The next morning, we were up early, eager to walk the botanical gardens where they have the largest bonsai collection in the world outside of Asia. We strolled toward the Chinese Temple Garden. It was a lush yet simple retreat from the streets. It encompassed acres, a place of renewal originally constructed in the 1600s in China and moved stone by stone to Montreal in 1990.

As we approached the massive gate, it was locked. I panicked; ready to demand entry after driving four hundred miles from another country to see this. Robert calmly, like an Asian sage himself, treated the situation as if it were a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted. He began to walk the outer wall of the Garden, which seemed insurmountable. I was frustrated. He kept walking slowly along the high wall. But the Garden stretched for acres, and I wondered if we were going to walk its entire perimeter. The thought made me cranky. He kept strolling.

Suddenly, when we had walked farther than was originally in our view, the walls disappeared. In fact, the Garden itself had no walls save for the façade at its entrance. We simply walked through the open grass to a path that welcomed us. It seemed profound that what loomed as an impenetrable barrier, a locked threshold, was actually a symbolic gate. Already, in entering the Garden, my frame of mind had been tested. How many thresholds that seem blocked or barred or locked, only seem so from their initial viewing? How many opportunities for true living are actually barrier-free, if we can only look beyond where we’re told not to go?

In fact, once inside the Garden, there were no doors at all, only doorways, and every threshold had been placed just so, in order to point up a particular aspect of the Garden that might otherwise go unnoticed. And through the waterfall, we could see the inner pond. Standing there, it seemed clear that beneath the cascade of our feelings lies the pool of everything that is eternal. And only on that shore is lasting relationship possible, not just with other pilgrims but with the Universe itself. So, we, with our numb hands and feet, a cancer survivor and a recovering alcoholic who pulled each other up from the moist nest of sickness that is so much a part of our modern world, we, who had come from another country to find the gate locked, we walked through the waterfall into the pool and began to live with new eyes.