Ghost Bus
I credit my love of public transportation with growing up in the suburbs of Detroit where I never used it. In the aptly named Motor City, we drove absolutely everywhere. This instilled in me a starry-eyed romanticism about the bus, one that would inspire birthday parties, art shows, and propel me into paid work with an organization called San Francisco Transit Riders.
My formal work in the transit world ended in 2016, but somehow it’s coming up again in 2022. I contributed an essay to Content Queen Zine’s Who BARTed, and through that I finally found a story to tell at Muni Diaries Live after years of being asked.
So instead of reading my words this month, you can listen to them. Here is a podcast recounting the time I convinced a whole house party to ride the bus together on Halloween, which of course did not go as planned:
Click that play button or listen wherever you get your podcasts, namely Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or Spotify.
If you are a visual person, below is the audio from that recording set to the video that my partner took on an iPhone, despite my telling him many times that it wasn’t necessary (thanks, Justin 😘). He sweetly wanted to make sure other people could see how big the audience was, which he demonstrates by walking through it somewhere around the 7 min 30 sec mark:
So why am I sharing a story about transit as part of a project about creative spiritual practice?
Well, for five years I made and shared a piece every week. During this last year I’ve made pieces every month, sharing them on the first quarter moon. But something strange happened last month when I went to share my latest piece: I couldn’t do it.
Maybe it was because I had recorded an original song to go with the animation. Maybe it was because that song quotes the Torah and speculates about what happens when we die. Still, I pride myself on being able to push through fear, which is why public speaking doesn’t phase me. When I missed that first quarter moon I meant to share it at the full moon, then at the last quarter moon (🌗), and then this first quarter moon (🌓). But when Muni Diaries emailed this week letting me know that the podcast was live, I heaved a sigh of relief that I could punt sharing that piece at least another month.
I have no idea what I will share next month. I often don’t. I may keep letting this new body of work develop more in private until it is ready. Am I scared? Yeah. But I think it might mean I’m getting ready for change.
Or maybe this latest work is only for me. Maybe it’s like a bus that you wait and wait for that finally shows up but isn’t accepting any passengers: it might not take you where you thought you were going, but it might show you something that you needed to understand.