Life, with the garden
Location: Montréal, Quebec, Canada • • • Visit: August 2024
In August 2024, I went to Montreal for a conference. Some of the best people I know were there. There is something bittersweet about my life as an academic: I have the privilege to meet some of the most incredible persons. But also: they often live, or move, far away. And so, getting together at conferences can be like adult camp. An intense rush of everything, all at once.
But I also took some extra days to explore the city of Montreal. And with me, both at the conference, at the bars, cafes and parks, I carried my crocheted linen blazer, my embroidery canvas for the summer.
In the incredible Botanic Garden of Montreal, I sat among the conifers and maples in the shadow garden and embroidered ferns, leaves extending, as if growing up from the ground onto the mustard surface of my blazer. In that stillness, I started thinking about carrying the world on my shoulders.
And I decided, cocooned in that lush green softness, that I will be making a choice. I carry so much existential pain. I have seen so much darkness. I have seen so many people close to me drown, tie up their own hands and feet. Choke on water, pull others down in desperate attempts to stay above the surface themselves. I feel them all in my body.
I will not disappear. I am here. But I need my choice to be light. I choose beauty. This is what I want to bring into the world. I did not have a choice about the darkness, it is there. To stay here, I choose light and beauty and play. The adventure in the leaves of a fern.
Someone else can fight to put light on all the other darknesses. That burden is not mine to carry. I choose to stay here. My choice is beauty. The meaning created when we are allowed to play, together. That has to be enough, too.
I was strolling along the arboretum, starting to think about belonging. How I sound so arrogant in my own head, how I look at the other visitors, hordes of tourists in the pretty gardens by the main entrance. I know botanic gardens. I have been to so many. I know how this compares to others, I belong. Everyone else: Amateurs, photographing pretty flowers.
I am finishing up a paper about sense of belonging, that is where the thought comes from.
And I am struck.
Two pine trees, low.
What is it with these trees? Gorgeous, branches spreading out, bluish green needles and shadows.
I feel dumb-struck, all the intellectual thoughts gone.
These are the sexiest trees I’ve ever seen.
And then a red bird flies through my field of vision. A red thunderbolt of grace sweeping, and then landing high up in a spruce.
A northern cardinal, maybe? I don’t know these birds. They might be common, here, but I have never seen them before.
Let go of that arrogance. Is it not delightful, something fragile and immediate. How belonging and wonder can exist in the same breath.
Katja Malmborg 