Slivers of Nature
My father used to say that places like the sliver of forest at the edge of a parking lot are somehow more wild than even deep nature
From mid-2018 to early 2020, I lived in Northeastern Virginia. A nice thing about Northeastern Virginia is the mini-parks one finds sprinkled throughout its suburban neighborhoods.
One day, I chanced across a video of a person walking in a park in the rain.
Randomly, the park turned out to be close to where I lived. It's Pimmit View Park in Falls Church, Virginia.
This is the video (click to watch it in a new tab):
Quite a pleasant film.
I walked the circuit just like in the video. Part of the magic was that, as you can see in the video, there are homes all around the park. It was like a backyard tree fort: near to people, yet in another world.
Another time, I walked through a Virginia mini-park with my father. It's perhaps no accident, but rather shared inclination, that that's what we did, rather than, say, going to a museum.
A while before living in Virginia, I lived in the Binghamton, New York area. After a while, I found this park there — "Choconut Center Park": link.
The park's surroundings are everyday rural Americana: two-lane roads, an industrial park, and a fire station.
The everyday surroundings somehow contributed to the feelings of transcendence to the place.
At the park, I found a small path from the park's main road to a creek, named Little Choconut Creek, just below. The creek was fairly hidden from the roads on either side: the highway on one side and the main road in the park on the other.
At the creek, I'd sometimes sit in a natural seat formed by the roots of a tree.
I took this photo from that seat or right nearby:
I think the branches in the foreground are the branches of that tree.
The creekbed was mesmerizing; the elegance of the rocks and the water.
It was a world of fractals: stones, leaves, patterns in the water.
The contrast between the elegance of the creek and its everyday surroundings is perhaps characteristic of a sliver of nature. The surroundings are the wrapping, and in the contrast lies half the magic.