How Have I Not?

There are holes in my upbringing,
knowledge, absent.
Consider Walden, the woods-lived
life--the proud pond;
sixty-one acres of knowing,
trusting simple existence:
that it was enough.
                -Kate Churchill

From The Writer's Almanac, July 12, 2014~
David Henry Thoreau was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He went to Harvard, but he didn't like it very much, nor did he enjoy his later job as a schoolteacher. He seemed destined for a career in his father's pencil factory, and in fact, he came up with a better way to bind graphite and clay, which saved his father money. But in 1844, Thoreau's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond, a 61-acre pond, surrounded by woods, and Thoreau decided to build a cabin there. It was only two miles from the village of Concord, and he had frequent visitors. During the two years he lived there, Thoreau kept a journal that he later published as Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau wrote, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."