Text and Design SiSix

Illustration Seymour Chwast

 

What vibes better with parks, Sundays, or Saturdays? It’s hard to decide. For example, Central Park, in my opinion, is for Saturdays. In the 90s, It was where immigrants gathered, often dancing in the rain during SummerStage, celebrating the joys of not belonging. One week, a solo drummer from Istanbul; the next, a hundred-voice choir from Angola. And always, rollerbladers circling that giant speaker, blasting house music;  something I’ve loved for as long as I can remember.

 

It’s Saturday because I think the Kramers met Meryl Streep on a Saturday.  Billy runs into her arms, and right there, you learn: mothers are everything you will ever need, no matter how the film ended.

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I’d say Central Park is a Saturday because once, just after sunset, I heard a whisper in slow motion of the song You Really Got a Hold on Me, a female voice, from outside the stage area.  I stood there, listening, while thousands of fireflies were blinking all around me. I never imagined I’d see that many fireflies in New York, and to this day, I’m not sure if I did or if it was a dream.

                                                         ↟𖠰˚☀︎ᨒ↟𖠰

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I love parks. They’re what cities offer when trying to apologize for being cities: ‘Here, have a pond and some ducks; forget the traffic jam and the existential dread.’  You get squirrels darting around as if late for court, and flowers arranged in combinations you only see in an AI illustration.

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In Berlin, I think of Tiergarten as a Tuesday park. You don’t plan to go, you barely live in the area, and it’s always crawling with selfie-stick tourists. So you speed through on your way to that doctor's appointment. As the park unfolds, something shifts, and the trees turn gold. You breathe deeper without realizing, you slow down, and yes, it’s beautiful - perhaps even too beautiful. After passing perfectly trimmed oaks, you grow philosophical (dangerous, I know) and wonder: Is this even real nature? I ride those paths thinking perhaps parks are just illusions of wilderness.

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For real nature, I mean the kind that exists when nobody’s watching. Real nature doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t get mowed, fenced, or told it can’t grow here because there’s a yoga class happening at 10 am. In parks, I feel there’s something off, like pressed flowers in an old book.

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I know, it’s still nature, of course. In a way, humans are part of it, so everything we create is, in a sense, wildlife. Hard shell suitcases, sunscreen, navy-blue HAY vases, all just stardust rearranged, waiting for the next collision.

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But this logic spirals into a dangerous forgiveness. We shrug and say, “It’s natural,” and suddenly nothing feels wrong. When nature destroys itself, it does so for a reason, a specific need, no more, no less.

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During a six-hour trip from Leipzig to Strasbourg, it struck me: most of the trees had been replanted after they were torn down, whether for war or for steel. They rebuilt the landscape with precision, like someone rearranging furniture after the storm of a partner. They told each tree where to grow, curated and orderly, so they appeared spontaneous. Europe is, in truth, one vast park, beautiful yet haunted.

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Just to be clear, I’m not here to give the European working man a hard time for sitting in the sun with his shirt off at 1 p.m., or the woman in her sixties eating yogurt on a bench, finally claiming time for herself. They’ve earned it, despite their ancestors.

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Once, in Bois de Vincennes, Paris, I saw hundreds of ladybugs. It was fall, and they had overtaken one tree like it was the last safe place on Earth. It looked like they were throwing some kind of party too, not a rager, more like a Peanuts Christmas episode. I stood there for a long time, watching them. I think they didn’t know they were in a park. Did they know they were being watched? Do we know?

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Once, in Hyde Park, a Sunday type, again during fall, a group of trees stood so red it looked as if all the Spice Girls had gathered to pay homage to the Ginger one.

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                                                          ↟𖠰˚☀︎ᨒ↟𖠰

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Victoria Park, also in London, feels like a Friday park, because of the party people, but sometimes, on a Wednesday, you can sort of Parklife your way through it. I know Blur was being sarcastic, but isn’t it ironic how things can shift? Suddenly, feeding pigeons and sparrows is what you look forward to the next day; then going home, having tea, and feeling that sense of enormous well-being, not even remembering that one night, years ago, when you partied too hard at Plastic People and somehow found yourself in an impromptu orgy.

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I could go on forever about the parks in the cities of my life. The ones I lived in, the ones I wandered through too often, the ones I used as an excuse to avoid actual life.

In Bangkok, Sanam Luang is a Tuesday park: unpretentious and necessary; a little fountain spiraling, making just enough effort to refresh, but failing, which is understandable given the persistent heat.

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In São Paulo, every day is like Monday, so Ibirapuera is the park version of starting a diet and immediately failing.

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And then there’s that cemetery park in Copenhagen that somehow makes death feel... inviting? Like dying wouldn’t be the worst thing, if you could do it somewhere with good benches and quiet Danes.

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Montreal has that one with the hill and all the deliriously happy dogs.

Tokyo has a bit of everything; I once saw a man with a bunny on a leash there.

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Hong Kong, bless it, has these any-time-of-day micro parks, sprinkled like confetti across the city, each with a granny gym and at least one 80-plus woman doing the splits while gossiping in Cantonese. You want to hug them all. And maybe ask them how to live.

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I bought this book once, Shinrin-Yoku, by Dr. Qing Li (I love his majestic name). Possibly the most relaxing book of my life. Forest bathing, he calls it. And apparently, two to four trees are enough to count as a forest, which is a relief, because some days that’s all you’ve got. The rule is: no phones, no photos, no distractions; just you and the trees, which sounds like a break-up retreat, but actually works.

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Lately, I’ve befriended a chestnut tree I named Greta (a homage to Thunberg, obviously). I sit on a bench beneath her, pretending she grew there on her own, that she’s not part of some urban design plan approved by five men named Klaus. I let her hold my sadness like she means it. The leaves whisper things like: nothing’s wrong, nothing’s lost. I come for the green. I leave with hope.

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ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ᨒ↟ 𖠰⛰︎ ོ ༄ 

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