Silent Simplicity
I was eleven. A young girl in a small attic room, hidden behind a bookcase. My uncle built the secret door. Push the third shelf, press the upper left corner, and the wall clicked open to a triangle of space beneath the rafters. No one else went in there. It was mine.
I read Walden there for the first time.
I didn’t fully understand it. I didn’t need to. The words moved like water over stone. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately… That line landed like a spell. I underlined it in soft pencil and copied it into my poetry notebook, which Mom gave me, with its bent corners and a pressed maple leaf between the pages.
Walden. It’s still inside me.
Thoreau offered a return, not an escape. He presented a way to embrace the pulse beneath the noise, to the dignity of enough, to the kind of silence that listens back.
The attic became my covey. I’d write short stories and poems about rain, and horses, and girls who didn’t speak unless they had something worth saying. I never told my friends. Some sacred things don’t survive explanation.
We live in a world swollen with more. More visibility. More productivity. More metrics. But the soul doesn’t keep score. It keeps presence. It notices how morning light hits chipped paint. How tea cools in a ceramic mug. How silence has texture if you sit with it long enough.
A life simply lived is not a lesser life. It’s a refusal. A resistance. A fierce act of choosing.
Anyone can chase applause. It takes devotion to sit in stillness and feel full.
I’ve lived years that looked impressive and felt hollow. I’ve also spent entire afternoons doing nothing but pulling weeds from a cracked garden bed, humming. I know which ones healed me.
There’s no trophy for sitting in a hidden room reading transcendental philosophy before puberty. But I think she, the girl with ink on her hands and pine needles in her socks, knew something I forget sometimes.
Not everything meaningful makes a sound. Some things just echo.
And that echo is still here.
