For me, it''s light. Waking my daughters up just prior to sunrise when the sky is streaked with their favorite colors. The way that the tree branches scatter the rays of late afternoon sun when I stand at the sink doing dishes. Dancing sunlight that looks like waterbugs on the surface of my parents'' quarry. The occasionally gargantuan orange moon that prompts my husband to remind me to "watch the road, please." Dusk. Dawn. Moonlight.

Noon. Wild moments all. I''m wildest then. And while I have always reached for the light in these moments, I did not have a language for the feeling or the impulse to record it until I read Wild Fruits , Thoreau''s parting remarks on the wildest places just outside his front door. The rest of his corpus soon followed. Though I grew up in Bedford, Massachusetts, Concord''s eastern neighbor, I would not touch these books until I was living outside of Massachusetts. When I did, I felt about my literary encounter with Thoreau what Amanda Mather, a Thoreau family friend wrote when asked to recall Henry: "It is hard to classify Henry Thoreau, to put him any where. He was himself and belonged to no class or creed--I think he did not reject revelation of God in the scriptures, but for himself sought light from nature in His works .

" What Thoreau offered was something I had not encountered in my own religious upbringing (or lack thereof--no slight to my parents), yet which spoke religion to me, asked me to "be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within" to "open new channels, not of trade" or of those darker imperial and violent impulses, "but of thought." Not rewired, but re wild ed. This is what reading Thoreau can do. And for those in Henry David Thoreau''s imagined community of wild theologians, their wildness speaks back. This Prologue, appearing at the end of the book, gestures toward those who have taken up Thoreau''s theology of wildness and adapted it to their own times, places, needs, and hopes. As Richard Schneider writes, and as this book thus far has insisted, Thoreau viewed his writings as a "continuous probing rather than as a creation of a finished record"--and a probing, writes Henrik Otterberg, that placed the onus on the reader "to make sense and significance of his words, beyond the horizons of authorial significance." Thus, to take seriously the idea that Thoreau imagined a real reader of what he left deliberately unfinished means to accept that Thoreau hoped others would continue in his stead, that the notion of a "constant new creation" was not just for forest trees, but for people who sought to create pathways into wild nature and their wildest selves. His death did not mean the "breaking" of his task, as interpreted by Emerson in his eulogy of Thoreau, which implies that the intention of his life''s work was to become a discrete, impenetrable whole.

No, Thoreau''s death broke nothing, because he did not imagine that his theology of wildness would end with him--it is a task, unbroken by the transmission, translation, and creation of those who would take it up in their lives, actions, and writings. To take this project seriously also means accepting that Thoreau understood his theology of wildness to be good --good for people and good for the world. He could not have predicted the forms his theology would take through the mouths, pens, and deeds of others, or the fame both he and his writings would earn, but the consistency with which he brought people into nature through his work bore ethical, moral consequences. That his work was able to enter this second phase of life is due in great part to those in his community who played the part of evangelist, particularly his sister Sophia, whose work in both the preservation and promotion of her brother''s published and unpublished writings was as crucial to his legacy as his elevation by biographers and critics. Yet, the work of interpreting the intentions and value of his writings as religious texts as well as the intentions and value of the man himself as a theologian of wildness began during his own lifetime. Caroline Dall found his nature writing equal parts blasphemous and captivating, producing a smorgasbord of emotional ambivalence for Dall when he praised a lecture she delivered in Concord. John Weiss, his biographer and Harvard classmate, was bolder in his appraisal of Thoreau''s religious inclinations, writing three years after Thoreau''s death that "no present writer of the present day is more religious; that is to say, no one more profoundly penetrated with the redeeming power of simple integrity, and the spiritualizing effect of a personal consciousness of God." Thoreau, in Weiss''s view, sought not to supplant the existent sacred canons of Christianity or Hinduism, but to point to the "continuous inspiration of the Spirit through all climes and ages," including ages to come.

Weiss keenly observes that Thoreau was a religious writer, "in the sense of worshipping the presence of infinite consistency and beauty" but that he matched this prosaic tendency with behavior that indicated "as if his religion ''was nothing to speak of.''" Thoreau likely would have been chagrined, even taken aback, by the speculation directed at him--he had not, it seemed, blended into the background as the observer. Yet, it is hard to imagine that he would not have been warmed by the fact that the same vigor devoted to unpuzzling his persona was devoted to understanding his writings. "His books," wrote editor and literary critic William Sloane Kennedy, were "the simple record of his life and thought, a sort of diary of his rambles; and yet they teach a morality as high and pure as the scriptures of any language." Then in language that evokes Thoreau''s theological legacy, Kennedy writes that this "morality" is one that "appeals to that element in man''s nature which unites him with his Creator." The takehome message of his writings was that this element, this wildness, was recoverable through the actions of rambling, or sauntering through nature, honing the senses to move from observing to seeing nature, seeking both primeval and domestic sites of wildness, and anticipating the revelations of wildness. It is nature, really, that should be read--but realizing the evangelical potential of the pen, he accepts his apostolic purpose of "[realizing] nature and [locating] man in it." From there, it will be up to the reader to discover wildness and to "learn of [the self]" as the reader learns "of nature"--to "open divine nature to" the reader who, so stimulated, will "break out of the pens" that confine the potential of wild discovery.

Thus, the question implicit in all of Thoreau''s is: what are you going to do with this message? (excerpted from the prologue).