A Garden for the Ages

Sunny Place of Stockton, Stockton, CA

The Friends of Bonner Healing Garden

Sunday, July 28, 2008

A poem in the chapel notebook says, “Even the rock – solid and secure – will come to this place and weep.” I walk out of the rustic tabernacle and sit on a warm stone bench near the center of the garden. I stare up at the towering old growth pines and cottonwoods that once marked the Brown House property and now define the parameters of Bonner Healing Garden and Hospice. At some distance across from me, a large concrete wall with a totemic wooden eagle at the top releases a torrent of water onto several boulders. An echo chamber behind the waterfall distorts my sense of distance with its sonorous pitch. The water flows out of a raised pool and streams down a rocky creek bed that directs the flow under a bridge and into a calm pool of river pebbles.

In the distance, I notice a boisterous group of women walking together up the long entry. The path inevitably forks but the seven women stay together under the solidarity of friendship as they stroll through the rose garden and arrive at the waterfall. One of the friends says, “This garden is amazing,” in a fascinated tone that speaks for the sentiment of the group. Then, directed by wonderment, they begin to quietly disband and individually observe the garden sanctuary in a natural and effortless reaction.

One of the friends walks from behind the chapel and passes the stone bench where I sit. I inform her that there is a bald eagle on a cottonwood branch at the end of the teahouse. She excitedly tells her companions as they regroup in front of the rose arbor. While the excited group streams under the stone archway of the teahouse, Mary walks back to my rustic bench. She peers down at my drawing and surprisingly asks me if I am a landscape architect. Her husband just finished a sensory garden in her home state of Virginia. She excitedly directs me to the teahouse enclave to meet the rest of the group.

Under the pitched roof and through the shade of the cottonwoods, the calm and shimmering waters of Sand Creek direct our attention. From the height of the creek bank on which the concrete teahouse is perched, the water looks close enough to touch. I point to the branch that the bald eagle inhabits. Standing there for at least the duration of my first hour in the garden, the creature is as stiff in the flutter of leaves as the boulders that sit beneath the garden waterfall. The friends point in amazement and take pictures.

The seven friends are sorority sisters from Montana State on their annual ten-year reunion. For some of the sisters, the gathering is the first in twenty years, since dispersing after college. They found out about the garden in a local article and decided to visit it while touring the Lake Ponderey Area, where one of the sisters now resides. Coincidentally, half of the sisters are therapists, including a burn, occupational, and grief therapist.

Mary, the grief therapist, tells me that she uses flowers and outdoor settings to conduct breathing and emotionally supportive exercises with clients who cope with death and abuse. Mary lost her father and son within a two-week span. “Helping others in their time of grief and pain helps us to cope with our own grief and in that way we are united in understanding and healing,” she exclaims.

Her friend, the burn therapist, tells me that she has to give me a hug because I am a miracle in myself. We embrace for over 30 seconds in a free flow of emotion bonded by pain and hope. The last person I hugged that way was the person who gave me life, during a time when I was on the edge of losing her. The tears begin to stream and the flow moves us all.

After an hour of pouring out our experiences, human emotion unites us in a solid circle of kinship. My companions and I hug individually and say our good-byes. My friends walk together in the distance, through one leg of the fork, back down the long entry path. I sit back down at the warm stone bench staring blurredly at the sonorous waterfall in a state of wonderment.