Alexander Theroux
"Have you have ever been out in the great alone?"
- Robert W. Service
No, Henry neither liked nor accepted
the derogatory attitudes toward "wilderness" in the Bible
where, symbolic antidote to civilization,
prayers were wrested. Where the experience
of God's holy presence is difficult for most people to find
he never failed to find it in the weald
and the wild, entering the woods as if
penetrating a woman, believing in the passion it held for him.
That was singularly prayer for him.
"My heart is a remnant white pine, beating
with sap, my hemlock hands as good as any tree." Solitude
filling his frontier head, he knew the God
he needed was in wilderness which was never
the sign of unhappiness or estrangement. Hunters become
merely predators in the way godly prayers
are too often commonly prayed on knees.
Hebrews trooped through the wilderness, always parched
for Jeremiah, Isaiah, Moses, where devils
are encountered, where one is cruelly put to the test,
saints sorely tempted, where angels are required to minister to one,
a Zin of strife, friction, discord, variance, disgrace,
and fear, with no prosperity found, only harshness
and isolation. Henry knew better. "In Wildness is the preservation
of the World," he proudly wrote. Our soul is soil.