My first great culture shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between busy streets all bore plaques that called them “parks.” Where I came from, a park was a place of birdsong and rustling leaves, a place to ramble, to get lost in, to dream in; a patch of wonder in the middle of the city; a pocket wilderness. It was in a park that I took my first steps, had my first kiss, wondered for the first time why we are alive.

The park — the proper park — as a place of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with great soulfulness in We Go to the Park (public library) — the product of an unusual collaboration between Swedish author and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna.

At the dawn of the pandemic, amid the maddening captivity of lockdown and the tempest of uncertainty, Alemagna entered a kind of trance of painting — an outpouring of color and feeling channeling her hopes and fears, dreams and remembrances. (Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism — we make what we make to save ourselves, to stay sane, to find the slender cord of grace between us and the world.)

When Stridsberg received a selection of these impressionistic unstoried images, she was moved to respond with her own art. Her spare, lyrical words gave the pictures coherence, making of them something uncommonly lovely: part story, part poem, part prayer.

Some say we come from the stars,
that we’re made of stardust,
that we once swirled into the world
from nowhere.

We don’t know.
So we go to the park.

Though spoken by children playing in the park, the collective pronoun seems to expand in widening circles as the vignettes unfurl until it becomes the voice of humanity, making the park — this “land beyond” — a miniature of our restless search for meaning, an antidote to the ordinary world where “everything is so big there’s no room for it inside of us.”

There amid the thousand-year-old trees that “stretch their branches toward the sky like old hands,” we encounter minute creatures and enormous flowers as big as heads, “birdlike old ladies on benches” and a girl “in a yellow raincoat with wild hair, who smells like lightning and isn’t scared of anything”; we encounter ourselves in all our yearning, all our incompleteness.

Sometimes it feels as if all of life
is made up of longing.

A dizzying lack of someone
to swing and swoosh beside.

When Stridsberg writes that “there are no rules in the universe” — a universe we know to be governed by immutable laws precise as clockwork — she seems to be intimating that there are no rules for how to be human, for how to make meaning. (There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.) There are only invitations — to be present with the wind that feels like “the breath of a dragon,” with the tiny ants, with the exquisite fragility of life and the size of time.

In just a second,
everything we love might be gone.

We Go to the Park is part of independent children’s book powerhouse Enchanted Lion’s inspired Unruly imprint of picture-books for grownups — or, rather, wonderfully category-defying books emanating Maurice Sendak’s insistence that an authentic life is a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”

For other Enchanted Lion treasures that feed the child self without shying away from the deepest dimensions of maturity, savor Before I Grew Up, Big Wolf & Little Wolf, and this illustrated reimagining of Neruda’s Book of Questions.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Photographs by Maria Popova.