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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SCUYtQUDXPn-X2gwctq5aA7doB5d4bDu8pvYWizImh4/edit?usp=sharing

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This picture was taken during a snowstorm. During the storm, the area lost power. I didn’t use any technology that day and truly appreciated the beauty of the snow.

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This picture was taken at Rosemary beach. I took a morning walk and this was the best feeling. Looking out in the ocean, i couldn’t see the end, relating to the vast unlimited thinking the mind is capable of.

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This poem by Walt Whitman shows the concept of individualism. The title itself is called “Song of Myself”.  The poem also talks about how we are connected to nature and god.

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Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

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This quote by Thoreau talks about how the world is a blank canvas and our imagination can fill up the canvas with ideas and opportunities.

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This quote shows idea of nonconformity to society. Why follow society’s path when you can carve your own path? If you create your own path on a trail you may find a better destination.

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This quote shows the idea of self freedom and thinking for yourself. Only you can shape yourself and don't let others influence you to be someone you aren’t.

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This quote by Thoreau means that people tend to care about all the little details in life and that hinders us, but if people can look at the big picture of life, they can truly live.

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This video shows transcendentalism because he paints an abstract picture showing his originality, creativity, and imagination. An aspect that Thoreau greatly admires.

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“Dare to Dream”

-Josh Legere

He says everyone is different and unique in our own way. He says we are scared of people judging us for being different, but don't let that stop you from being yourself. He says to not fall in the conformity trap and “Dare to be different”.

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healthy living lifestyle unique life conformity be yourself dare

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You are unique. We all are. We are the product of our upbringing, our experiences and our friends and families. We think differently and act...

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Podcast

Alex Strong talks about an overview of Thoreau and his transcendentalist ideas. He talks about the naturalistic aspect of Thoreau philosophy. He talks about how nature influenced Thoreau and how what he thought based on Thoreau’s books.

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Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism

Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long. "Simplify," in a one-word sentence of good advice. But then 2- words on 7-thousand pages in his quotable lifetime journal.

It's one of many odd points to notice about Thoreau at his 200 th birthday: that the non-stop writer was equally a man of action, a scientist and a high-flying poet whose imagination saw that "the bluebird carries the sky on his back;" and still a workman with callused hands, at home in the wild, a walker four hours a day on average, in no particular direction. His transcendentalism was all about the blossoming intersection of nature-study introspection, fact idea, detail ideals. In his pine grove, on his river, at his pond, the Thoreau.

N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945) Walden Pond Revisited, 1942

What does a Transcendentalist do, we were asking in the first of three bicentennial Thoreau shows? All the answers are to be found in the canoe trip that became a masterpiece, titled: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. What the Transcendentalist does is soar - between water below and sky above; between this day and eternity, between Nature, and human society.

We start our journey at the South Bridge Boat House near Thoreau's house on Main Street in Concord, just upstream from the Concord River itself. A naturalist philosopher in the Thoreau lineage, Alex Strong from Maine, is one of our guides. During our trip down Thoreau's "little Nile", Alex tells us about what the strapping, young 22 year old was learning on his voyage:

He was learning about big-N Nature when he was studying the Perch, studying when flowers bloomed, where the bees were. The notes he took, the meticulous notes, weren't just about the little details; they're about understanding the whole picture and keeping nature sacred while understanding it, in all its finite mundane details.

Next up, the still-water Walden, a pond in Concord, Massachusetts where Henry Thoreau wrote his great book in a cabin by the shore. In 1845 Walden was a woodlot next to the new railway where the 28-year-old poet went to "suck out the marrow of life," whatever it turned out to be. Our guide to the pond and the book, the young philosopher John Kaag had been in and out of the Walden water the other morning before we got there.

Photo by Michael J. Lutch
While we're here, at Walden, we decided to stop and consider the statuesque, very tall, dark-green, almost black, pine trees all around Walden Pond, trees that Thoreau came to consider cousins, virtually human. Richard Higgins, widely traveled in Concord today, has written a book on Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and he has no doubt that Thoreau spoke it fluently, from the heart.

Finally, we conclude with a Thoreauvian meditation on walking. Real walkers are born, not made, Thoreau liked to say. "If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk." These days the woods and the bookstores are full of such walkers. e literary traveler Andrew Forsthoefel made his reputation in public radio walking 4000 miles from Philadelphia to San Francisco, with a sign that said "walking to listen" and recording back-road stories. And then there's th Paul Theroux, of Cape Cod and Hawaii, of the Mosquito Coast and The Great Railway Bazaar. He has spent a lifetime on trains, and in kayaks, and a lot of it on his own two feet in China, in our own Deep South and specially in Africa. In our conversation, Theroux extends Thoreau's idea that walking is in-born, into some more than others.
See a full transcript of this show on

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Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism

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Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long. "Simplify," in a one-word sentence of good advice. But then 2- words on 7-thousand pages in his quotable lifetime journal.

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“Get up, Stand up”

Bob Marley

"Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight"

This iconic song by Bob Marley  shows transcendentalist views of standing up for something that is unjust and fighting for your rights.

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Bon Jovi

“It’s My Life”

“It's my life

It's now or never

I ain't gonna live forever

I just want to live while I'm alive”

This song by Bon Jovi shows the transcendentalist idea of nonconformity. He says it's his life and he decides how he wants to live it. People aren’t truly living because they are trapped in society’s norms, but Bon Jovi advocates for people to be themselves.

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Bon Jovi - It's My Life (Official Music Video)

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Mister wives

“We'll dance to our own beat, won't sing to your melody

We will not care if we're the only ones swimming in the sea

Let do this all our own way

Can't change the storm of a hurricane”

This song tells you to be yourself. You don't need to be people’s expectations. The line, “Let's do this all our own way”, shows independent thinking. Don’t bother what other people think about you because you are unique in your own way.

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MisterWives - Hurricane (Official Audio)

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Madison Bryan

This picture captures the essence of looking at the world through nature. The eyes are the wings of the bird representing nature. This shows transcendentalist views of letting nature guide you.

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“‘Selfie’-reliance: The word of the year is the story of our individualism”

-Dan Zak

This news article states that current transcendentalist ideals are being used in today’s society through selfies. The selfie is a form of self reliance, being able to express yourself through pictures of yourself.

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There is a time in every man's day when his Facebook feed spits out a photo of a friend who has turned a smartphone camera on him or herself. There is the practiced tilt of the head, to avoid additional chins. There is the palm tree or infinity pool in the background, to record momentary privilege. There is the artfully arranged cleavage, or the casually flexed triceps, to establish oneself as fit, desirable, deserving of exhibition in the carousel museum of social media.

We click "like," or we narrow our eyes in dislike, and then remember our Emerson.

"Envy is ignorance," he wrote in his essay "Self-Reliance," and "imitation is suicide."

Regardless, "selfie" is the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year, chosen partly because its usage spiked 17,000 percent since this time last year. We have become selfie-reliant, and now the lexicon has wholly absorbed the modern way to label the ancient fascination with self. But are modern selfies, uploaded onto Instagram by the millions, corrosive in a way that finer self-portraits are not - the oil-on-canvas selfies of Frida Kahlo, say, or Australian gunner Thomas Baker's 1917 Kodak portrait of his mirror image in uniform?

The practice of self-portraiture has never been cheaper or wider. The #selfie hashtag on Instagram summons a torrent of self-portraits, ranging in style from glamour shot to mugshot. Now we are a mob of self-portraitists. The total democratization of an art form either destroys it or ennobles it, and the selfie is either a pure expression of self or the surrender to conformity.

Depends on your artistic standards, and your tolerance for psychobabble.

Selfies are a form of vernacular photography, like amateur daguerreotype or Polaroid, says Alicia Eler, who writes routinely about selfies on the arts Web site Hyperallergic, and the prevalence of the artistic tool (the smartphone) doesn't diminish the value of the work.

"I think the self-portrait and the selfie are for anyone who's continuously documenting the act of becoming," she says. It's not self-obsession, though. It's a way to connect.

Such portraiture on social media is as good for self-empowerment as it is for self-objectification, psychologist Sarah J. Gervais writes in Psychology Today.

Though it's possible for people to take an unhealthy "outsider's perspective of their bodies," Gervais says, she suggests "that Instagram offers a quiet resistance to the barrage of perfect images that we face" in the traditional media.

Parse them any which way, and realize that we have come to rely on selfies. Selfies say "I was here, in this state, at this point in time." Selfies say "I'm not alone because I can share my aloneness."

We're not narcissists, as the curmudgeonry claims.

We are transcendentalists with iPhones.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose marquee essay is titled "Self-Reliance," would have been a habitual selfie-taker. The transcendentalists meticulously journaled about themselves and shared passages with each other. They prized the notion of the individual and his or her capacity for self-definition.

Emerson "says the mark of wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the commonplace, and showing ourselves to each other because we find something of worth in ourselves," says Philip F. Gura, professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this way, each selfie is one more breath blown into "the Oversoul," which Emerson defined as the "common heart," as individuals knit together in the ether. He could have been writing about the Internet and social media, in which case he would have cautioned against modeling yourself on others, which "loses your time and blurs the impression of your character."

"But do your work, and I shall know you," Emerson wrote. "Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself."

If Emerson were writing "Self-Reliance" today, he might have added this instruction to his essay: If you do take a selfie, don't look at the image of yourself on the screen as you snap the photo. Your eyes will be looking in the wrong direction. Instead, look into the lens itself, into the other soul who will soon be looking back at you.

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Selfie-reliance: The word of the year is the story of our individualism.

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There is a time in every man's day when his Facebook feed spits out a photo of a friend who has turned a smartphone camera on him or herself. There is the practiced tilt of the head, to avoid additional chins. There is the palm tree or infinity pool in the background, to record momentary privilege.

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This image shows the transcendentalist idea that there are unlimited possibilities of imagination and ideas that one can think of. The collage of different thoughts in the head shows the true creativity that people can think of.

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This image shows the transcendentalist idea of not conforming to society's norms. The picture depicts a bird breaking out of a cage which represents society. The bird can be independent and represents thinking independently and that there is no limits.