The Hidden Trail, 20 October 2026

 Here is the hidden trail yesterday, 20 October 2026; a beautiful day, +17 C.

The Hidden Trail, 20 October 2025

 It was a year ago today . . .

Henry David Thoreau on Walking

 

We walked in so pure and bright a light... I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium,and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

                --From "Walking" by Henry Thoreau; 1862

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

                --"What Shall It Profit?", Henry David Thoreau, 1854

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

        --Walden (1854), "Solitude", Henry David Thoreau 

On 12 April 2012, out walking

The hidden trail in February

It's been a very cold winter and it looks like it will continue being very cold until the end of March. Here are photographs from a walk on February 17, on the hidden trail; this winter, beginning in early November, has not been a time for any really pleasant walks. But we're Canadians, we endure. And we wait for spring.

Soren Kierkegaard on walking

Kierkegaard

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

         --Søren Kierkegaard

 

The Hidden Trail, fall 2025

Henry David Thoreau on gardens and nature

 

The Hidden Trail, 2022

Photographs of the Hidden Trail

And then for my afternoon walks I have a garden, larger than any artificial garden that I have read of and far more attractive to me, -- mile after mile of embowered walks, such as no nobleman's grounds can boast, with animals running free and wild therein as from the first, -- varied with land and water prospect, and, above all, so retired that it is extremely rare that I meet a single wanderer in its mazes. No gardener is seen therein, no gates...You may wander away to solitary bowers and brooks and hills.

                                   —Henry David Thoreau, "Journal", 20 June 1850.

          

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. 

                        —Henry David Thoreau, "Journal", 22 June 1853       

         

A man is not to be measured by the virtue of his described actions or the wisdom of his expressed thoughts merely, but by that free character he is, and is felt to be, under all circumstances.
                       — Henry David Thoreau, "Sir Walter Raleigh"

                   

A Tiny Garden Near Here

I often walk by this garden on the corner of Nelson and Westminster Avenue, and I always admire it. Every house has a garden and many of these gardens are very nice, but I have not seen people stop to admire other gardens as they do for this one. This past weekend there was an article in the newspaper on the "tiny garden", and this would qualify as tiny. I think of my garden as small but it is large compared to this. The owners must be proud of what they have created.