Stop and Smell the Flowers Traditional Cache

This cache was created as a tribute to Henry David Thoreau's essay Life Without Principle.

Life Without Principle originated as a lecture called "What Shall it Profit," first delivered at Railroad Hall in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 6, 1854. Thoreau had begun work on the essay about three months after the publication of Walden.  He worked on Walden for seven years and was expecting it to be successful enough to create an unprecedented demand for his services as a lecturer during the following winter lecture season.

During the last few months of his life, he was preparing "What Shall it Profit" for publication. It was finally published more than a year after his death, in the October 1863 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, where it received its modern title.

This essay is considered the most important and most influential of Thoreau's shorter writings. It is a brilliant summary of Thoreau's most fundamental and passionately held beliefs, that of defiant individualism and a plea for the individual's right to march to the sound of his own drum. It is pure Transcendentalism, a plea that each follow his own inner light.  It can be best summarized in Thoreau's own words ..."Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives."

"The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money

Thoreau believed every man must discover for himself what the Good Life is, and he can only find it if he consults himself and his own nature. Thoreau argues that work should be something we love to do, in order to lead a life worth living.  Our lives should be about enjoying living, not making a living.

"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it."

The focus of the essay is on Thoreau’s penetrating questions about how to live ethically and responsibly, as part of nature and part of society – questions that lead us to confront the way we live our lives. It has been 150 years and Thoreau still asks 'Why wait until retirement to do what you love?'. Reading this book changed my life...

"We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities."

You will notice a lot of Mountain Laurel trees growing here. It is a beautiful thicket-forming shrub or small tree. It is evergreen with reddish-brown shredding bark and produces beautiful large pink flower clusters. This tree is found in the understory of mixed forests on upland mountain slopes in the Appalachians, and is one of the most beautiful native flowering shrubs in North America. This area is stunning in the spring. Take time to enjoy them...