Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Dynamic and Evolving Landscape | Page 20

© Matthew A. Longo, 2015

Excerpt from The Lively Place by Stephen Kendrick

Getting Lost
“In the last year, I have trave rse d Mount
Auburn with many guides: a horticulturalist turned
administrator, an advocate for green burials, a
groundskeeper, a landscape designer, a historian, a bird
expert, a fellow historian-minister, and many others,
experts and family and friends besides.Yes, I have walked
alone, but I felt that going with others would serve to
deepen and enrich my experience, and help me see things
I was not equipped, or ready, to see. William James called
the sensory overload that a baby confronts at birth an
“aboriginal sensible muchness.” I needed help in focusing,
in narrowing down, in noticing specifics in the richness.
Most of us are effectively sleepwalking through our
days, and any encouragement to awaken and alert our
senses—well, that is good. I Am adept at many things, but
actually looking at what I am looking at as I pass, sadly, is
not high on the list. I have enjoyed researching this book
and getting to know the friendly staff at Mount Auburn—
and I have even enjoyed the writing—but what I am
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really getting from the experience is a heighted sense of
seeing this place and every other landscape in my life not
only with keener senses, but with a willingness to process
and notice.
One of my favorite biblical words is the exclamation
Behold! You don’t have to have an angel whisper it to you.
This is what is being asked of us: behold. Unfortunately, it
is less a grand gift than a discipline, and I have to stretch
myself to keep it up. It will force me, if I stick with it,
to see the walks I do every day...as the means by which
I apprehend the extraordinary in the very ordinary, the
“muchness” in the mundane. And it will take more than a
place as beautiful as Mount Auburn to make me achieve
this (though it certainly helps).
The lost art of walking is often the heart of Thoreau’s essential message, as shared in one his last essays, “Walking,” in
1862. In defense of the preservation of wildness, he harkens
back to the old word sauntering, surely one of the things
that Mount Auburn most exemplifies. In the Middle Ages,
wanderers would ask for alms saying that they were about
the purpose of heading to the Holy Land, “till the children