On a bluebird morning, we left the stunning beauty and stillness of Chinook Beach Park on Lake Washington to walk up to Kubota Gardens. A public park since 1987, the 20-acre gardens are the legacy of Japanese immigrant Fujitaro Kubota. His is a story of persistence and overcoming obstacles, purchasing five acres of swampland in 1927 with the help of a friend – he was disallowed from making the purchase himself, due to his Japanese heritage. The forced abandonment of his project in World War II, and the four years of forced incarceration in Camp Minidoka in Idaho are well-documented elsewhere. The echoes of this shameful period of U.S. history unfortunately still linger in our society today.

I am immediately impressed with intentional design as we enter the park via a side pedestrian entrance. I linger at the small, circular portal in the stucco wall to absorb its view of the lush greenery, glacial boulders, and weeping trees before we enter. I realize this is akin to the Moon Gates we frequently see as architectural features in Japanese gardens, often representative of the complex journey of life.

The gardens achieve the challenging goal of creating a series of private natural spaces, linked together by curvilinear footpaths ornamented with large stones. The massive glacial erratics remind me of the granite and gneiss ‘whales’ of my youth in the inner Stockholm Archipelago, aligned North and South, slowly ever-growing with glacial landhöjning (glacial uplifting). Guardians, spiritual touchstones, I am not surprised to later find Fujitaro Kubota observed that “rocks and stones pulse with life,” working in harmony with nature, rather than attempting to conquer it.

The spectacular Terrace Overlook draws us in; Paul informs me this is where we will hold some of our workshops for attendees in the gardens, during Cascadia Poetics Lab’s upcoming 10th Cascadia Poetry Festival. With its polished granite floor, crushed stone patio, and wooden shelter, it is the perfect blend of heaviness and lightness, with a view down into the central garden. Gentle curves of weathering steel form its railings, containing and easing the shape of the space. I see a turtle on a rock, and several large koi swimming in the pond below. Black Locust trees with lemon green foliage stand out against a backdrop of evergreens. I later learn the massive 225-year-old Grand Fir below was already grown when Fujitaro bought the swampland.

We walk below, and I meet the Ishigaki Wall, the massive three-sided support for the overlook, made of 300 tons of raw granite. I immediately notice it is a dry-set construction; interlocking stones held in place by gravity and friction alone, without mortar or other support. Our group moves on without me, as I stand in the wall’s presence, clearly the work of Masters. It feels immeasurably old to me. I later learn it is the work of 15th generation master masons Junji and Suminori Awata, from Japan, using a 10,000-year-old technique, built in 2015.

The resonance with this wall within me is strong. I built hundreds of feet of dry-set retaining and property border walls of granite when I lived in Connecticut, less expertly, but with similar intention. I used to draw my stones from a large cache stacked by farmer 150 years earlier at the bottom of my property, when it was still a hillside working farm instead of a lush deciduous forest.

I often thought of the lingering imprint of the farmer’s hands that held those stones. Stones holding spiritual energy and memory is a recurring theme in my own poems, and in one of my favorite Swedish poet’s work, Tomas Tranströmer. In his poem, Upprätt (‘Upright’) from Mörkseende (‘Dark Vision’), sees this energy in the stones of a half-height stone wall:

…Till hälften övervuxen a grönskan en låg stenmur. När det skymmer börjar stenarna lysa svagt av der hundraåriga värmen från händerna som byggde.

…A low stone wall, half-overgrown with greenery. As dusk falls, the stones begin to glow faintly with the century-old warmth of the hands that set them. (

*translations are my own.)

On a return trip to Stockholm to the doorstep of my former Östermalm home, I once wrote a Swedish poem that also reminds me of this moment – a stanza of which is here:

Sten och trä
…
Ty sanningen är svårfångad
i levande minnen,
men sten och trä
glömmer inte
det förflutnas saga –
som talar till mig
i jordens toner.

Stone and Wood
…
For Truth is elusive
in living memories,
but stone and wood
do not forget
the saga of the Past –
speaking to me,
in tones of the Earth.

It does not matter that the Ishigaki Wall is 11 years old instead of 10,000, it holds the spiritual imprint of the hands that built it and of their ancestors. I feel the warmth of their hands and the truth of their intentions. I will definitely come back to this spot in October.

The ‘ki-ki-ki-ki-ki’ rattle of a Northern Flicker pulls me back to the present moment, and I hurry to catch up to our group.

Please join us for the 10th Cascadia Poetry Festival October 9-11, 2026, at the Rainier Beach Community Club and other venues. CPF is a gathering of poets and bioregionalists, exploring poetry and its connection to environmental, political, historical, and sociological pursuits within the Cascadia bioregion as defined by David McCloskey. The festival aims to consider how prioritizing natural and cultural boundaries, rather than arbitrary political ones, can address climate change and other issues. More information at https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/2026-cascadia-poetry-festival-10/.