The Magical Power of a City Park: A Photo Essay Dedicated to Winnipeg’s Munson Park

There is a magical power that city parks have on the urban soul. Amongst big box stores, parking lots, apartment highrises, and suburban cul-de-sacs, city parks exist as a dedicated place of sacred release from the grip of modern urban life. The frenetic city calls for haste and productivity, something the city park resists with its very nature. You fall into primordial habits of observation and appreciation.

The longer you spend in that city park, the more you get a strong sense of the place. The sight of red foxes walking across shattered river ice in winter. The enveloping scent of freshly blossoming flowers in spring. The immense relief provided by the canopy’s shade during the summer. The calls of migratory creatures like warblers and thrushes who call it home for the autumn. All of this swirls together in a grand sensational experience that gradually reveals itself to you as you dedicate your attention to a place.

Winnipeg’s Munson Park became that place. Huddled on the south side of Assiniboine River along Wellington Crescent, a mere five minutes from our apartment, Munson Park is a small urban park with a simple pathway, some park benches, and many verdant deciduous trees. Though small, it offered me something wonderful during this time and beyond: tranquility during a period of tremendous national crisis and difficult personal change.

The global COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally challenged the resilience of Canadian cities during the public health crisis. Our hospitals were on the verge of collapse, small businesses were shuttered en masse, and schools were thrown into chaos. For myself, a recently hired elementary arts teacher in the West End, I felt the full weight of the latter. I remember the constant struggle to get students to keep their masks on and maintain 6-ft social distancing, the uncertainty of planning too far ahead (lest there be another lockdown), and the troubles of making a lesson plan out of the drama, dance, and music curriculum when airborne disease threatened community health. In between and after teaching contracts at the school, periods of unemployment brought general restlessness and anxiety. Any absence of work lead to doomscrolling and social isolation with the world closing further and further in.

Throughout it all, Munson Park provided the relief I needed. It offered peace in a more attentive and slower pace of life. Whether I was bird watching or reading on the grass (with an iced soy latte in hand), Munson Park got me back into the world. It allowed me a window into the life around me, that moves on its own terms, free from the feeling of crisis that surrounded our nation during the time. And through eastern grey squirrels, white-breasted nuthatches, and red foxes, I found that pace in myself and could take a moment to breath.

I have since left Winnipeg for my home of Calgary. I live in the inner city with new condo developments, public plazas, bustling cafes, and busy streets dominating my urban life. City parks, like Munson Park, are more distant from where I live now. Finding the same tranquility requires a more devout pilgrimage, though I admittedly have been less zealous recently. Though daily commutes on the C-Train, lazy Sunday mornings at home, and visits to the neighbourhood cafes have their own magic, nothing quite beats the morning chorus of birds in Munson Park. But while Munson Park has a special place in my heart, Calgary provides its own sanctuaries to give attention to. I just have to find them.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

"When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."