The machine has two tall tires at the front or outside and under where the driver sits and another set of tires in the middle with eventually at the end a last duo of tires bringing six, or eight because the middle might have two and two on each side, to cruise forward a long stretch of metal with windows. Sitting inside the machine I have room for a food nutrition bag under my seat and cozy confined space for my feet to be at rest while seat cushions are plenty soft which means superior support continues on a road-trip roll happening since I’m at ease for the travels. On a map I have a location seen yet while approaching our destination the place is a mystery.
The driver announces on a speaker, “Folks, in a few minutes we will be arriving.” Soon a descent begins on several long full-circular swings, deftly and swiftly achieved for such a heavy forward motion. This pro has driven here many times before. Probably three or four skillful circles are successful and in a squeezed deep underground space are 40 slots efficiently designed for these machines (another side of this underground building has 40 more machine parking areas). Once inside the terminal we have bright lights, people milling around, and warbly voices announcing arrivals and departures. Right now though our travel mobile is narrowly parked in a slot, a few feet tightly free on either side before another metal contraption rightfully takes a place, and our small crowd of 30 passengers or so are exiting. We made the journey.
Where we are is the Port Authority Bus Terminal in downtown New York City at 625 8th Avenue, New York 10109 and open 24 hours daily. No one can claim to have traveled in America until spending an entire day here: bring a backpack of homemade food, water bottle, and every awake five-sensory ability to witness how our sixth sense called intuition sees hopeful lives.
Before any new career starts or college years are begun or a family is soon to be born or an American passport is accomplished—a requirement needs to happen for spending one full day here. The place is a visual church on how every spiritual walk of life lives. And if you haven’t been an observer how can a fullest life be claimed? Just asking is all.
Waiting for a next bus connection, a few hours is what I devoted for prayerful observation. Still, I saw a few details or rather a few hundreds. In fitful despondency we claim America is falling apart and social mayhem plus political anarchy rule. Sweet honesty is that when folks are on a budget and a dream to get there anyway, we have harmonious. The Port Authority Bus Terminal operates like a sophisticated ant hill, what Native Peoples’ based kiva design on because underground is hospitable for spiritual ceremony. And in this location, I find watching my people is one, a heartfelt observation ritual that gifts more empathic spirit, a ceremony to recognize real lives.
Like an ant hill, the bus station operates routinely precise and reliable: janitors are sweeping, ticket operators are selling freedoms to wherever, travelers are looking into lunches made before, foreign languages are lovingly spoken to keep this tribe unified, buses are shiny and ready to depart, public bathrooms are clean, security guards are friendly and watching like helpful hawks, fresh drinkable coffee dispenses from vending machines, cafes are open serving variety foods, and a convenience store sells food at popular prices meaning we the people can shop here.
Last essay I sent every American high school student away to Zen University and now I’m sending every US citizen to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Looking like continual progress every two weeks to say how else can we live except on simplicity? Every consumerism widget has been made, many never necessary in the first place. And now we are learning how to live without the original gadget for a healthier nature environment. If a life is in simplicity balance and work happens for another reason besides consumerism then what for? What I observe is spiritual uplift during random perceptions of beauty on travels.
A ceramic cup travels at an airport and a bus terminal equally well. If a woman decides, she can be powerfully solo while on a cross-country bus voyage. Travelers get a knowing smile when noticed is a flower growing despite a sidewalk, just enough open edge for soil to be alive beneath cement. For me, random granular beauty like this is a reason why travel enriches my life especially when diverse people are the beautiful.
One family at the Port Authority Bus Terminal had stacking metal containers nearly as tall as their toddler. In one was rice and another a vegetable and a third a chicken sauteed. From these a portion goes onto paper plates and chopsticks, too, to be for disposal when a shared meal finishes in the bus station, a pause before departure. Another traveler is a college student having purchased a large slice of pizza from one of the cafés upstairs, where the escalator goes for a floor or two or three in the bus station, and she is now comfortably nutritioned for the bus ride.
Most passengers are disciplined in waiting for travel to begin—listening to music, reading a newspaper, watching other people, keeping children occupied, helping seniors, answering questions other travelers have, and sleeping lightly to raucous background bus station noise. Every life descriptor can be seen: people of all races, sizes, heights, ages, cultures and LGBTQ+ are here traveling on a thoughtful frugality because the bus system works. America has these highly beauty-centric ways of being too seldom described in travel portraits.
A few summers ago, I purchased a one-way ticket from Providence, Rhode Island to Denver, Colorado for $245. Several buses drove nearly 2,000 miles across Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and eventually Colorado. Takes two and a half days: read, music, food, rest, talk, photograph, map, listen, ask, restroom, wait, and travel continually on the bus. Random rural stops way out in America’s countryside, wait times at postage stamp locations, and, diverse travelers historical on hope for uneventful mileage and successful arrival, are experiences inherent to the process. These truths happened along this trip and how exhausted yet grateful I was that my family journeyed together, my 11-year-old son Darien having made the voyage, too.
Last summer seeing granular beauty in unlikely travel vistas happens when Pueblo, Colorado is near. Angling to be seen while I am driving on a two-lane highway is a mammoth, dilapidated factory quilted in a patchwork of rust. Picture several Wal-Marts all lined up in one rectangular stretch. How in the world and what is going on and when did the structure—I stopped asking myself questions and spiritually gave in that I would discover soon enough once wandering around Pueblo town.
Town is a quiet mixture blending houses and business no longer in use neighboring with lively small businesses and renovating houses to signal old failures and new inspirations. One devotional consumerist locale changed the oil for my road-trip car and Darien waited in a hipster customer room: coffee, television, magazines, and stylish 50s décor. Rather than sit around I went for a walk a few blocks away and discovered Pueblo’s artfully created museum. What I learned is that the rusty quilt has been a steel mill for 150 years until several of the buildings closed and currently functioning well are edifices focused on melting steel often repurposed for railroad tracks. The stupendous fact of beauty is solar power.
Historically the steel mill had been coal powering furnaces that create a hazardous work environment. And not surprisingly for the steel mill owners the factory was extremely profitable in the late 1800s and forward during railroad construction eras. And also explains why I observed so many banks for a small town, a few now shuttered. Eventually employees went on strike for more humane working conditions. Many employees left for good going to college at Colorado State University Pueblo and on to new career paths. And more than a few attended college, returning after to work at the steel mill factory given higher wages than elsewhere.
Pueblo’s travel anecdote is a meteor for granular beauty lighting across the sky, a reminder to learn what complexity resides in diverse lives and doing so feels like a random act of kindness for my own life well-lived. If I had judged that first dilapidated factory building, I might have driven away curiosity. Instead, I listened to my intuition and went exploring. Expansively enriching are modern business organizations that inspire. Today the ESRAZ Rocky Mountain Steel mill in Pueblo is 90 percent solar powered, edging radically away from coal and furnaces and towards the future like a flower growing on a cement sidewalk, unlikely yet entirely possible.
Now just last summer I heard crackling lightning and thunder drums sounding across a few mountain ranges. My $35 tent I perched underneath a tree to weather this storm. Several feet away is the Pecos River, a tributary through American southwest culture and history. So far during one week traveling through New Mexico what have been are a blessing in clear skies, helpful winds, and encouraging sunshine. Not this evening though. Surprising me is that June is an exact month for seasonal monsoons.
Everyone had been crowing like Black-billed magpies that serious weather is imminent. Villanueva State Park ranger said so, friendly lesbian couple told me again, a septuagenarian duo at one campsite over confirmed the news, and I heard hikers animated in conversation to get real: a storm was on her way. I had no idea what to expect in this Villanueva region, a nature scenario riveting on beauty backroads, a simple hour south of Santa Fe.
Cozily asleep around 9ish evening time, only an hour later I heard a clamorous thunder stomp and a jump-in-place lightning slap. I knew then the gossip earlier is true. A deluge began and thanks for an air mattress resting high enough off the tent ground. Unlikely to float into the Pecos River. After two intensive hours of constant thunder and lightning and rain buckets emptied from the sky, I heard the shout.
“Mom!”
Rarely have I heard my son shout like this. I researched around my sleeping zone and sure enough I was floating in a storm lake called the bottom of my tent. Dipping my feet into the water, I was still able to haul my air mattress outside and dashed for the adobe roofed space. Here I could weather proof an evening’s rest. Over the storm volume of constant thunder, lightning, and rain intensity, I could at least speak.
“What is it?” I shouted.
“Are you okay?” Darien asked from inside a tent dry and comfortable under an adobe roof, a location he had chosen earlier in the afternoon.
“Is that all? You woke me up in the middle of the night? I’m fine and the storm will be gone in a while I am sure,” I reassured him not at all certain myself but confident sounds are 97 percent of Mama work. “Go back to sleep and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Where are you going?” he asked hesitantly. Again, this kind of uncertainty is not what a teenager had brought on the trip so far. I smiled. Even the “toughest” can be vulnerable when a Mama might be in peril.
“I’m going to set up camp right here. Now good night and get rest.”
The next day’s bright sunshine facilitated moving all the rain-infused items from my tent to easily air dry while summer sunrays did the work. Next night exact same summer storm procedure with intensive thunder and lightning from 10 pm until early morning followed with another warm sunshine day.
What keeps in my memories vision from these two camping days are Pecos River and her beauty changes. When I first arrived the river waters had a silvery dancing bubbly flow. Before the storm a few golden light shards keep glimmering on the river’s clear water at sunset. Entirely serendipitous was this campground discovery. Truly like finding a flower growing in a cement sidewalk edge. A brief afternoon hike when I got to the campground showed mountain ridges speckled with brilliant blues, yellows, oranges, and reds from flowers growing unlikely wedged in rocks. Made me laugh how persistent a flower must be to grow despite such a large obstacle.
What radically went from a clear water river to a muddy river flowing clearly on meaning for my life is this Pecos River. After 48 brief storm hours, the river now flowed a deep red-chocolate color rushing forward yet slower. Where I had stood on a river bank two days before was now three feet higher given the river’s growth. Traveling and observing random beauty can be overwhelming, for sure, like this seasonal storm. Makes sense what Shakti Gawain explains in her book Creative Visualization: “Let us imagine that life is a river. Most people are clinging to the bank, afraid to let go and risk being carried along by the current of the river.”
Yet if deciding on a leap of faith to jump into life’s metaphoric river, now Gawain reminds that “once she has gotten used to being in the flow of the river, she can begin to look ahead and guide her own course onward, deciding where the course looks best, steering her way around boulders and snags, and choosing which of the many channels and branches of the river she prefers to follow, all the while still ‘going with the flow’.”
For all diverse women—lesbian, genderqueer, straight, bi, and trans—making a decision to nurture creative life flow has consequence. Clarissa Pinkola Estes clarifies in Women Who Run with the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype that “the creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us. We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools, ponds, streams and sanctuaries...this is not a slight thing to be ignored. The loss of clear creative flow constitutes a psychological and spiritual crises.”
Modern life has distraction and what I discover through travels are creative ways to return and discover nurturing spirit, lively soul dances in unlikely observations. Estes describes that “in the Hispanic Southwest, the river symbolizes the ability to live, truly live…always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the Rio Abajo Rio; the river under the river nourishes everything we make.” And each and every one of us decides what to make of our lives one beautiful day at a time.