thoughts for a chilly evening

The Bus
Riding the bus has the potential of being a very meditative experience. Waiting for the bus. Pondering the passing landscape as it changes with the seasons. Waiting for a transfer. If you can muster up the right attitude it is a long series of moments of respite. Time that you can't work or do chores or feel guilty about not doing those things. Occasionally, I can be this way. When I started working again after my year off, I prayed the whole bus ride. I was so in tune. So connected. So present. After 3 years with just a couple weeks off from the bus, I can't say that I make much use of the time anymore. Even my book reading has dropped off lately in favor of just zoning out or checking my to do list for things I may have missed. I just want the bus to come on time and not break down. I wonder how I can get back to my meditative bus rides without having to take another year off. Or maybe that's exactly what I should do.

Relationships
I am usually irritated when people try to romanticize a difficult situation by saying, "But I learned a lot about myself..." It sounds phony to me. Why don't people know themselves already? Just say that the situation was sucky, end of story. I won't judge you. Call a spade a spade. There is something about relationships (the romantic kind) that much to my chagrin, teach you lots of things about yourself, whether you like it or not. I never knew I was so self-centered. I never knew how irrational I could be. I never knew how subjective my opinions were. I never knew I could hold someone to so much more than I hold anyone else to. Somehow things with my friends and family are different. Maybe I keep a subconcisous distance between the icky me and them. Maybe they know how to avoid her. I think some people call them "boundaries". I'm not sure how it happens, but being in a relationship totally blows your cover. All the emotions and energy make it impossible to keep any sort of distance anywhere. You find yourself thinking and feeling things that previously you could bottle up and hide away. But now there is this person, and they see all that, and you go on being together anyway. I never knew someone could be so nice to me in spite of my worst sides.

Season for Babies
Tonight I met another new baby, birthed by another friend. It is the season for babies. New adopted babies, new Seattle-born babies. It is amazing. These things are created out of thin air. A woman's body knows that it should make a placenta and a stretchy sack and almost exactly 9 months later, to get the baby out. Even if she's never done that before. And that's not even considering what the baby does, out of thin air. The heart, the nose, the brain, the inflation of the lungs at exactly the right moment... All the tiny pieces! How does this ever work out? How is there ever a healthy baby? Or a healthy mom? It is a miracle. We were made and have grown to be quite a fantastic species. It would be cool if we could try and not extingush ourselves via bombs or broken ecosystems that we depend on.