.

And at such a time, being on its surface and looking with divided vision so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword-blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself.

alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish-blue as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the West before sundown. Yet, a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air.

It is well known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its body. But a small piece of the same will be colorless. How large a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint, I have never proved. The water of a river is black, or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it.

and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge. But this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michelangelo.

The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of 25 or 30 feet. Paddling over it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars. And you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there,

Once, in a winter, many years ago, while I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back onto the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was 25 feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole.

until I saw the axe a little on one side standing on its head with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off if I had not disturbed it making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had

and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip noose which I attached to its end and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle and drew it by a line along the birch and so pulled the axe out again. The shore is composed of a belt of smooth, rounded white stones, like paving stones,

excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head. And were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some think of it as bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it.

and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which did not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag, nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart leaves and potamogetans, and perhaps a water target or two, all which, however, a bather might not perceive. And these plants are clean and bright,

like the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves, which have been wafted onto it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors, even in midwinter. We have one other pond,

Just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly. But, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this center, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired and fathomed it, and passed away, and still live.

Its water is green and pellucid as ever, not an intermitting spring. Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain, accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese which had not heard of the fall,

when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters, and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of heaven, to be the only Walden pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews.

Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been, the Castalian Fountain, or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age. It is a gem of the first water which conquered wares in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect

encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow, shelf-like path in the steep hillside alternately rising and falling.

approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old possibly as the race of man here, worn by the feet of Aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter,

just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type, alto relievo.

The ornamented grounds of villas, which will one day be built here, may still preserve some trace of this. The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, or within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness.

I can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sandbar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for 25 years.

And on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them that a few years later, I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods, 15 rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of 1952,

is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was 30 years ago. And fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of level at the outside of six or seven feet. And yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs.

This same summer, the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence, the water will again be as low as I have ever known it. Flint's pond, a mile eastward,

allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true, as far as my observation goes, of White Pond. The rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use, at least. The water standing at this great height for a year or more

though it makes it difficult to walk around it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise. Pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore. For unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest.

On the side of the pond next to my house, a row of pitch pines 15 feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments, and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation, the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn white.

and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water.

and to the height of three or four feet from the ground in the effort to maintain themselves. And I have known the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances. The pond was my well, ready dug. For four months in the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times.

and I think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter, all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond water, which has stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the next day, the 6th of March, 1846,

The thermometer having been up to 65 degrees or 70 degrees some of the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42 degrees or one degree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The temperature of the boiling spring the same day was 45 degrees or the warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of in summer.

when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. Moreover, in summer Walden never becomes so warm as most water, which is exposed to the sun on account of its depth. In the warmest weather, I usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the night and remained so during the day, though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood.

It was as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice. There had been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity."

which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds, because he did not see him, perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach, a very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds. I am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here.

Also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast.

I have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections, and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped like the last, on the sides with small dark brown or black spots.

intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name Reticulatus would not apply to this. It should be Gutatus, rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises.

The shiners, pouts, and perch also, indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it.

Muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a traveling mud turtle visits it. Sometimes when I pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall. The white-bellied swallows skim over it, and the peat tweets teeter along its stony shores all summer.

I have sometimes disturbed a fish-hawk sitting on a white pine over the water, but I doubt if it ever profaned by the wing of a gull like fair heaven. At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence which frequent it now.