the purpose of life is not to be happy
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoreau invariably walked to the pond, saw
the deer & was happy. Emerson failed to know
his friend, in Ralph Waldo’s considered opinion
an educated smart man with no ambition
except to spend his short span of years
figuring out which Concord flora flowers
first in spring, detecting that small brown
heaps are muskrats barely awake — he found
them so dimwitted from hibernation
he could upend & inspect one
before it ran away. Thoreau stayed
home while Emerson roamed the world for pay.
O, to live in your own world, the richness of
flower, meadow, muskrat, ditch.
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