{"id":573559781,"date":"2021-01-08T17:31:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T23:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/souwester\/2021\/01\/08\/smiles-guaranteed-on-the-river"},"modified":"2021-01-08T17:39:33","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T23:39:33","slug":"smiles-guaranteed-on-the-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.winnipegfreepress.com\/our-communities\/souwester\/2021\/01\/08\/smiles-guaranteed-on-the-river","title":{"rendered":"Smiles guaranteed on the river"},"content":{"rendered":"

A garden has grown on the ice of the Assiniboine River, featuring a serpentine meditation maze that invites people to enjoy the beauty and benefits of winter.<\/p>\n

Back in December, Osborne Village resident Hazel Borys and her friend Charlene Brown were walking on the riverbank near the Hugo Street docks and thinking about the few things people are allowed to do during the pandemic lockdown.<\/p>\n

“I came up with this idea to have a serpentine mediation loop made out of snow,” Borys said. “I’ve built spiral mazes before, but had never seen a serpentine one, so we had to make our own design.”<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Sou'wester\nHazel\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
Sou'wester\nHazel Borys (from left), Serena Keshavjee, Charlene Brown and Kathryn Ready built and maintain a serpentine meditation walk on the Assiniboine River just off the Hugo Street dock. Not pictured are Hennie Corrin and Stephen Borys.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n

Being outdoors has benefits for mental and physical health, she added.<\/p>\n

Borys and Brown recruited more friends to start shovelling snow on Christmas Day, including Serena Keshavjee, Kathryn Ready, Hennie Corrin and Hazel’s husband Stephen Borys to make up the creative crew. They decided on heaped-up snow cones with paths cut from the snow around them, with two larger, tiered snow structures anchoring each end of the maze. Borys calls these the “gardens.”<\/p>\n

Borys cooked beets and used the concentrated red liquid to infuse water that she froze inside of balloons to form the ice globes which perch on top of the cones. Twigs with red berries frozen into rounds of ice are fixed on top of the tiers at the ends of the maze.<\/p>\n

“I brought things down in a wagon, and then we decided where to put everything,” Borys said.<\/p>\n

Technically, they finished the project on New Year’s Day, but it seems every day, something new is being added. Wooden chairs were carted down onto the river and set carefully more than two metres apart.<\/p>\n

“We thought seniors would like to rest after making the trip down here, but younger folks are using them as well,” Borys said, adding solar lights were added to the tiers.<\/p>\n

Brown, a River Heights resident and ceramic artist who usually teaches ceramics at her Clay House Studio, said building the snow and ice maze has filled a creative outlet she’s been missing.<\/p>\n

“I used to teach at the Winnipeg Art Gallery before everything was shut down. That’s why this project is so enticing for me,” she said, adding she’s built quinzhees out of snow in the past. “As soon as I started playing with the snow, it felt like a larger version of sculpting with clay. I have a desire to keep going and going.”<\/p>\n

To engage the community further in being creative, the group is holding a poetry contest. Poems can be in any form — rhyming or free verse, for example — and need to fit on an eight by 11-inch piece of paper, in 25-point font.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Sou'wester\nA\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
Sou'wester\nA \"garden\" of red berries and twigs in ice at the east end of the mediation walk.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n

“The poems should be about winter,” Borys said, adding people can submit their work via social media, and the crew will put the poems up on a bank of snow at the eastern end of the maze. Borys can be found at @hborys on Twitter, @h_borys on Instagram or Hazel Borys on Facebook. “You have to be willing to give us the right to post on the river trail for the duration of winter. Until we take the lights and the chairs back in.”<\/p>\n

Borys originally froze snippets of poems and installed them into the gardens, to reward people walking the maze, but took those down.<\/p>\n

“I decided to ask people to come up with original poems about winter,” she said.<\/p>\n

Borys, who is the CEO of PlaceMakers Canada, said she blogs about winter cities, and how people can be connected and happy in the winter months.<\/p>\n

The community coming down onto the ice is enjoying the fruits of the crew’s labours. People are shovelling snow off the Hugo dock stairs and stopping by to chat. Even teenage boys have complimented them, Borys said, with a laugh.<\/p>\n

“I’m down here every day,” Borys said. “We’ll probably continue to sculpt it more, so the whole thing will morph a bit. It’s going to grow.”<\/p>

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