In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

THE OLD GROWTH INITIATIVE
In Search of an Autumn Wisdom


A Keystone Initiative of Cultural Reclamation and Renewal
At the Heart of the American Founding Experience


We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time.
It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars,
and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight
which becomes the light of our life.



The Old Growth Initiative is the cultural heartwood of our work at the Innermost House Foundation, the parent tree from which all our projects of Nature and Craft, Thought and Spirit, Society and Solitude descend, the unitive seed into which all converge again. In the natural succession of forest trees, it is the elder and the offspring of our existence.

The Initiative exists to triangulate America’s composite founding culture between the elder traditions of Native America and the ancient wisdom traditions of Afro-Eurasia, thus to reclaim to individual possibility the promise and aid of a universal human archetype: the genius of Elderhood, a perennial autumn wisdom equal to the unseasonable challenges of the modern world.

 
 

And the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit
to wide neighbourhoods of men.

 
 

AMERICAN OLD GROWTH

America’s contribution to the world’s elder wisdom is little recognized, and less engaged to any purpose. Its long age of development has been characterized by historians as the period of “Plain living and High Thinking in American Culture,” which we explore as the American Wisdom Tradition. Its importance today lies in the fact that it alone among the world’s great wisdom traditions arose from the same soil at the same time as did all the unique challenges presented to nature and the human soul by modern mass culture.

What are the conditions of elder wisdom? Nature, learning, and life-experience first, refined at length by intelligence and sensibility, love and loss, suffering and reflection to the seasoned complexity of the mature human soul. Such a wisdom of completeness precedes and succeeds all distinctions of culture, age, race, and gender. Its wholeness dissolves all categories of partiality. Its complexity comprehends all degrees of diversity. It is generous. It is just. “It gives what it hath and all that it hath.” It is the final stage in the heroic development of human nature, the “rounded complete grace” of a shining course come full circle.


In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
There I feel that nothing can befall me in life. . .
which nature cannot repair.


The perennial conversation of Elder wisdom stands for balanced wholeness in a world of divided interests. It belongs to the old growth forests of human time, forever seeking out the timeless, watercourse ways of woodland nature. It proceeds in concentric circles of growth, and does not apply for relevance to straight-line standards of social or technological progress. Its genius lies in the conservation of energy, in remembered origins, in reclamation and renewal, in a fine feeling for what to make of the beautiful passingness of things in a life bounded by birth and death, yet rich with love and truth and meaning.

Our Initiative takes seed and root in that shadow world of deep time, for wisdom does not mature under the noon-day sun of youth. It is first at home in the most complex ecosystems on earth: in the canopy of old growth forests the world over. It cultivates as its heartwood and core the most complex organic structure we know to exist in the universe: the individual human mind. To the old growth complexity and infinite resource of the solitary human being, then, we look for our deliverance.

The Individual is the World

 


And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. . . Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, — there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

 

Else would this stone be standing maimed and short
Beneath the shoulder's low translucent plunge
Nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey
Nor breaking out of all its contours
Like a star: for there is no place
That does not see you.

You must change your life.

 
 
 
 

“The only gift is a portion of thyself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
 
 
 

Please visit the American Wisdom Project, a pilot research and teaching curriculum of the Innermost House Foundation at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of the College of William & Mary. The Project exists to bring an American Wisdom Tradition of “plain living and high thinking” into focus, through which to illuminate the great wisdom traditions of the larger world.

 


The American Wisdom Project: Suggested General Readings

The present impulse to simplicity, small houses, and sustainability may appear new, says David E. Shi, President Emeritus of Furman University, but the underlying ideal has been with us for centuries. From Puritans and Quakers to Boy Scouts and environmentalists, our quest for the simple life is an enduring, complex tradition in American culture. Looking across more than three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, Shi introduces a rich cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Scott and Helen Nearing.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, awarded both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, has become a classic of American historical literature. Hailed at its first appearance as “the most brilliant study of the meaning of the Revolution to appear in a generation,” it was enlarged in a second edition to include the nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, hence exploring not only the Founders’ initial hopes and aspirations but also their struggle to implement their ideas in constructing the national government. An essential work on the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution.

Historians have always had problems explaining the revolutionary character of the American Revolution: its lack of class conflict and civil violence make it seem positively sedate. In this beautifully written and persuasively argued book, Gordon S. Wood restores the radicalism to what he terms "one of the greatest revolutions the world has ever known." It was a revolution of the mind, in which concepts of equality, democracy, and private interest transformed a national culture nearly overnight. Bold, exciting, controversial and compelling, this book has become a classic of American history.

American Transcendentalism is often seen as a literary movement—a flowering of works written by New England intellectuals who retreated from society and lived in nature. In Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul, Barry M. Andrews focuses on a neglected aspect of this well-known group, showing how American Transcendentalists developed rich spiritual practices to nurture their souls and discover the divine. The practices are simple and nearly universal to the world’s monastic traditions—among them, contemplation, walking, reading, simple living, and conversation.

In The Transcendentalists and Their World, Bancroft Prize winning historian Robert Gross takes us deep into the life of a small American community to study the writers and thinkers who would make America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence” and change our world. It shows us familiar figures in American literature, centered upon Emerson and Thoreau, and reveals how the common life of Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the central figure in the history of American thought, spirituality, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us nearly a century and a half after his death. Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson presents us with a thrilling intellectual biography as the portrait of a complete man.

Examining California's formative years, this powerful and evocative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but on the rest of the country. What is the California Dream? How may we understand that dream as both the culmination of the American Dream and as its contradiction, its reduction to unsupportability? In this first volume of Kevin Starr’s seven-volume masterpiece, California comes to life as an idea, an ideal, and a sometimes fallen reality.

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically different society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. The central theme of his work remains in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation.