"When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night", wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden.

173 years after Thoreau, I took my abode in the woods, in May of 2018, also in the state of Massachusetts, but hundred miles to the west, in the Berkshires. Unlike Henry's, my project was not a deliberate social experiment. It emerged from the chaos of tectonic shifts and eruptions re-configuring a middle-class family of four in the endless New Jersey suburbs, as the children grow up and leave for college, and then adult work.

I grew up in a Cold War Eastern Bloc country and came to America with dreams of great scientific discoveries. But after many years and places, I have finally found my well paid busywork at a global pharma giant so oppressive that, at the end of 2017, I gladly jumped at the opportunity of an "early retirement". And fell in love with a 3D landscape on Google Maps even before the Berkshire snow melted enough to even drive by the land. I had the closing on my 32 acres of woods in May, 2018, and right after Memorial Day began spending several nights a week in a hi-tech tent I pitched at Camp Chaos. 

Without initially knowing it, I have been walking in Henry's footsteps ever since. He famously wrote about his hike to the top of Mount Greylock, which towers over Camp Chaos. But more importantly, despite all the differences between us, I feel a strange kinship with Henry and his declaration: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach".

I am biologist by faith. I have wanted to study life since I first saw, in an aquarium in the biology room at my elementary school, a male of the smooth newt in his courtship display -- a fantastic underwater dragon with a translucent crest and a neon rainbow on his tail, who immediately redefined the boundary between reality and imagination.

I was a foot soldier in the last great wave of discovery in the biological sciences, which determined the life's code of heredity, and opened the way for its dangerously easy manipulation. As a student I hoped that science would also offer me a glimpse of understanding of the life's greatest mystery: The mind that is so unique to each of us, and yet, in the general design, must be shared with all animals, the same way internal organs, cellular structures and DNA are. And my own mind.

It did not happened. Future scientific revolutions will create new paradigms some day, but for now I think the old proven tools of humanity -- arts, psychoactive mushrooms and plants, meditation -- to be more useful. For thousands of years, people like Henry sought solitude in search for the ultimate insight.

My little house is almost ready, solar panels and all. So welcome to my Walden.