In Transit On Thanksgiving

Union Station.


I've walked these halls so many times that I know the corners, secret alcoves and tiny spaces to duck into for a quiet moment out of the very public arena of the train station.

I'm in the Great Hall, filled with pillars and caryatids, once again... as well as crazy people surrounded by ticking irritation, hostility and shopping bags sprawled around filled with crazy stuff. It's Thanksgiving. The train station has a different vibe when the rest of downtown has shut down for the holidays and its filled with the chaos of travelers and a bare bones staff, and this is my favorite place to observe people.


Years ago when I worked in this building as a young girl manning the espresso machine alongside gangbangers and hoodrats, we spent a lot of time drinking coffee and standing around talking shit. I'd wander around the station during my breaks, smoking alongside the river and in hiding spaces throughout the underground walkways encountering all types of characters, some predatory and some friendly. Here is where I met my first martial arts teacher, a guide in my philosophic search for truth. I haven't spotted Douglas today, but he's here in spirit - I am remembering his silent and watchful way, an elderly former Black Panther with a kung fu pigtail and glasses, broom at his side. He observed me for some time, stepping my way around through the seas of people cluelessly but agile, before he began stopping by the coffee shop to share some much needed knowledge about life.

What is a more intense place for ninja training than a train station? He taught me wushu moves, punching techniques, throwing people, tai chi. In the end, it was just a bunch of fucking around on the job but in the process I learned some things that changed me for the better, and some fundamental wisdom that I have practiced ever since. This environment, the constant movement of strangers and the need to watch your back at all times made for a great microcosm to sharpen one's skills.

Walking through the station, I saw another student of the guy who asked me to call him sensei, the only familiar face amongst the workers of the station today. He used to laugh at us clowning around kung fu style, but I see by his demeanor that he's taken on the sort of reflectiveness that I learned here from Douglas. What else is there to do here than that? His name is Otis, I believe, and as I walked by I noticed his face - a little leaner from the years- spouting some truths to a coworker. It has been too long to have broken into their conversation and ask if he remembered me. It felt like too many lifetimes have passed between now and then. I did want to ask about Douglas, but I was also fine with just passing through invisibly.


There are ghosts here. Old time Chicago ghosts and the spirits of so many lives and dramas that have passed through the Great Hall on a stop at the busiest transportation hub in the country. Someone once told me that around 100,000 people travel through here on an average day, both locally and across states.

I trekked through here this morning with Kelly Maree, slugging our duffle bags and wellington boots through the cold puddles of the gray Chicago November day. We rushed to get her to the gate bound for Milwaukee to hang with Mikey and the rest of the Del Rosarios up there. I noticed the electronic schedule blinking that my next train would be in an hour, so I took a walk through the crowds of people draped across benches and chairs, and up to the river for some fresh air before coming down to the Great Hall for a good vantage point for watching people. Now I'm breathing in the feeling of solitude in this monumental ultimate waiting room. The overcast sky makes this moment feel like a dream, with light streaming through the skylight. The atmosphere is charged with the wet emotional rawness that I find typical of the holidays, people waiting to face their families, facing the realness.

I'm sitting here now reminiscing, lost in my memories, watching a bizarre looking gray bearded man watching me from across the enormous room. He's a little over 6 feet, long gray trench and khakis, holding his head intensely. he's unnerved by the fact that I am staring at him and scribbling in my notebook, but he does not look away. He has now moved behind a pillar, but he still sees me watching him.


I'm glad for these moments to be suspended in time and to linger in transition. So much has happened and I have traveled far from those days, and now the distances lie vast in the tracks that stretch before me here in this hub. Time seems to stretch in every direction here at Union Station, odd enough for a place that I've burst into many times, out of time, sweaty faced and missing my train. This hasn't happened in a long time - I think my timing has improved. But for this hour, I can think of no better thing than to have this waiting bench to reflect on these things and sit still to breathe. I know the clocks will tick on, and then I'll have to jump up again, ready to rush and catch my train so it can charge me ahead to the next place I'm going.



In front of these piles of commuters waiting, the gates to the trains twitched with artificial robot voices announcing the departures endlessly droning. Are they trying to hypnotize us? It felt like it. I was stoked when this guy pulled out his guitar and fought the electronic voices with music.

I got onto the train and we barreled through the distance.



Happy Thanksgiving! I'm grateful for time, these stolen moments amongst others. It's a good day to appreciate the many unbelievable and transcendent moments that I don't always have time to reflect upon before life charges me into a new scenario.

Nuclear Physics

"Want to go see some mad scientists?," my friend asked on a recent warm autumn afternoon as we walked around Hyde Park.

"Why not? Hanging out with geniuses sounds like a great plan."




We asked what they are building, and the short answer is a detector, which will be used at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It will be used to study double beta decay.

Paths of Knowledge

I apologize because it's about to get really nerdy around here.

The Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago is one of the largest libraries in the world. Among its treasures are original manuscripts by William Blake and Alan Ginsburg in the phenomenal special collections.



This library's stacks open up like a labyrinth.

Lions

The theme of my week was lions. I kept running into pairs of them all around Chicago. Strangely synchronistic.


The Tsavo Lions at the Field Museum, killers of 140 men.


These were on a stoop in Hyde Park.


This one is one of two in front of the Art Institute.

Undefeated Lady Horse

Cosmic Debris

The leaves on the trees around the city of Chicago are ripening from their red and orange hue that you saw in the pictures from the previous post, and are amassing in piles around the ground and sidewalks. For the first time in my life, I am entering this season with less of my usual resentment at the weather turning colder and with more of a true appreciation for the cycle of life that we experience through nature.

I was talking with my brother's friend about walking around our streets during this time of the year, surrounded by the decaying leaves. "Death surrounds us," she said, "I step on the leaves and feel the dead energy." What she said caught my ear and sparked some thoughts. I told her about the pagan beliefs of the ancient Celts, who celebrated the feast of Samhain to mark the end of the harvest season. This is said to be a time in which the boundaries between the living and dead are blurred and made indistinct, when the fresh green life that abounded during the summer slows down and becomes dormant. For the past week, I've been musing upon this subject as I face the march of time and change in to winter. We turned our clocks back, giving me the great gift of an extra hour but also taking away a few more precious moments of sunlight at the end of the day. I feel myself gearing up to buckle down for the winter and get absorbed with work, books and films.

All the cooking I have been doing during the past few months as I have experimented in the kitchen have left me feeling the need to clear out my own body of a bunch of dead things. A majority of my girlfriends are vegetarians and have swept me up into their lifestyle of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. I have finally joined their bandwagon of trying to put mostly good things into my body after a prolonged season of very decadent living. I have learned that times of indulgence must be balanced by periods of austerity - and with this thought I began a mostly raw food fast last week and have been avoiding putting animal products into my body.

Kelly Hyatt called me up over the weekend to invite me to do yoga with her at a new yoga studio in our neighborhood. I had been hoping for the chance to get back into practicing yoga after skating and bicycling pretty hard in the past few months, so I jumped at the opportunity. In the past week, I've practiced yoga every day and have felt my body become more efficient and tuned as a result. Coupled with the vegan fast, I feel my organs, blood vessels, skin and body system adjusting to a healthier metabolism. I had been feeling the effects of getting older by noticing that I no longer bounce back from my skatepark wounds and bruises as quickly as I had in the past, with just a good night of sleep to heal me up. It has been taking me longer to physically recover from skateboarding and I had been feeling as though my energy was slowing down and becoming sluggish. There was once a time when I felt like a superhero, able to withstand an extreme athletic lifestyle, on fire about everything. I want to set my body up to get back into that kind of shape.

I've been told that the best times for fasting are during the shifts in the weather, to prepare one's body to enter or exit the dormancy of winter. I have found that this has been my own instinct, and now have a better understanding of why I have this impulse as it connects to larger patterns in life and in nature.

***

I also wanted to remind us/myself of the upcoming Leonids meteor shower on November 17 and 18. We enjoyed the Perseid meteor shower on a few outstanding nights this past summer. A meteor storm is defined as 1000 meteors or more passing through the path of the earth. I had a great conversation during the meteor event in August about the shape of the moon changing perhaps by the pummeling that it takes from these clouds of cosmic debris.