There's this succulent plant that made it's way home with me from a local farmers market about a year ago. It has pudgy, bulbous little leaves that are attached to a slender, string like stem that curves and twists wildly in every direction.
"Strange looking little guy," I thought as I carried it home. It was so delicate that it's bulgy little leaves fell off at the slightest touch.
It made it to my apartment half naked from the trip. I moved it to a window seal with a lot of light, but every time hands brushed against it more leaves fell off. A strong wind would blow through the open window and even more leaves fell from the stems. By now, the everyday challenges of life had left the plant looking starved, dilapidated, and half-dead.
"Stupid plant! Why are you so delicate?!" I complained out loud at the very sight of it. Then one day, as I was watering my contained botanical collections, I noticed something in the soil under the naked stems of my struggling succulent. Every bulby leaf that had fallen off and landed in the dirt had begun to grow roots, each forming a brand new plant.
All of a sudden, I realized how little I actually knew about the plant. The very flaws I attributed to the strange little creature turned out indeed to be it's strengths. How amazing and talented the plant had become, and the only thing that had changed was me. How amazing nature is...to make a living creature that grows, even multiples every time it is shaken. If only I could be so strong!
Things happen on the subways of New York. Everytime I walk down the steps, the underground envelopes me...it is a place and a state of mind very different from the world above.
Often I am half awake, either going to or coming from work so exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open. The person next to me often has something to read. I like to look over their shoulders to check out the latest newspaper headlines, but not everyone is into sharing. Some shake the paper feverously when they see my eyes stealing a line, quickly turn the pages. Some leave the page where I am still reading, even after they are done, waiting generously for a que that it's okay to go on.
These things happen so covertly that neither of us could articulate when and how...it's just an underground phenonmenon like the squirrels collecting nuts or the sunflower facing the sun.
A homeless or crazy lady or man is always in the same car as me. Sometimes they send such a pungent smell of urine and grime through the car that like magic, people pull sprays and colognes from their bags and begin spritzing. A person unaware, maybe on an exhale, sits down next to them and immediately gets up. I want to sit closer, just becuase I feel so bad they have to be that stank. To watch everyone flee from your presence must be even more psycologically disturbing than being homeless and crazy itself.
Sometimes they smell good and ask for my money, and I think, nah, I bet you are taking a bath...you're livin' good. Sometimes they shout about Jesus. In Spanish, English, and even one time in Chinese. I think about their approach to saving the world. Isn't it strange that no one ever just sits next to you and tries to talk to you about Jesus? Now that would be crazy. I bet that's why they shout, better to be loud than for people to think your really crazy.
My favorite subway troop is this Mariachi band that consists of 3 Mexican men. Maybe it's because I'm a little homesick or maybe its just because they're really talented. The stand and play on a moving train, in old cowboy boots and with beat up instruments, smiling the whole time like they were on a stage. Like clockwork, during rush hour on the A train headed uptown they are there singing a song. It's always different, but upbeat and sends me to a celebratory space that I imagine I am in in those 3 minutes. I think about how poping they would make a drunken wedding go off. And when one of them comes around to collect donations with his hat, I never give them money, just a smile of gratitude in hopes it is enough.
The human being is a strange yet beautiful creature. Alone, we walk independently, comforted by the world’s winds that fold around us. Our hands are open and we hold everything but another. We collect the dust and sand that keep our fingers busy building castles on the shores of our potential. Then one day, those same winds carry a hand that lands, of all places, to meet our own. The sand all of a sudden seems so pointless and the ocean pulls our castles back to be with her in the sea.
The fingertips brush and coax and dance amongst the folds of our lives, timid at first, like dipping toes into a cool pool. As the sensation becomes a part of us, we allow our hands to penetrate deeper and deeper into our very being. Complimentary curves fit like puzzle pieces and as the picture expands so does the desire to put ourselves together again. Chemical concoctions pull moist lips and adjoining parts closer with the force of nature’s magnetism. The world’s winds feed brightening flames that heat spaces sheltered from the harshness of storms we might have known.
Heat intensifies, loosening thoughts from our mouths and beating from our hearts until they flow into the eyes of the other soul, showing a mirror unto ourselves. Looking into the warmth and light, we see who we are, who we can be…a spiritual awaking takes place in the sacred temple of love. Tangled strands of you become part of me, exposing the beauty of Divine design, the feeling the flowers must feel to see their pollen floating away with the bee. The day and night become hazy, fuzzy, indistinguishable realms in which we traverse only to come together. Our bodies, minds and hearts twist and turn the world upside down, showing heaven was right beneath us all along. And as I watch us discover these truths in each other’s arms I pray someone investigates this phenomenon further. For the ritualized dance of lovers may hold the secret to finding that God is just a fingertip away.
My room is, was, so tiny...just big enough for a bed...just big enough for a desk, just big enough. But I have windows. I’m just learning the importance of windows.
I wondered how it was that I decided to come to a school that’s got 19 girls for every guy. How will I find Mr. Right in Ms. Rightville? Sometimes I see beautiful men…most are on the street, many have their arms around other beautiful people. And I walk by thinking how beautiful that is.
But I’ve seen this guy around my building here and there and I thought, wow, there is a beautiful man. A few weeks later, I saw him coming off the elevator as I went in—he was with a girl and they walked down the hall towards his mysterious apartment. As the elevator doors hesitated to close, I watched their backs walk away together and I sank against the elevator walls feeling defeated. She won, I thought, as the doors finally closed.
Then I saw him again, saying really nice things to the security guy at the front desk of our building, but I can’t remember his words. I was fumbling in my purse, trying to find my ID so I could scan in and attempting to listen to a friend nearby who was talking to me. But I was listening to the beautiful man who lived in my building conversing with the security guard. I started to stare as my hands dug in my purse. He saw me looking at him and my face said everything as our eyes met. I took them away as soon as it happened, knowing they said too much, threw them into the depths of my purse and hurriedly grabbed my ID card so I could rush to loneliness.
A week later I went downstairs to get my mail and he was standing in the path of the mailroom. I immediately tensed up but tried to keep my composure. He saw me and smiled. I gave him a grin, the best I could do under the intimidated pressure of being in the presence of a crush.
Back to my room…it’s so tiny but it has windows. I have two. One looks out onto a courtyard made of cement from 7 stories up. There are benches and chairs but really not that much is there. My other window faces other people’s windows. One is directly across from mine but the shades are almost always closed. A couple nights ago, while working on my computer, I paused from my studying and turned my head only to see a shirtless man standing in his room across the way. The window framed the bare chest and muscular back that paced the room. It was him! The beautiful boy I’d been seeing around and pining over all this time lived 20 feet away from me, our windows looked right into each other’s. I couldn’t believe the odds--in a 10 story apartment building with over 700 rooms and mostly girl tenants—my dream man lived directly across from me.
I watched him sit down at his computer in the humidity of the New York night. He ran his hands back and forth over his head thinking about what line to write next.
I couldn’t help myself from looking more. I grabbed a piece of paper, wanting so badly to reach out at that very moment, and wrote in large letters “H’ and “I”. I drew a smiley face and hung it up with a piece of tape against my window pain in the hopes he would look. I eventually went to sleep and the next morning I saw his blinds had closed, but his window was blank. The following day I checked off and on, for any signs of life, but only the blank, white sterile vinyl curtain looked back at me. Defeated, again.
I felt like an idiot and took down my unreciprocated “Hi! :)” sign. A few days later, I was in my kitchen and noticed something strange, a few windows down and across there was something on the glass. I ran to my room to get a better view and saw that he had written back! Taped onto his bedroom window was a sign that said, “Hi, sorry…” and on another window of his apartment following it was, “I’m late! :)”
I danced around my tiny room like a little girl on an endless ballroom floor.
I smiled all day.
Tonight I see his lights are on. I look up, without glasses and he is there standing, half hiding from the openness, peeking to see if I am looking, and I can’t see, but I see and he sees me… and I wave and he waves back and my heart is racing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
New York is a sea of places and faces and concrete buildings and horns swirling around me. Whirling around, I wonder, where am I going? So I pick up the pace and jump on the train that people from the industrial revolution thought our generation might respect. Little did the progressive engineers and laborers know how their posterity would treat their modern marvel. Rats scurry from track to hole amidst discarded diapers and coca colas and unsustainability, dodging the incoming D.
No time to fix any of it because we’re moving…onto to the next stop where twenty different people help a blind man upstairs and out onto the street. Smells change just as quick as our steps and men with nothing to loose let every beautiful woman know she is. Fences are everywhere and the chain links rushing minutes closer and closer together until all you can squeeze is a blink.
But the old Puerto Rican man and his friends steal time to dance in the street on Saturday evening, reminding me to slow down—that the city, she breathes; And every tree that calls this place home has become my hero—and sometimes I inhale and notice—every bee and bird that hack the solid ground despite the buried earth that’s beneath; And every child who plays amongst the towering structures and curious strangers gives me reason to do the same. Their songs are the gentle melodies that flow like golden rivers of light that glow brighter than that square of time.
I went to creating my vision board…anyone who’s watched the secret knows.
And I cut out girls with hot jackets and sweet stockings cause’ I want clothes to look that good on me. I taped all the dream vacations I could imagine and the school I will one day own and my dog and the bike I will ride instead of a car and the legs I want onto the poster board. There were trips to Vietnam and the Grand Canyon, African Safaris and storms in the Caribbean; there were parts of me I never even knew I wanted that I plastered onto the paper to focus on and make real. But there was something missing from the magazines, and I searched through all those easy images that came in the mail and plastered the streets and the papers we hold. No lovers worth cutting out had been come upon. I had no love to place besides my ocean view and garden gazebo and spiritual bliss. There were no pictures of love in the magazines; spiritual bliss yes, funny to say, but love no. And it has left my vision board lacking in the one dream I would so like to relish in.
