in Thoreau’s Journal:

In proportion as I have celestial thoughts is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days.

That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity and transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind; for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of what is deepest within. The lover of contemplation, accordingly, will gaze much into the sky. Fair thoughts and a serene mind make fair days.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

….As we go southwestward through the Cassandra hollows toward the declining sun, they look successively, both by their form and color, like burnished silver shields in the midst of which we walked, looking toward the sun.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

There is a still life in America that is little observed or dreamed of.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

….It is a mild day, and I notice, what I have not observed for some time, that blueness of the air only to be perceived in a mild day. I see it between me and the woods half a mile distant. The softening of the air amounts to this. The mountains are quite invisible. You come forth to see this great blue presence lurking about the woods and the horizon.

in Thoreau’s Journal:
Here I am on the Cliffs at half-past three or four o’clock. The snow more than a foot deep over all the land.

Few, if any, leave the beaten paths.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a very beautiful and spotless snow, it having just cased falling. You are struck by its peculiar tracklessness, as if it were a thick white blanket just spread…

This was a star snow, dry, but the stars of considerable size. It lies up light as down. When I look closely, it seems to be chiefly composed of crystals in which the six rays or leaflets are more or less perfect, with a cottony powder intermixed. It is not yet in the least melted by the sun. The sun is out very bright and pretty warm and going from it, I see a myriad sparkling points scattered over the surface of the snow….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience…

I demand of my companion some evidence that he has traveled rather than to the sources of the Nile, that he has been OUT OF TOWN, OUT OF THE HOUSE, not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveler, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The weather has considerable moderated, -2º at breakfast time…

Recall, realize now, if you can the hum of the mosquito.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Snows again….The snow is very moist, with large flakes.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When, as now, in January a south wind melts the snow, and the bare ground appears covered with sere grass and occasionally wilted green leaves, which seem in doubt whether to let go their greenness quite or absorb new juices against the coming year,

in such a season a perfume seems to exhale from the earth itself…

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by church-going and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.

I thus dispose of the superfluous, and see things are they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When I look up a fragment of a walnut shell this morning, I saw by its grain and composition, its form and color, etc., that is was made for happiness. The most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction. They are the homes of content. Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy.

a beech nut husk on snow, January 2, 2016

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To-day the trees are white with snow,—I mean their stems and branches,—and have the true wintery look on the storm side.

Not till this has winter come to the forest. It looks like the small frost-work in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which the branches take. That is a picture of winter…

in Thoreau’s Journal:

After spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan, incessantly, I especially feel the need of putting myself in communication with nature again to recover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs. The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit.

I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields, and conversing with the sane snow. Having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, I would now bathe my temples in eternity. I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I love nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him.

None of his institutions control or pervade her.  Here a different kind of right prevails….The joy which nature yields is like that afforded by the frank words of one we love.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I stopped short in the path to-day to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances.  They do not wait, as men do.  Now is the golden age of the sapling; earth, air, sun, and rain are occasion enough.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Standing on the west side, the contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation or prolongation on the north was admirable. I thought I had never seen the berries so dazzlingly bright.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a remarkable sight, this snow-clad landscape, the fences and bushes half-buried, and the warm sun on it…The town and country is now so still, no rattle of wagons nor even jingle of sleigh bells, every tread being as with woolen feet.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When the snow is falling thick and fast, the flakes nearest you seem to be driving straight to the ground,

while the more distant seems to float in the air in a quivering bank, like feathers, or like birds at play, and not as if sent on any errand. So, at a little distance, all the works of nature proceed with sport and frolic. They are more in the eye, and less in the deed.

Photo:  December 30, 2015