National Park of Delight

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought on dark and unsettled feelings. The multiple uncertainties of how long we would be at home, if we would get ill, when we would see our families and friends, and the loss of work and income, felt grey and heavy. I was lucky to be confined with my two teenage children, and their company and our closeness brought a sense of solace and groundedness. We settled into a slow, fluid routine which included very late-night walks with my 15-year-old son and our toy poodle, Lili. In March and April, when the weather was still cold, these walks - usually close to midnight when our neighbourhood was almost completely still - took on a magical quality. We had vibrant, in-depth talks, sometimes absurd, often bursting into laughter. The barren, otherwise silent streets became the National Park of Delight. Buds appeared suddenly on bushes, hinting at something hopeful and new. Early spring flowers glimmered white under the bright street lamps. A number of young, new trees seemed to have been mysteriously air-dropped out of nowhere, lounging beguilingly on the newly-revealed grass as they waited patiently to be planted. Our sprightly little dog trotted along, sniffing the sharp air. Out of a bleak moment in time came shimmers of brightness, heightening our senses.

Shira Gilbert
Montreal, Quebec

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. All images and writing are by each participant. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Envy

I am mired in the National Park of Envy. It is only a small garden park among the great national parks of emotion and it is very crowded. Everyone wanting. Me, wanting. All around are green things—bushes and leaves and moss in the wet areas. I slosh through them, creating footfalls and faint sounds. I get covered in muck. I want more. I want. I want the rainbow—the colours that will move me along the moody paths. I want the tunnel, gaping, lit, alluring in that rainbow, calling me from envy. I have. That is the conundrum: the have. In this quarantine-time haves are significant—a husband or friend, my sons and their children, other friends, ready and responsive and loving. Haves like a computer, a cell phone, a smart TV. Haves like a terrace, a great apartment, plants, food, books, subscriptions to the New York Times and Netflix. Haves like projects to finish. Haves like the colors each evening that promise another morning.

But there are the things I have not, and they are bigger than me. I want what those others must have—the yard, the pool, the live-in child, the guarantee that I will be around to want more. I envy those who have confidence that they will get through this; who gallivant—masked, yes, but still go without fear into the colourful tunnel. I envy. I envy. In the distance, maybe there is the pathway out. I also wait. 

Judith Veder, 77
Bronx, NY

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Fear

I am in the National Park of Fear. A few weeks ago, my next-door neighbour suddenly passed away of a heart attack. We weren't friends, but we were friendly. At first I felt disoriented. Later that day I thought of a podcast I had recently listened to (Sugar Calling, episode 1.) The guest was talking about how people experience trauma. He said that we all live on the back of a tiger, and every once in a while the tiger wakes up. I thought it was a powerful metaphor about how we live our lives, believing we are in control. Whenever something terrible happens, we wake up to the realization that there is so much we can't control, and so much we don't know. I started to think of all my fears regardless of whether they had anything to do with the pandemic, and wondered which one would materialize next. There was the fear of dying, of getting sick, of losing someone, of losing my job, of my life never returning to normal. After a while, the various fears became a single mass, and I was enveloped in it. I felt like a particle on the back of a tiger.  

The place I'm in is monochrome, musty, and completely quiet. The terrain is bumpy and slippery. It looks as if it is covered with exposed tree roots. They are giant and look like unfriendly hills and valleys. In the valleys, it is dark and I can't see what is beyond the next hill. When I get to the top of a hill, I look around, and the place goes on forever. It is hard to know what is the way out because all directions look the same. Going forward is scary, because I may not like what I find behind the next hill. But staying put is also uncomfortable. I dread the feelings I am going to have once I confront the "thing" on the other side of each hill.

Julia Grozdanova, 48
Toronto, Canada

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Frustration

I have been contentedly married for over five decades. As in any marriage, there’s been frustration, and our union has featured lots of bickering and arguing, usually about petty issues and housekeeping chores. Although these squabbles were irritating, we usually developed a kind of amnesia afterwards—so much so that often we joked about some of the sillier dustups. After one fight, I wrote down some of our most ridiculous recurrent topics: a hard rain vs. a steady rain, taking I-95 or the Florida Turnpike, full vs. stuffed. and whether Eva Braun was really in love with Hitler. Once on a long drive, I mentioned a conflict close friends were having in which the husband discouraged his wife from driving. I took her side and my husband took the husband’s. Our fight lasted almost 50 miles.

Unfortunately, frustrations have increased in this time of isolation. There’s a daily round of arguing about keeping the house clean, shopping for food, and controlling the television. These arguments can reach a fever pitch. Once, early in the lockdown, we argued because my husband felt that leaving the house to buy lox and bagels counted as an emergency errand. Like many a skirmish, these squabbles are very passionate. But unlike a world war, the battle is soon forgotten and all is well. 

When I enter the National Park of Frustration it is dark, and difficult to find my way. The inky and stormy atmosphere impairs my vision and my judgement. Through the darkness I see neon signs pointing the way to a narrow path. After I take a few hesitant and insecure steps, the storm clears and the path gets safer and wider. After I enjoy the lush scenery for a few miles, the path again narrows, the clouds darken, and the wind picks up. I have visited this park many, many times. When I get caught in its gloom and irritation, I understand that soon there will be calm and beauty. But around the next bend, darkness and frustration will return, over and over and over and over again.
 

Sara Gootblatt, 78
Boynton Beach, FL

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Peace

I love to knit. When I pick a ball of yarn it speaks to me. It tells me what it wants to be transformed into—a sweater, or maybe a dress, or maybe a blouse. I think of a pattern that the yarn would love to be and I get to work. I find the count of stitches very relaxing; it takes my mind off the worry, anxiety, and sadness that I sometimes feel right now. When I knit, I am in the National Park of Peace. It is always restful and quiet. There is nobody around and I can roam wherever I like. I am happy and free. It is woolly-warm and fuzzy, soft and calming, never-ending.

Daria Malave, Age 38
Corona, New York City, NY

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Sadness

Big losses are layered with small ones now. One of mine has been not being able to go swimming, as the community centres and outdoor public pools are closed and unlikely to re-open soon. As the weather gets warmer, I feel frustrated that swimming won’t be part of my summer and I can feel a sense of sadness creeping in. I miss the casual conversations in the changing room, the walk through tiled hallways to reach the pool, and the effortless way the water holds my body and allows my limbs to float weightless in space. It is a moment of refuge from the noise of the world and of solitude among the other swimmers. All of this hit me the other day as I walked by a neighbourhood apartment building and looked in through streaked dirty windows to the pool area. The pool was empty, drained, a canyon in the midst of a dark quiet room. The tiles at the bottom of the pool (usually underwater) were sky blue and there were lounge chairs on the side of the deck waiting for people to return.

Seeing the empty pool made me realize I’ve been carrying an undercurrent of sadness for all the things that have changed. In the context of larger losses that COVID has brought - health, employment and lives - this seems trivial. But the empty swimming pool is a stark reminder of how I long for the pleasures of everyday life that I thought would always be there. The National Park of Sadness is an empty space devoid of activity or sound. There is a haunted quality to it - as if it has been suddenly abandoned and there are only the faint echoes of previous human life now. If one looks closely there are also glimpses of beauty and reminders of the way things used to be, and could be once again.

Karen Gold, Age 58
Toronto, ON

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Nostalgia

As my final year of secondary school comes to a close, I’ve been revisiting my camera roll from the past four years. Because our school required us to have iPads, my friends and I have documented a lot of our experiences—school trips, restaurants, parks, birthdays, etc. I decided to make my friends a slide show of all the pictures I'd taken, and to score it to the song “Time Adventure,” from my favourite tv show, Adventure Time. As I edited the slideshow, I was overcome with intense nostalgia for all the happy memories that I'd shared. Making the slideshow took hours, so I listened to the lyrics, “Will happen, happening, happened,/And we’ll happen again and again,/ ‘Cause you and I will always be back then,” until late into the night, revisiting all these experiences as if I was living them for the first time. Because it's difficult during these times of isolation to make new memories, it's easier to look behind than ahead. Nostalgia is a complicated emotion to describe; that mix of fondness and sadness, with underlying tones of regret, has often crept up on me. But I don't think I've felt it as intensely as I did that midnight at the beginning of June.

You enter the National Park of Nostalgia through a lake in which you can breathe perfectly. Your first view of the park is from below, through the distorted surface of the lake. The park can be visited in any season—sometimes it is covered in snow, sometimes in wildflowers. Everything is smaller in the park, and warped, as if you were looking at something stuck in a snow globe. You may choose to wander the small paths that go on and on, or you can visit the caves that are only ever as big as a bedroom. It is always twilight in the park, and it is always body temperature, even if you visit in the middle of winter. It is neither easy nor hard to leave this park—in fact it seems like it slowly fades away before your eyes. 

Arwen, Age 17
Montreal, QC

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Rage

This past weekend my family of four, including our dog, visited a state park in Northern Minnesota. Beautiful woods, long hikes, rock formations, waterfalls, tents, smores, campfires. It was a great way to recharge and get away from Covid-19 and the unrest in Minneapolis. When I returned home and started looking at my pictures, I was suddenly struck by how much time I’ve spent staring at screens during the pandemic. And how little they have given me. A weekend in the woods had actually nourished my soul. But these small colorful images on my phone were lacking in anything natural or nourishing. My digital devices had become the oppressors. The Netflix show, the Zoom call, the online yoga class. I had just experienced real outdoor freedom, and the stuff on my screen was a pale substitute.

I felt a rage rising up in me. I’d been brainwashed into this reality. And living my life through a tiny screen, when the world is so open and inspiring, is nuts. 

“Rage Against the Machine” National Park is not a fun or beautiful park, though it’s expansive, with rivers, forests, and mountains. It’s tired and worn down. It promised so much when it first opened. But the pathways are all too far from actual nature. The forest is always just up that hill, the mountain is a little too far to get to, the animals are always absent. You get to “enjoy” it on giant iPads with awesome billboard-sized infographics, and video screens with bird’s eye view drone footage, and great facts about the park’s flora and fauna. There are many long winding sidewalks with informational signs. There’s always someone asking you to download an app for the park so you can really embrace the experience. And everywhere there are people taking selfies or making TikTok videos. There’s really no fucking park to enjoy. It’s just a place to take our phones out for a walk.

David MacGillivray, Age 56
Minneapolis, MN

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Overwhelm

Living in a busy household with a lot of competing needs while working at a demanding job makes every day a marathon—a marathon being undertaken while juggling knives. My list of things to do each day is mythic, laughable, and bears little relationship to what actually gets done. I am the mediator of big feelings (for both the children and adults of this home), and as a result, my own feelings get stifled, squashed into the smallest possible space. I am desperate for time alone, time to breathe and think and process, but at the same time I have never been more lonely, more starved for substantive connection.

The Park of Overwhelm is huge and crowded with both human-made and natural objects. There are plenty of enticing things, but if you pay attention haphazardly, you may be in danger. Constant vigilance is required, leaving little time for rest or engagement. It's crowded, dangerous, noisy, frantic, exciting, sensual, rich, and stifling.

Anonymous, 44
Toronto, ON

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.

National Park of Angst

I work as a child and family therapist in an intensive in-home and out-of-home program. I began working with a family with complex needs in early 2019. After COVID-19 hit, the family’s wraparound supports were reduced to virtual bi-weekly “check-in’s.” As the family remained quarantined together, tension escalated and risk of family breakdown increased. Recently, I coordinated a meeting with the family and service providers. During the meeting, a few comments were made about why I wasn’t “doing more” to “fix” the child. In this moment, I felt an overwhelming sense of angst, which I describe as a mixture of anxiety and fear. I began questioning my own competence. What if I don’t do enough and the risk increases? What if the family blames me if the child gets hospitalized? What if I’m the reason they don’t progress in their treatment? I felt like a small ant navigating through a forest of weeds, uncertain of how I got in or how to get out. 

My National Park of Angst is a dense, overgrown natural forest, full of shadows and rough terrain. It is dusk, midsummer, and the humidity makes it uncomfortable to breathe deeply, like a veil I cannot push off my face. The air leaves a film of sweat and moisture on my skin, and smells of rotting natural debris, leaves and bark. Large roots grow out of a hard soil littered with rocks, fallen leaves, and broken branches. The vague path is cluttered with low brush that scratches at my legs and low-hanging branches that poke at my head and shoulders. In the distance I can see fading sunlight through the treetops. I can hear birds calling and the scuttering sounds of critters but I can’t see them in the shadows. As I navigate through the forest, I occasionally come across a small clearing where the air is less dense and the path more visible. Walking through the park feels like both an exploration and a search for an exit.

Carmen Chui, Age 35
Guelph, ON

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This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.