Spring Walk Through Highland Park: A Photo Essay

When everything is beautiful and sadness lingers

The world outside my window is in the midst of a violent, tender becoming. Trees begin to remember themselves as tulips drive their green horns up through the loosening earth. Buds swell and hesitate at their seams, like they’re unsure if it’s safe to do so. I understand that feeling.

There is effort in everything, even my steps. Branches bow with the weight of what they carry, their tips taut with almost-being. People call this season renewal, but from within my body it feels more like expectation, like pressure gathering at the edges. There is a quiet betrayal in the promise that warmth should feel like happiness, when what blooms in me instead is the same slow, stubborn melancholy, spreading each spring like a toxic algae bloom in my psyche.

Siberian squill nod their intense-blue bell-shaped heads toward smiling daffodils, their colors complimenting each other in the same way faeries applaud defiance. I linger with them longer than I intend, my camera raised, trying to hold what cannot be held. What I feel is not quite joy, but brushes against it—admiration, perhaps, or recognition. As if they had to insist their way into existence because they had no other choice.

Magnolias bloom in staggered truths: the white ones open, unabashed, while the pink ones remain furled in their soft, animal-like skins. They possess a patience I cannot access. I wonder what it would mean to trust timing so completely—to believe there is something within me that knows when it’s the right time to unfold. Instead, I feel stalled, like a bird who can’t remember the second note of its birdsong, stuck on the same note.

I sit beneath a canopy of cherry blossoms and watch the light fracture into brief constellations through the branches. The sun, I remember, is a star—and I, too, am made of that same distant burning. For a moment, something in me loosens, and I am threaded into something that feels older than my sorrow.

A wind passes through and the birds lift, scattering from branch to branch. They move with purpose, searching for buds, for sweetness. The ache within me moves the same way—restless, seeking some hidden abundance. I follow a cardinal through the park, drawn by its insistence on brightness, until I feel the weight of my attention become intrusion. The thought that I might frighten him softens me, and I let him go.

A bench waits, usually occupied, but today the park holds only a handful of quiet bodies. Stillness unsettles me, so I lower myself to the ground instead, pressing my back into the cool, damp earth. Above me, clouds drift slowly across a blue that feels almost too open. And then, without warning, gratitude rises—soft, unclaimed. This place asks nothing of me. I can lie here in my sadness, and still it goes on becoming, inch by inch, bud by bud, into something fuller than I can yet imagine.

When I stand, there is no shift, no revelation waiting. Only the path, and the act of following it. For now, it is enough—to walk, to notice, to stay.