The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

In his essay Nature, Emerson says, “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?” With solitude and a rainstorm: All is changed. My parents did not bring me up in a church-going tradition. But nature is church, my great-great-great grandfather believed—and I was raised to go into the woods. “[Nature] always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us. . . . The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” He taught his children to go into the woods for communion—and they taught theirs to do the same, and so on. * * * “I actually hate nature,” I once confided to my mom when I was about nine after a buggy week at Audubon camp. I preferred to cozy up with a book or use my stuffed animals to act out scenes from Little Women. “Ha,” she laughed. “Just don’t ever let anyone from Dad’s side of the family hear you say that. You’ll probably be excommunicated.” The thing is, Emerson himself probably would have been fine with it. As his son wrote, RWE’s “own attitude in the matter was, that it was only a question for each person where the best church was,—in the solitary wood, the chamber, the talk with the serious friend, or in hearing the preacher.”