“Goodness of the Lord” comes alive in stroll through arboretum
I walk through the Washington Park Arboretum almost every Sunday afternoon from September through May. My feet know the way and my body follows. Any pent-up anxieties waft off into the woods.
It’s a time of prayer without words. It’s a time of absorbing beauty and grace and peace without a whit of effort on my part. I taste and see as I walk - just as the psalmist says, “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” Earlier this month, the soft mist clung to the yellow-ripened leaves, and the leaden skies led me into a kind of melancholic reverie. One of Shakespeare’s sonnets floated through me: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
This mix of beauty and death strangely lifts my spirits. Perhaps it’s the Irish in me that “we’re never so happy as when we’re feeling sad.” The Hebrew psalms have the same effect on me - facing into whatever sorrow is sheer prayer and acknowledgment of my dependence on God’s benevolent love.
My feet lead on, impatient with these intrusive thoughts.
I see an old friend as I round a corner of the park - a lovely dogwood in the spring, now stripped bare. Onward I go through a patch of cedars that is fenced off to prevent the spread of a killer fungus and then down to the little glen called Loderi Valley. A rivulet overgrown with ferns sluggishly runs through the little valley and forms a small, inviting pool.
The real treat, though, is the spectacular Japanese maples. Three weeks ago they were in full glory. They flamed out orange and red and golden yellow. But today our Asian friends have closed down the show. Piles of spent leaves litter the ground - as if a Broadway musical had just closed and the cleanup hadn’t yet begun.
It’s not a place to stop. My feet scamper up the sharp incline on the other side of the glen, and the Winter Garden opens out before me. White camellias already bloom. Pink heather covers a corner, and the arboretum’s splendid collection of Hamamelis, or witch hazel - yellow, red and pink varieties - fans out like feather boas.
For someone like myself who grew up in North Dakota, a flower in winter is a rare treat and a Christmas carol rises up in me: “Lo how a rose ere blooming … Amid the cold of winter/When half spent was the night.” A longing for the birth of the Savior Child “who felt our human woe.” More echoes of times past.
At the Arboretum Center my feet suddenly take an unusual turn. Rather than sticking to the familiar Azalea Lane, I am suddenly walking along the east side of the park. And I’m in the middle of some exotic mountain ash. On a rare impulse, I step off the path to read the tag: “Chinese sorbus” (from the mountain ash or rowan family). The tree is loaded with dark-red berries.
I’m surrounded by sorbus. A Japanese sorbus with bright white berries. A pink berried European sorbus. More Chinese sorbus. The arboretum has more than 50 species of sorbus, the world’s greatest collection. Who would have known it!
I have tramped, trudged, sped through the arboretum for years, but I’ve totally missed this treat.
And I meet more new friends that day: a sourwood tree featuring reddish-yellow arrow-shaped leaves and then a Chinese wing nut. The latter is nondescript, but don’t you love the name?
As I finish the course, Shakespeare returns. As the bard contemplates the fading of life and ultimate death, he invites one “to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
And on that last intrusive note, I’m back to my car. “Taste and see. Taste and see.” My melancholy has lifted, and I’m cleansed.
The Rev. Patrick Howell, S.J., is vice president for mission and ministry at Seattle University. Readers may send feedback to faithcolumns@seattletimes.com