Transience and Permanence

“Director’s Notes” are excerpts from our monthly email newsletter, “Stories from the Garden.” Subscribe and see past issues here.

Dear Friends,

After the Kona rains of March, palm flowers burst forth across the canopy, then floated down on the softer currents of trade winds returned. Our garden snow in May. The garden is of course a place of constant change, a meditation on transience. And, the Conservancy is also a place of permanence—or its illusion, if one imagines beyond the span of human lifetimes. What is fleeting, and what is fixed?

Happily, one kind of transience—the comings and goings of people dear to us—carries with it a kind of permanence; their presence abides after their departure. April was indeed a month of comings and goings of dear friends. Early in the month we said a reluctant goodbye to the extraordinary artist Ann Hamilton, who had joined us in residence through those weeks (and weeks) of rain. In Ann’s wake I’m sensing the garden anew. She made her way through, what she called, “the garden as a library of palms, and the library as a garden of books” just as she seems to make her way through the world— on the currents of the unknown, with a “rigorous willingness to trust.” She made ethereal images of lei as they began to wilt and return to the earth, and of the old books William kept outside, on their own way back to the elements.

In the last week of April, members of our board gathered in the garden for our annual convening. We tucked stones into trails as footholds and catalogued books in the forest-like library. We looked ahead to a seasonal celebration of William’s 100th birthday in 2027, and imagined well beyond that momentous occasion into a future stewardship of a place of constant change, and a world in flux. During our gathering, we spoke with another friend and former resident, and now 25th U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, about the art of translation, and his signature project Words Bridging Worlds. We considered together the practice of translation as one of intimacy, empathy, sensuality, fidelity, and creativity; pondered the transience of translation and language itself; and spoke of William’s gardening as a perpetually evolving act of translation.

Here in early May, I pause to absorb these rich conversations, while looking back on older ones. I’m coming to see that in many ways, the inherent transience of this place is its permanence—the constant we continuously return to. I linger with Anne and Arthur’s work. Ann’s ethereal images of palm seeds, like her gorgeous public art project O N E E V E R Y O N E, and Arthur’s latest book, the many chambered Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, published with Copper Canyon Press, open up for me a spatial dimension of transience. Perhaps the question of our stewardship, asked again and again over time, is: what do we beckon to the surface, and what do we allow to recede?

With warm wishes,

Sonnet