Book Description

JOTTINGS IN THE WOODS, WALT WHITMAN'S NATURE PROSE AND A STUDY OF OLD PINE FARM is a unique combination of Whitman's stunning nature descriptions and the down-to-earth profile of a current program to protect land in South Jersey. While Whitman lived in Camden, he was stricken by paralysis. The Stafford family in Laurel Springs invited him to be their guest. During his stays, he walked along the Big Timber Creek and wrote about the nature he saw. The Old Pine Farm Natural Lands Trust in Deptford was founded to protect what is now nearly forty acres of woodlands, meadow and wetlands along the same Big Timber Creek. It is as though Whitman wrote his essays just yesterday, and the land trust is a current, living reflection of what Whitman experienced so long ago. Photographs, maps, drawings. "The teachings in this book come as natural and lively as the land it celebrates. Walt Whitman's vibrant jottings stir our senses, showing us how to wake up and see, smell, hear the daily wonders of the natural world, right at the edge of our city lives. With those who have come, over a century later, to love the same small realm of creek, woods and wetland, we learn how that full-body attention to life translates into service and the commitment to restore. Another lesson I love in this book is the way Old Pine Farm ignites people's dreams and energies to work together. The all-volunteer staff and board, neighbors, naturalists, scouts, high schoolers have generated an ecosystem of human community, whose powerful magic is this: to use the present moment to preserve the gifts of the past for the sake of our common future." -Joanna Macy Advocate of Deep Ecology and author of Coming Back to Life "Walt Whitman has been celebrated as an experimental poet who introduced the long line and free verse, as advocate of an uninhibited sensory and sexual life, and as a would-be founder of a new religion. But underlying all of these images of the poet is the Whitman who experienced the natural world as a manifestation of divine love and reciprocated this love in his poetry and remarkable prose "jottings." As we face an era of impending climate change, the editors have given us a choice sampling of Whitman's least known but best prose nature-writing. They also tell a heart-warming story of preserving an area of South Jersey streams and wetlands and woods that Whitman walked in and wrote about in riveting detail. Read this book and then plant a tree in honor of Old Walt and the good folk at Old Pine Farm." -David Kuebrich, Whitman Scholar and author of Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman's New American Religion