Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts. . .  My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. . . I feel ripe for something. . . yet can't discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me. I have lain fallow long enough.
      - Henry David Thoreau, in his journal.

Thoreau first explored the subjects of his love in his journals, which totaled two million words. Those things –- the company of his own mind, the beauty of the natural world, and the interplay between those two aspects of his life –- were the basis of his journal. His journals also ptobe darker subjects -– his puzzlement and distain for the futility of the preoccupations of the people that surrounded him, their ”quiet desperation,” their desire to extract from nature anything profitable, their willingness to destroy anything in nature considered not useful. 

And then, after expressing his disappointment in the flow of society around him, he’d circle back to what he loved. E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web, wrote a great review of Walden,Thoreau’s masterpiece .

If Thoreau had merely left us an account of a man's life in the woods or if he had simply retreated to the woods and there recorded his complaints about society, or even if he had contrived to include both records in one essay, Walden would probably not have lived a hundred years. As things turned out, Thoreau, very likely without knowing quite what he was up to, took man's relation to Nature and man's dilemma in society and man's capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelet from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day. Walden is one of the first of the vitamin-enriched American dishes. If it were a little less good than it is, or even a little less queer, it would be an abominable book. Even as it is, it will continue to baffle and annoy the literal mind and all those who are unable to stomach its caprices and imbibe its theme.  Certainly the plodding economist will continue to have rough going if he hopes to emerge from the book with a clear system of economic thought. Thoreau's assault on the Concord society of the mid-nineteenth century has the quality of a modern Western: he rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions. 

Many of his shots ricochet and nick him on the rebound, and throughout the melee there is a horrendous cloud of inconsistencies and contradictions, and when the shooting dies down and the air clears, one is impressed chiefly by the courage of the rider and by how splendid it was that somebody should have ridden in there and raised all that ruckus.
      - E.B. White, A Slight Sound At Evening

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Below, a two page spread from the upcoming Heron Dance journal, Nurturing The Song Within. You can download a PDF of the two-page spread pictured below here, or click in the image.
To be published in early March. You can pre-order the Collector’s Edition printed on premium paper, superb image reproduction quality, high-end binding, here.