Emerson, Thoreau, and the Raspberry Jam

One of my favorite topics of study during my ten year stint as a public high school teacher was Transcendentalism. Explaining Transcendentalism in a sentence or two isn't easy; nevertheless--and at the risk of boring you to tears--here I go:

Transcendentalism is a philosophy loosely tied together by some general beliefs regarding God, nature and intuition. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau get most of the credit for articulating the Transcendentalist philosophy back in the 1830s in New England. Thoreau was more radical than Emerson and even spent two years living in a small cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts (the very pond that Amy falls into while ice skating in Little Women. Who doesn't love a good literary connection?).

Whew. Are you still with me?

I loved chatting with my students about Transcendental philosphy. I liked spending days discussing the merits and disadvantages of Civil Disobedience and loved it even more when kids talked animatedly about staging sit-ins in the commons to protest some school policy they found offensive to their freedom. Thoreau, as nutty as he often was in real life, makes a convincing enough argument that he's simply irresistable.

Emerson was Thoreau's teacher and a much less radical-in-real-life kind of guy. Among other things, Emerson was a nature advocate, specifically, humankind's divine relationship to Nature. In one particularly memorable moment in my New York classroom, a student named Sam declared that despite a decision to be an Athiest, Emerson's advocation to spend more time in nature had gotten Sam thinking about God again. That insight of Sam's is consistent with what I experience when spending time in nature; namely, that a Divine Presence is not very far away. Thus, Emerson, despite being pretty wordy, is equally irresistable.

Tied very closely to their ideals on following intuition and nature is the Transcendental belief in Self-Reliance. This means they advocated hard work, manual labor, and doing those things that created true independence. Their writings suggest that solitude is a key to peace and that self-reliance is a way toward greatness.

There is your literature and history lesson for the day.

Okay, so why am I even talking about this?

I think it has something to do with all the fruit picking we've been doing around here lately.  There are 80 some odd jars of grape juice in my storage room. There are 12 jars of grape jelly, and 18 jars of raspberry jam. There's 12 jars of salsa, too. And this weekend we'll add 30 or so jars of applesauce and apple butter to that growing collection. Who knew canning could be so awesome?

It gets better. All of it, the salsa, grapes, raspberries, and apples, has been hand picked from local gardens. All of it has been washed and smashed and processed and stored by Trent and by me. Of late, we find ourselves downstairs staring at our jars with not a little bit of pride and not a little bit of satisfaction.

Last week we went raspberry picking. Trent is digging this as much as I am. Together we filled container after container while Lillian scampered down the rows of berries, popping the reddest and juiciest in her mouth until her cheeks and lips and fingers were stained.

I, a lover of words, and one who is determined to articulate how I feel at most every occasion, felt a momentary loss for words. What am I feeling? What is this? I thought. It was peaceful, so satisfying; we felt like we were doing something good, and something right. I picked berries and I thought, so...what?
And then my brain stumbled on Emerson, and all those classroom discussions gathering cobwebs somewhere in my mind. As I picked raspberries, I dusted off those thoughts and I remembered. Ah, I feel self-reliant! In fact, I feel like a Transcendentalist!

I reveled in the quiet glory of it. Then I ate a raspberry. Very satisfying, indeed.