Confessing love is no easy task and is made even more difficult when the affection is so overwhelmingly consummate. However, upon realizing how deeply I’d regret it if I never professed my feelings about the profound mark that this particular place carved into my life, I decided to summon the courage to pen a love letter to my beloved Trillium Park.
Living in downtown Toronto is a fun and thrilling ride. Everything and everyone moves at a meteoric pace, and you’re on a high when you’re onboard. It’s all enthralling—until you need to get off the ride and realize it speeds off without you. The city’s caprices become too intimidating to keep up with when you’re off the ride. So, in the city, there’s no choice but to stay on the mechanical cycle.
On one of the days I felt resigned to the city’s suffocating structure, I floated into Trillium Park. My journey of falling in love with this sublime park was numbing and humbling. A short turn past the Princes’ Gates and Coronation Park led to the park’s entrance, just before Ontario Place—and the city ended there.
Once you pass under the bridge near the entrance — under which the walls are covered with carvings of moccasin images developed by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation — you can walk along the William G. Davis trail. The sounds of cars and traffic are muted by the lush waves of trees and the ripples of Lake Ontario, which gently stroke against the rocks that separate the trail from the water.
Many often stop here to sit on the rocks and face the Toronto skyline — which already seems so distant and small. But the trees that wrap around the trail obscure the landscape view of the lake, so I always walk further into the park.
The slight uphill trail leads to the summit: the highest point of the park at the southern tip. From on top of the rolling hills, everything falls into sight: the city skyline, Toronto Island, planes flying in and out of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, and as much as you can see of the lake.
I’ve biked and walked to the top of this hill countless times, but I can vividly recount every single day and night I came here with so much angst, agitation, anger, and agony. Every time I brought the turbulence of my life into this park, it was immediately subdued by the earthly steadiness of Lake Ontario and its expansiveness that contrasts the limited city skyline.
Much of my suppressed sadness and stress stems from the unpredictably changing nature of the city and — when you’re smack in the middle of downtown — it seems like the chaos is omnipresent. But my beloved Trillium Park whispers to me of the constant steadiness of the ripples in the lake and twittering birds in the trees: the forces of nature are the rightful omnipresent and omnipotent beings. What happens in the city is trivially miniscule in the face of an 11,000-year-old lake.
And, no matter how removed the park is from the city, there will always be extended human interference — almost as if teeming with jealousy of nature’s tranquillity that the city will never have.
But the park, the trees, and the lake remain still, with my chaos, confusion, agony, and love safely tucked away and protected within. And when life’s harrowing voidness and breathlessness recurs, I close my eyes and wander lonely in the park as a ripple.
