How can I not be in love with this life? I’m intoxicated by it every single day here in NYC.
Even with my back to the window, the sounds filter in and flood my mind with visions.
I hear a phrase from a song as a car passes, and I am in the back seat, windows rolled down, my hand out to catch the air current and the silky humidity that coats my skin.
In its tumult, in its chaos, in the anarchy of the street below, there I find God. The promise, the arduous and complex challenge, the vulgarity, the loss, the pay off.
And on a night like tonight, I revel in the sticky sound of masking tape tires make as they shed water left on new drenched asphalt, laid down on Marcus Garvey Boulevard in the course of a few hours yesterday. A miracle in itself for a girl from a place where pot holes dash and dot under axels like Morse code over country roads.
Not quite this beauty:
but equally majestic for its organic origin. It is no less a song than that of Route 66. In fact, it is the very embodiment of the lyrics:
In liberating strife,
Who more than self, THEIR country loved,
And mercy more than life,
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain devined.
Even on a night like tonight, when discord and disharmony and dissent abound, I can find joy in the sounds of life, teeming and thriving, in a world on the other side of a single pane of glass.
Veneranda Jade 