The Masses

Friday, February 25, 2011 (in transit)

Every time I have a chance to commute in this city by myself, I get lots of time to think and soak in my surroundings.  Today I spent nearly two hours one way to meet with friends on the European side of Istanbul and then another 2 hours on public transportation home.  A dolmuş (like a van that fills up and then goes directly from one part of town to another), a ferry boat, the tram, the metro train, some walking in between, the feeding of my coins to machines for tokens to ride.  By myself.  The crowds, all moving in masses and I with them, making my way home.  

As I sit on the ferry boat waiting to ride from Europe to Asia, I gaze out the window at the lit up mosque, golden against the night sky.  A lone bird is bleached as it soars above the minarets.  I sometimes still marvel that what I see before me is now my home, at the mystery that got us and keeps us here.  The things that were once so foreign to me have become familiar.  The sights and sounds that are now part of our lives.  The traveling with the masses from one place to another on a rainy day.  The umbrellas and boots and the quiet sitting together on buses and ferries.  The silent moving of prayer beads in the hand of the man beside me.  The cellphones and headphones that keep strangers strangers to one another.  This mass of humanity.

It's among this mass of humanity that I travel with that I experience life in a way I never experienced in the scarcely populated places of my past.  There I came alive in places of solitude and among a membership of sorts, where the landscape was large skies an endless horizon and a cottonwood tree growing tall.  There were no crowds, no masses of colorful people before me and around me.  But here when moving with crowds of people, I feel like part of a mosaic, like a small gear in a machine of humanity set in motion.  As I weave my way among the crowds, I travel with a keen awareness that I am one among so very, very many and that so many, many separate lives are passing by.