It had been rainy, cool with the dark moodiness that makes April in Oregon the time for reading Russian novels or lamenting lost loves. I had been driving alone and aimlessly around the street of Portland, seeking some way to exhaust a few hours until a dinner meeting.

While my mind was somewhere in between boredom and mild melancholy, I lost my way, pulled over, and picked up the city map from the seat beside me. Searching the map for the intersection a half-block behind me, my eyes were drawn to a large light green swath on the map, which was apparently a park stretching across the ridge above me. Perhaps, I thought, I can find some spot to look out north east over the Willamette River.

So, I chose a route and wound my way through puddles into a forest which threw shadows in such light as the was, increasing the somber feel of the afternoon. Around one of the curves, I glanced to the side and saw the sign indicating a Japanese Garden. The rain stopped and there ahead was the parking area totally empty. Why not, I thought, half enjoying the idea of the loneliness mixing with the grey, wet day. Some emotion, even if it is the blues, has to better than boredom.

I climbed out of the car which I left at the bottom of a hill near the upward path to the garden, and started the trudge to the gate. Each step up was with heavy gait of one who walks like he bears the burdens of the world tied to the end of a pole strung across his shoulders.

I rested two-thirds up and looked back at the easier walk down and added the worry about the rain into the internal debate about continuing, sighed and started again to the crest. Over the top, I sagged again from the uninspired effort and went down into the garden.

Just as I turned the corner for my first view, a shaft of sunlight cut cleanly through the trees to illuminate a spot an arms-spread wide a few yards in front of me down the hill casting its brilliance back through the branches of a cherry tree at the side of the path and inches from my face. Tiny rain drops hung along the bottom of each dark leafless branch catching the light and enhancing it like prisms, somehow showing infinitely tiny spectrums of color. Sharing the branch were blossoms blending pink and predominantly white like the flick of a master’s paint brush in Oriental painting.

The background of this scene was a cascade of green down and around the basin in which the garden was set. Still muted by the cloudy skies, it mixed the deep, dark shades of the year with the passionate newness and brightness of spring colors.

Each step down the path brought me a new and separate exquisite vision framed by trees, tall and shadowy or carefully sculptured. The shaft of sunlight moved and grew, sometimes giving a transcending effect that drew me forward to each new scene, but not without an instant nostalgia for the uplift of each memory etching left behind. The varying textures were a sensory delight, the raked sand, the weathered rock, the water pooled but lightly rippling, the reflections which varied between light and dark. Somehow I could see it all at once and yet focus on the smallest aspect. I felt exhilaration rising to that intense level like childhood Christmas morning when one first awoke and realized what day it was.

I walked on feeling almost weightless on my feet, and headed back down to the center. I looked back up to through the trees to the sky and felt my face bathed in warm sunlight as a cool breeze brought contrast. I heard a rustle composed of the subtle differences in sound of wind breathing through leaves, needles, and branches of trees and plants of unique character. I was alone, but I felt so much a part, not lonely, but unified. Even the smells, the freshness that spring rain brings from pine and blossoms and the earth enwrapped me.

Somehow my conscious mind weighted with anxiety and tension was gone and I was floating free in an experience filled with joy in nature sculpted by man – a Japanese Garden.