Paradise lost

At MLA I got lost in the labyrinthine conference hotel; here, I got lost in a garden. It's not even a particularly big garden, just a small but vibrant haven of greenery on the UVic campus, a quiet place where I escaped the noon sun to sit on a bench and gather my thoughts. 

The flowers there are astounding: rhododendrons in many colors and an amazing davidia that dropped huge white petals like feathers falling from the sky. I saw some Solomon's Seal taller than I've ever seen and still blooming in June, and I heard birds that sounded entirely unfamiliar but turned out on closer inspection to be towhees. 

Then I got up to go back to the conference--no easy task, as I soon learned. The paths in Finnerty Gardens curve and twist, confusing my sense of direction, already numbed because of jet-lag. If I keep walking, I thought, eventually I'll find the way out. I could hear traffic on the far side of a hedge but I couldn't find a way through or even a signpost to point the way, and I felt a little silly about asking directions out of a place no one in her right mind would want to leave. I could stay here forever, I thought, wandering the paths and snacking on the feral bunnies that occasionally find their way through the fences. No one would ever find me and if they did, we'd never find our way back out again.

But eventually I turned a corner and saw that big davidia tree at the entrance and stepped back out of the garden into the workaday world of conference sessions, plenary speakers, and papers. Tomorrow I'll deliver a paper on the rhetoric of isolationism in paradise, so I suppose it's appropriate that yesterday I found myself isolated in paradise with not a hint of rhetoric to help me find my way.