Thoreau said he wasn’t paddling the Assabet River—he was on the Ganges. Was he being poetic, or was he seeing something we’ve lost the capacity to see?
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Thomas Moore—bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Ageless Soul—about his new book, The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity. At 85, Moore offers a reading of Thoreau that upends the one most of us were taught: not a naturalist cataloguing the woods, but a mystic looking for what he called the divine “lurking” there.
Join Tami and Thomas to explore:
- Living daimonically: the guiding presence the Greeks called a daimon and the Romans called a genius—and how to tell it from your own ego agenda
- Why Moore left the monastery after 13 years on the strength of a single morning’s clarity
- “We are half human, half angel”—and what changes when you look at the people in your life through that lens
- Musical time, Bach, and why playing the piano every day has made Moore think differently about dying
- Why “the ultimate secret is to show the world who you are”—and why humiliation may be closer to the soul than confidence
- Thoreau’s dark night: holding his brother as he died, and what it teaches about grief you never get over
- The chapter called “Be Cold and Hungry,” and why the storms belong
Tami presses Moore on the parts she finds hard to swallow—and his answers are the heart of this episode.
Listen now, and find the cure. →
This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.
