I see this small fern everytime I walk past the parking garage.

Seeing it growing in this little divot for some reason makes me hopeful.

Taking the bus for no reason at all

I started randomly taking the bus in Corvallis towards the end of my tenure there, but that was more out of spite than anything else. After six years of residence with a willing and honest forefeiture of taxes, I realized that I had never once rode the bus and while subsidizing others to use the service. In a fit of neoliberal energy, I decided to start taking the bus since I had already paid for the service (buses in town were fare free). But again this was purely out of a nonsensical desire to get “my money’s worth”, even though there was no reason for me to take hour long busrides out to the end of town and back. Often times I was perhaps one of two or three people using the bus, so it was basically like boarding an enormous, shared Uber.

Seattle is different. There are many well-used bus routes and boarding random buses to different spots around the city has become a strangely comforting hobby of mine. Part of it is to explore the surrounding area, but if I’m being really honest with myself I think it’s a loneliness thing. I’ve taken walks by myself for years, strolling down the same streets in New Jersey or Oregon hundreds of times over the years. I find a lot of solace in walking with no purpose in mind, but now that I live in a larger city when I go for my walks I feel a weird pang of jealousy when I see people taking the bus. I think it’s the communal aspect of it. A bunch of strangers with independent lives but still heading in the same direction just seems like the purest form of serendipitous chaos that our world has come to represent. When you’re on the bus, you’re not alone. You’re part of a new organism, part of the bus, if that makes any sense.

Since I work from home, I have no need to ride the bus myself. There’s no physical destination in the city that requires my presence, and it feels a bit sad when I’m amongst all these people who for better or worse are expected to attend certain places at certain times, as if everyone else has an invitation to a citywide dance except me. With nothing better to do, I decide to crash this public dance at least once a week and take a bus somewhere with no particular agenda or prior research in mind.

The busrides are shaky and loud. I’m not sure if it’s the fault of the roads or the buses, but some areas of Seattle feel as bumpy and jolty as trying to ride a covered wagon down a flash flood prone gully. You would think south Seattle would be in rougher shape than other parts, but actually I think many of the routes along Northgate around where they built a massive new commercial space is just as bad. You would think we were driving a jeepney around wartorn Manila with how much these buses jerk and shake. Perhaps as passengers, the fact that the bus provided us with these small hardships to endure together subsconciously tightens our bond. We are sharing a mildly uncomfortable human experience together. No train can pull people together like a bus ride can. A plane can do it with delays, so that’s not even the plane ride itself. For a bus, the discomfort comes when everything is going to plan.

Looking around the bus is not the same as looking around in any other environment. It’s the only place where I can be among a certain assortment of humanity, people who I would otherwise never see. The homeless, the elderly in their mobility scooters, the old nainais with masks on and full plastic bags, those in medical scrubs, the punkers in their pointed denim, the group dressed in outrageously detailed anime outfit, the tired students leaving class, the excited students recording videos across bus seats, the occasional solitary businessmen, the line chefs, the security guards, the mothers with their strollers, the hippies who traded their cars for bikes, and the casual observers. All deciding to share the same space for brief glimmers of time. I do my best to appreciate them quietly, for the short time we share, before we drift away again like clouds in the sky.

Every stop someone gets off, and someone new can take their place. The bus is the one venue where you can see the Universal Dealer constantly shuffling an infinite deck. Where else in the world can you see such a variety of creation?

Thinking about love a lot

Not sure where I first heard it, perhaps at a summer bible camp or something, but I’ve been pondering the phrase “God is Love”. It’s been sticking in my craw quite a bit lately since there’s truly no shortage of things to be anxious about. Praying to an Almighty that they might fix it all is a comforting thought, but one that never really sat fully with me. I have seen people pray for all kinds of specifics, for the mundane things like winning a football game and for the miraculous things like curing an ill loved one, but I’m not sure God works that way. There’s too much sickness and suffering in the world to convince me of a Great Genie in the sky who grants wishes if you wish it in a special way and under certain terms. That’s not to say I don’t believe in God though.

I’ve really labored over this phrase for a while, God is Love. Being Catholic means that God is God, the Father almighty. We have a whole Creed about it in fact. Everything I ever learned in Christian Doctrine pointed to a mighty Father, who reigns above us all, created this whole world so therefore was not of this world. Jesus was the closest God ever came to our world, he was the Son of God, and if you subscribe to the Catholic Church that makes him consubstantial to God the Father. However, while Jesus was in this world he was also not of this world. Jesus is God, and God is Jesus, so when Jesus was crucified that was God learning what it was like to suffer at the hands of man. But if we take all that at face value, then how can God also be Love?

Love to me is something very much of this world. It can be found in all kinds of forms, all around us. The buoyant, shining love of a young child for their parents. The simultaneously aloof but frenetic love between college students. The leather-bound and wood-aged love of a long marriage. The desperate twisted love of an abusive relationship. The carnal, primeval love of a man and his vices. The taut and flickering love between a couple about to tallying their last straw.

When I think love, I think about people. People in all their forms and shapes, and with them all kinds of forms and shapes for the love they have to share. When I think love, I think of some kind of conscious doing, an action. The action of running into someones arms. The action of typing and retyping, drafting and editing your text messages before sending them. The action of staying awake all night because of some burrowed anxiety. The action of avoiding someone. The action of trying to drive the memories of someone out of your mind. The action of pulse quickening, a blood rush, eyes darting downwards and away. The action of panicking, of crying, of screaming because there’s nothing else to be done by you in that moment. I think of the mess of Love. How is it possible to reconcile this human dysfunction, the mess of Love, with the Supreme?

Are we God too?

Not almighty Gods of course, we share more in common with the Greek gods with all their idiosyncracies, their predilections, their capriciousness. But is it possible that God is not separate from us at all? That he is right here thought all of it, through the thick and thin and ups and downs. He is the tears, happy and sad, he is also the hand on the shoulder, and handkerchief, the ice cream, and the reason it all happened in the first place. Can it be that He is on the bus with us, and when we look at each other in all our forms for just those brief seconds of acknowledgement, is it possible that we can see the Divine?