Liliuokalani Park, in Hilo, is named after an Hawaiian queen, but it's a traditional Japanese garden, designed by a master Japanese gardener and the more I go there, the more I like it. A thing unique about the garden in my experience of such spaces in America, and a feature of the traditional Japanese garden, is that though it's a small park it feels very spacious - an effect produced by great attention to detail.
In my small understanding of Japanese culture, I must rely on first impressions and given that, I'm impressed by their architecture - particularly their landscape architecture. Wherever you stand in Liliuokalani Garden you get a number of views, each one quite different. In a particular spot you might see a pond with a bridge over it and a stand of burnished, golden bamboo. Looking another direction from that same spot, you may see a beech with ironwood trees, rock outcroppings and Native Hawaiian ferns. Again, from that same spot, you might see a completely different tableau, all blended seamlessly, so that the effect is never jarring, but quite natural. One encounters it without even being aware of it. As you walk around, you feel you've really been somewhere, in a very small space.
That is the magic of the garden. It fills you with a feeling that's soothing, contemplative and somehow emotionally restorative. Entering consciously into that effect - into that calming, centered, feeling in the mind - gives us some understanding of Zen Buddhism. To me, it's similar to that produced by mild green tea, calming, yet mildly stimulating and restorative.
I've been walking in the garden four or five times a week for exercise and have come to be enchanted by the place.
Last week, on Thursday, I walked there in the morning. It's particularly beautiful just after dawn on a sunny morning, because on the east side of the island, as the sun rises, it strikes clouds that gradually build-up against the slopes of Mauna Loa, producing rainbows and brilliant color-effects, in and around, the Garden. On that morning, as I walked toward the ocean I entered a space where a rainbow was forming in the air around me, and rain dogs (snatches of rainbow hanging freely in the air) were materializing over the bay and against the mountain. It was spectacular!
There was a particularly dazzling luminescent vibration of the air - a kind of glowing light and I was suddenly conscious of feeling really good, physically and mentally, for the first time since childhood. It was that strong a feeling - not just of feeling okay, or feeling pretty good - but of feeling an exaltation I haven't experienced in 50 years! It was as if for a few hours I were in Heaven!
If only I knew why? Why, for two hours there, did I feel so good? In adulthood, we turn to alcohol, or marijuana, because we long for that feeling we had as children. How wonderful it was to feel that again, and to know that it wasn't produced by some substance, but was real - that it was produced by just whatever was going on inside me and around me at the time! I know the Garden had everything to do with it.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
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