MEDITATION W_LK

First off, I do not want to come of as overly cynical, I am grateful that a place as beautiful as Audubon Park exists for us to enjoy, but I stumbled upon something on my walk that was simply too ironic to ignore.
This archway reading "Meditation Walk" (the A is now missing), marks the entrance to the Heymann Memorial Conservatory, which was a botanical display initiated in 1884 along with Horticulture Hall. In 1898, a golf course portioned off a great expanse of the free space in which the display existed. Upon meeting this archway, I laughed at what I saw through what was supposed to be the portal to a peaceful world of tranquil outdoors reflection. The scene I witnessed: a group of hard-boiled-egg-bellied men on the aforementioned golf course, waddling to and from their golf carts, adjusting their khakis, groaning about some new lawsuit as they lined up to tap their little white balls; all this framed with the iron-working of the arch. The mood was anything but meditative; nature only existed as a putting green. This could very well be these men's only contact with nature, "getting out for 9 holes"; the thought crossed my mind that if there had been electrical outlets in the tree trunks, these men surely would have plugged their laptops into them.

I sound rather biting, but at that moment, I felt angry and I wanted to criticize these men straight to their face. Alas, I was on a meditative walk in "nature," I was not there to talk to people, so I continued on my way wondering how that archway had become so inane, about "What man has made of man." The park today is a far cry from the same area which would have been experienced by the romantics. It was difficult to see those oaks, the same oaks that they saw, in the context of joggers who only had thirty minutes to get in their workout, in the context of casual utility. These trees no longer stand as focal points or entryways into worlds of imaginative bliss, but as the backdrop to the daily grind, simply something nice to glance at as you come round your third lap. We have filled our lives with the unnecessary and the transient, to the point that we do not even have time to be with ourselves, in our own minds. The romantics took the time to get out of this world and into the world of nature which does not care whether or not you have only written four pages of that eight page paper. In nature, everything comes into focus, the frivolities of man made reality peel away like layers of cheap paint. All our stresses, our commitments, the schedules upon which we base our everyday are constructs, things that could be dropped in a split second and the world would continue. Something I briefly jotted down while I paused on my walk:

Men hold fast to sentiments
that will not save them.
The shaggy tree that leans just so,
the grass that nips at its roots,
the duck that guides
the green blades to water's edge,
they will all eventually die.
Never to come back,
never to be mourned,
never aware they were there at all.
Men hold fast to sentiments
that will never save them.

Not a good poem, but definitely a reflection of my immediate sentiments during the walk.