Cecil Frances Alexander 1818-1895 *

Have you ever wished that you could simply talk to God the way you would talk to a close friend or relative? Yet, that very thing may very well be possible. How many of us have felt God talking to us in a special way while we are on spiritual retreats, church camps, and in other situations where we have, for a time, laid down the normal business of our lives and taken the time to actually listen to what God is saying?

Trying to get a quiet time in our lives, where we can simply allow our spirits to talk to God, and God is allowed to talk back to our spirits, is not an easy thing to do. Most Americans have so filled their lives with activities that crowd our very existence to the point where every spare moment must be filled with some activity or noise of some sort. The command that comes to us through the ages, that we should "Be still and know that I am God" could not possibly be more counter the American culture. Yet, this very activity seems to also satisfy a deep craving for quietness, for many who are not Christians are turning to yoga, meditation, and other quieting spiritual practices from other cultures, and most certainly they are doing so because our culture of noise and distraction does not meet a particular need for peace and quiet.

One exercise that I have found to be very helpful in clearing the mind, and helping to gain spiritual communion with God is to pray over and read the scriptures while in one of the many excellent public parks that are scattered over our region. There are fewer distractions, and what distractions there are, are of the sort that appeal to a different part of our nature than the normal rush of everyday life. Furthermore, when in a park such as Forest Park, or Cross Park, the presence of God's creation tends to be so close at hand that communication with God is perhaps made a little easier than if we were surrounded by our normal everyday disruptions.

This web page started out with the goal of reading one chapter of the Bible in each of the Portland area public parks before the end of calendar year 2003. To make it more of a challenge, as much as practical this would be done by walking or on public transit. The goal here is that anyone could simply drive from one park to another, reading a very short chapter from Psalms in each park, and probably be done in a matter of several weeks. That would not be a challenge. The idea here was to not simply blast from one park to another as fast as possible, but to actually spend some time in the areas around the parks as well as in them.

About one month into the project, I decided to turn the results into a public web page. There were several reasons for this:

• There does not seem to be a general inventory of public parks in the Portland area. Certainly, most of the cities and county agencies that own parks have at least a web site of some sort, but there is no central list of the parks owned by the 17 cities, 3 counties, 1 regional government, and 1 state parks department (and this doesn't even begin to count the Washington side of the Columbia River).

• I wanted to be able to publicly access the list of places I had visited, so that should I forget if I had visited a particular park or not, the list would be easily available.

• Perhaps some will find the brief descriptions of the various parks interesting, if not useful.

• Perhaps some will find the brief scripture observations interesting as well.

A Note On Location: In east side Portland Parks, I tended to list the location of a park based on its center. For example, I list the location of Woodstock Park as SE Insley & 48th Ave, Portland. This intersection does not exist, but it is the approximate location of the center of the park. Most parks can be approached from many different directions, rather than from a specific intersection, and locating the center of the park will indicate how to get there equally bad from all of those directions. Also, in such cases as Portland's Flavel Park: if I were to put down that it is at SE Flavel & 76th, you would probably not find it because the "main entrance" from the main road is a narrow area with just a sign, and 76th doesn't even cross Flavel there. The primary parking area for it is actually on a gravel road on the south side of the park. So, if I give the center of the park, it at least gives some indication where the park is located in the Portland street grid. This method doesn't work for the Portland West Hills and other locations where the streets turn into a tangled mess, and so in those cases there is an intersection listed that at least approximates the location of the park.

My sincerest thanks to those whose feedback have helped develop a better listing. You can send e-mail to gl4317@yahoo.com However, note that this address is posted on a web site, and usually there is so much trash that is sent to it thanks to e-mail harvesting programs that all useful messages are lost. It is much better if you use my regular e-mail address, which you should be able to determine simply by looking at the web site URL. HINT: The provider name is easystreet dot net, and the username is glennl

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• First Third of 2003

• Second Third of 2003

• Third Third of 2003

• First Third of 2004 a huge project at work as well as various other items eliminated a lot of my free time during late 2003. Therefore, another section of the visitations came into existence.

• Second Third of 2004

• 2005 and 2006 (many distractions during 2004, 2005, and 2006 extended the activity far longer than I had originally planned, but thus is the nature of recreational projects).

• Ongoing Efforts New parks have been formed or developed to the point where it is possible to access them, and as well I have found places that previously I was unable to get to or correctly locate. Therefore, this ongoing effort is listed here.

• Parks Unable to Visit