Feeling Infinite at Maymont

Maymont was incredible. I would take the time to write out a really nice creative writing narrative-type piece describing the sensations of the place, but there’s just no doing it justice. Or at least with my lacking creative arsenal. It was bloody brilliant, and I’m not just making a cheesy Harry Potter reference. Bloody. Brilliant.

I expected a cool nature center, maybe something like a small natural history museum. But I’ve been to the Museum of Natural History where I live fifteen times, so I wasn’t outrageously excited. I almost wasn’t able to go, and other than not being able to complete this blog post, I wasn’t too broken up about it. In fact, when I finally did get to go, I was feeling pretty sick, and didn’t expect much out of the trip. But I had a ride, friends to go with and an assignment to do, so go I did.

First of all, when we got there we ran into a guy selling snow cones. So that was awesome. We couldn’t go into the nature center, so we just decided to walk around a bit. Or what I thought would be a bit. We ended up spending three hours there. I was expecting a smallish park, maybe ten acres max. It was amazing. We just kept walking and walking and then exploring and frolicking and having a grand old time. We climbed the tree with the oblong waxy leaves I wish I could name, we found a path I’d love to roller blade down, we found a cool fountain, and that’s where I thought the park ended, but no. The gardens. Oh the gardens. The gardens were glorious. That garden, I think called the Italian garden, was my favorite. It had roses and porticoes. It had old stone walkways and stairs. It was romantic. It was just what I needed. To be surrounded by flowers on a perfectly warm and sunny day, it made me feel worlds better. That beautiful fountain/river thing on the stairs, and the waterfall, and the eastern style garden down below, with those awesome stone shrines. And the koy. It was amazing. Like I said, I can’t even do it justice. I wish I could just take a slice of it and put it on the page. But that might ruin it. I’ll attach some pictures because it’s the only thing I can do.

Being there made me feel self actualized, cheesy as that sounds. In part because of something I’ve mentioned before–the fact that gardens seem to me like nature and humanity working in tandem, creating a place of peace that works for everyone and everything. And on days like that, even the weather wants that peace. It reminds me that everything is part of the same whole, we are earth and earth is us. There was this moment that really established that point for me. We were sitting at the bottom of the stairs from the Italian (?) garden, where the fountain lets out in the river thing down the stairs. A few rose petals were floating round and round in the pool of water there. With the sun playing on the water, for some reason it brought to mind the concept of time. Maybe because we were all a bit worried about how much of it we were spending gallivanting at Maymont and not doing our homework. But time has always been something of an infinite concept to me. Not as if I’m under any impression of having an infinite amount of time. Just…it resonates somehow. And the petals floating there brought it to mind in an inexact, vague, resonant way. Like the petal were floating around my sub-conscious but I couldn’t quite reach them to know they were real. To take a quote from one of my favorite books/movies, The Perks of Being a Wallflower–I felt infinite. That’s what the gardens stirred up in me. That’s what a lot of sitting outside in nature and doing things in natures, like kayaking or hiking, stirs up in me. The ‘oceanic feeling’ that Freud credits religion with. That feeling that Chris McCandless left civilization behind to seek. That’s one of my favorite feelings.