#382: The Japanese Garden
Finding life’s metaphors in sculpted nature
I am walking the bridges of life this week. Metaphorically, I stride across the zigzag pattern of my life, sidestepping obstacles and unexpected sudden turns. This is the yatsuhashi zigzag bridge, a Japanese bridge designed to represent life’s jagged path: no straight walk of life for me, or anyone.
Soon, I reach the first island: Hōrai, the island of perpetual youth. But this is not the last island, for another bridge awaits, one leading to the next life. This is the sorihashi arched bridge: traditionally built with a sharp climb, rising steeply above the water as one cannot see what is on the other side until one reaches it.
I have not left Scotland to walk these bridges, but travelled only an hour north of Edinburgh, to the Japanese Garden at Cowden, in Clackmannanshire. As their website says, it is 5,775 miles east of Tokyo, and like another Japanese garden I visited in the US, this is a garden that blurs the distinction between Japan and Scotland. While making use of Scotland’s hills and plants, traditional Japanese plants are also grown and shaped in this garden.
I learn the remarkable history of this garden while on a wonderful tour of its paths. Although only recently restored, it was first founded by Ella Christie in 1908, who hired Taki Handa to help her design and create this garden called Shã Raku En: ‘The Place of Pleasure and Delight’. We wander the paths, gazing on beautiful rocks and a ‘dry’ or traditional Japanese rock garden (karsansui). We stand in the azumaya, a place to rest on the water’s edge, and I take in the stories and the symbolism, marvelling at the thoughtful placement of each element.
What strikes me most about this garden is its abundance of metaphors. The garden is built on certain principles, creating meaning in its patterns and layout. In essence, the garden uses physical objects to represent what one struggles to contemplate fully in life: a zigzag bridge distills the unknown path of my life into twenty metres of a narrow wooden path above water in which I do not wish to fall. An arched bridge over that same water obscures my view of the other side of life.
Rather than making my life seem small or reduced, these metaphors allow me to contemplate it. To put it into a wider perspective, which includes the plants and landscape around me, and the others who are stepping onto these paths beside, behind, and ahead of me. I can stand at a zigzag point and stare down into the water, looking at my reflection even as I also look at the bright pink of a water lily, and the tail of a fish swimming away.
Standing in this garden, I contemplate life. I find contentment in my wider surroundings. Standing by the water and watching the wind and sun sweep across its surface, I find peace in metaphors, and peace in life.
