Kenilworth Gardens

Lotuses of the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens (Photo credit: Yantar Yoga)

About four miles east from where I live, on the other side of the Anacostia River just where the District of Columbia borders Maryland, are Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. So close to the bustling capital city, they seem miles and centuries away, truly a different world, especially when lotuses are in bloom. The Nacotchtank lived here over 4,000 years ago, long before the arrival of the European explorers, including John Smith who came to explore the Anacostia, or Eastern Branch of the Potomac, in 1608. In the 1800s, Walter Shaw decided to build his water garden in the river wetlands to grow lotuses and water lilies. His daughter, Helen Fowler, became an ambassador for water gardening and successfully lobbied Congress to save the gardens from dredge operations in the Anacostia, preserving a section of the original marsh. As we celebrate the Indigenous Peoples’ Day today (October 12), I think back to what this place was like hundreds of years ago and how in some ways, if you only squint, it doesn’t seem that much different today - watery, wild, and wondrously beautiful.

The river was once wild and deep, bald eagles circled above the marshes separating the deep blue of the water from its mirror image in the sky. Splash! A turtle slid down into the river from a moss-covered branch stretching its gnarly arm up from the muddy shallows. A lotus flower sways gently in the breeze like a pink sun - how many of them are here! The entire field of delicate petals. I imagine a lotus blossom opening up between my eyebrows. I hover over this landscape like the eagles - today or a thousand years ago, I’m not sure. I hear every rustling leave, I sense slow steps of a blue heron in the reeds. I suddenly lift off the earth together with the majestic movements of broad wings, listening to Mary Oliver’s quietly whispered words:

“Toward evening

the heron lifts his long wings

leisurely and rows forward

into flight (…)

Now the woods are empty,

the ponds shine like blind eyes,

the wind is shouldering against

the black, wet

bones of the trees.”

Native eyes are also following the heron’s path, this shiny scale of water fluttering briefly against the smooth surface of the pond and rising toward the sky. I see footprints in the soft, marshy ground. This is his kingdom - Anacostia. I am only a visitor here, a wanderer taking respite from it all. I want to stay here like he did. Become one with the river, breathe in the spirit of the wind, cling to eagles’ wings, submerge myself in the water, intertwine my hair with the ivy that holds in a tight, timeless embrace ancient trees older than this country. Time is an illusion…