Best of London: Hyde Park

I went to visit the famous Hyde Park the day before I left London. I don’t remember that day so well because I was in a veiled space, wrapped in the muslin of my thoughts. I wanted to reach out to people but I didn’t want to talk. Maybe it’s because I was about to leave the city the next day and I wanted to be quiet so as to absorb and take all the sounds with me. Judy Dench‘s character in A Room with a View tells her friend to sniff, sniff Florence because every city has its own scent. I think every place has its own distinct sound. Maybe we need a blind man with superior olfactory and auditory faculties to tell us…

And so I was tumbling in my head and the garden was like the perfect place to be, where we could be together and yet not talk. It reminded me of how once we had learned to talk with our movements, with our bodies. People don’t talk about body language anymore but about email etiquette. No one under 35 has said the term “body language” to me in recent memory.

In the garden, people walked hand in hand and sometimes photographed one another from afar. It was lovely to be together and not overwhelm each other with words, which sometimes are just empty bullets. They reach the target but have no impact. It was was delightful to be in a space where people were living for living’s sake; we were not trying to get anywhere.

It was so beautiful that even though it started to rain, I walked in my cheap sandals under the drizzle with my blue umbrella knocking against my head as I bent to smell (and photograph) the fragrant flowers.

Old couples gaily sauntered through the reeds and kids swung from the trees. {Kids still do that? I must get myself to the rivers and dells more often…}

European Beech tree or Fagus sylvatica, if you fancy.

I do believe that nature restores health. I grew up in a big noisy bustling city, Port-au-Prince.  Since then I’ve always lived in urbanite areas – some busier than others, but always places with public transportation, which my basic requirement for a city. But I spent summers in the countryside with my grandmother. My parents, now in their mid-life triumph {my parents have done this whole crisis thing backward, when they approached 50 they got exponentially more confident and generally more awesome in every way} moved to a woodsy bowl of quietude, with gold fish lapping in the lake in the backyard. I call this the country but the United States Government calls it a CDP {Census-Designated-Place}. Neither city nor country; no public transport, no cows.

At any rate, I swear this woodsy CDP is having an invigorating effect on them. Whenever I visit them my skin stretches taut and I feel bold and alive. It’s wonderful.

Visit a park this weeek or at least read an Emily Dickinson poem.  Emily Dickinson is the Queen of nature poetry to me. Dickinson is the pure unalloyed fantasy love for the earth and its sprouts.