My Walden Pond Cabin

I am rereading Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and this line jumped out at me today as Thoreau was describing the house he built for his time at Walden Pond:

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long…

Ten feet wide by fifteen long.

150 square feet.

I got curious about how big that was, so I measured the room I am in right now, my home office/library. It measures twelve feet wide by thirteen feet long, or 156 square feet — more or less the same size as Thoreau’s home for two years. That realization moved me more than I can express. Walden is one of those books that has had a profound effect on me, as it has for millions of others. And Thoreau wrote it in a one-room cabin about the size of my home office.

Even though I live in a nondescript house in a nondescript city that looks out onto a nondescript front yard, I almost feel, in this moment, that I have my own house on Walden Pond. As Thoreau himself wrote, it is not the architectural style of a house that makes it interesting, but the life of its occupants:

The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling.

This room, this “suburban box” I am sitting in right now, is the place where I do my praying, reading, contemplating, and writing. Here is where I journal in the dark each morning while the world sleeps; here is where each day unfolds and where I try to open my heart to the Divine in solitude and silence. In this room the spirits of authors like Henry David Thoreau whisper their wisdom to me from within the pages of their books and I whisper back to them. For over twenty years this room has been my Walden Pond cabin, though I am only now realizing it.

150 square feet.

So tiny and yet so boundless.

Do you have your own Walden Pond cabin? Leave a comment and share your story.