Walking in the King's Park
Poetry, art, and books on our relationship to world around us
Walking in the King’s Park
Bangkok, Thailand
A monitor lizard drags a mangled fish
onto the pond’s grassy shore and rips
flesh from bursting flesh, flies swarming,
scales glinting, smell repellant.
A pied fantail hops and spreads its feathers
to stir up little critters. “Look what I found!”
my two-year-old son exclaims and runs
to watch it dancing on the grass.
My daughters see for the first time
how rice grows. “In water!?” one shouts
like it’s so silly. Her little sister lingers,
slowly fingering the growing grains,
while people swipe through two-inch boxes,
caged.
Suan Luang Rama IX is the biggest park in Bangkok, built to honor Thailand’s late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX). It lies just a few minutes from our house and has long been my favorite spot to go running. We also took our young kids there regularly during the pandemic, when I originally wrote this poem.
But the park took on a deeper significance for me this year. Early on in my sabbatical, God clearly led me to step away from screens and to step outside—first to my garden, then to my local open-air market, and eventually to morning after morning at this stunning park. The King’s Park, as it’s commonly called in English—and I welcome the multivalence here, because above all this park reflects the lavish creativity of our Creator King—became the place where I deeply encountered God through unrushed hours of prayer, good books, and the beautifully noisy silence of nature. At the end of my sabbatical, my wife thoughtfully bought me a framed fine art print of the painting above as an ebenezer, a way to remember how God graciously restored and transformed me during this season.
Needless to say, I absolutely adore this gorgeous oil painting by fellow Bangna artist Jonathan Preg. It happens to depict the exact pond mentioned in the poem’s opening lines, the place where this poem was born. There’s even a monitor lizard in the bottom right! (Check out Preg’s Instagram for more views of this painting and his other amazing oil paintings.)
This was the first poem I wrote (though certainly not the last: see “iRemember”) about how technology affects our relationship to the real world around us. If there’s one thing I don’t like about this early attempt from 2020, it’s that the last couplet might come off like I’m pointing the finger at others in a holier-than-thou way, when the truth is that I was mostly writing to myself from a moment of clarity—a slow day at the park with my kids. It has taken a lot of time and intentionality, and God’s patient leading, to grow toward the kind of person I want to be when it comes to relating to technology in healthy ways and becoming attuned to the world around me. I’m sure I’ll write more about this topic in the future, but for now, here are four books on this topic that I found formative this year:
Jenny Odell — How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Manoush Zomorodi — Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self
Catherine Price — How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Digital Detox Plan
Cal Newport — Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
More on Writing and Faith
Thailand-based poet Eris Cardin recently interviewed me for her blog, Rhyme and Rhythm. I really enjoyed her thoughtful and thought-provoking questions!
There are still spots left for the August 2025 cohort of Spirit & Scribe, the four-week workshop about integrating spiritual formation and writing craft. Need-based scholarships are available. Learn more and register at the link above.
Finally, thank you to The Way Back to Ourselves Literary Journal for originally publishing “Walking in the King’s Park.”