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Hiatus

I am going to spend three days camping out on the Olympic Peninsula, on the northwestern tip at Shi Shi Beach. I will leave the following, mentally adding ocean to Thoreau’s lakes and rivers:

I should wither up and die if it were not for lakes and rivers. I am conscious that my body derives its genesis from their waters as much as the muskrat or the herbage on their brink. The thought of Walden in the woods yonder makes me supple jointed and limber for the duties of the day. Sometimes I thirst for it.
There it lies all the year reflecting the sky – and from its surface there seems to go up a pillar of ether, which bridges over the space between earth and heaven.
Water seems a middle element between earth and air. The most in which a man can float.
Across the surface of every lake there sweeps a hushed music.

– Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 1837-1861

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