24 November 2023 – Though I don’t go around talking about “forest bathing,” I firmly agree with its core premise: engage with a forest and you will receive a bounty of physical, emotional and visual benefits in return.

Today’s walk reminds me how firmly I also believe that engaging with our urban environment can be just as rewarding.

I’ve just left the VAG (Vancouver Art Gallery) and I’m headed for home. It’s such a brisk, bouncy day that I decide to walk for a while, not hop on the nearest bus. So here I am in Robson Square, the link between the VAG and the Provincial Law Courts, and already I’m being shown how much fun a downtown can be.

Reflections morph ordinary buildings into structures that Gaudí would have loved to design…

and fall-fiery maple trees look particularly dramatic, when carefully framed in an urban-park setting.

Robson Square is an award-winning urban park — a collaboration between Arthur Erickson, architect, and Cornelia Oberlander, landscape architect, that lives up to Erickson’s vision for the site. Let’s not do yet another corporate momument, he argued; “Let’s turn it on its side, and let people walk all over it.”

People are indeed walking all over it, this beguiling day, but I walk on out of there, and start my zigzag south-east to False Creek. The route brings me to the corner of Homer and Robson streets, where the spiral of Moshe Safdie’s public library building culminates in a single bold vertical.

Just look at it. It slices right through all that urban clutter.

On to False Creek, where banners atop the Cambie bridge sparkle in the sunshine…

while sun & shadow play a luminous game of catch-me-if-you-can, down below.

At water’s edge, the stripes around 10 bridge pilings — the 2012 art installation, A False Creek — remind us that it is now predicted climate change will raise sea levels 4-6 metres worldwide, and show us what a 5-metre rise would mean, right here.

Continuing east, I pass the Plaza of Nations marina and see, there through the trees, off to one side, the sprawling complex of tents that hosts Cirque du Soleil’s current touring spectacle, Kooza.

I’m side-swiped by memory. I first saw Cirque du Soleil many decades ago, when we joined other curious Torontonians down on the Lake Ontario waterfront to take in one of the little company’s first forays outside Quebec. In those early days, they performed in a single, and very simple, canvas tent. Then as now, they celebrated the magic of human movement. Then, unlike now, it was all human-scale, not Vegas-spectacle.

(I liked it better then.)

I salute the memory, add it to all the other droplets of today’s “city bath” — and climb the hill to home.