One of my favorite parts of my week is the walk I take every Wednesday from the church where I am working at 13th and G Street to the church where I have a midday rehearsal at 20th and G Street. That would seem like a pretty straight shot along seven blocks of a single street, but nothing is quite so simple when you travel around the city of Washington D.C.
My route is bisected diagonally by Pennsylvania Avenue, and that takes me past the house at 1600 every week. Being a veteran Washingtonian of more than 30 years now, I am too cool, of course, to gawk at The White House, but the house itself is the least interesting thing along my commute. That long stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, with Lafayette Square on one side, and a wide swath of pavement that was blocked off from cars more than a decade ago, beckons people from every state and continent. Musicians playing everything from rock guitar to smooth saxophone to mountain tunes on the harmonica. Camera-wielding tourists, families, and people in wheelchairs. Evangelists for their own brand of God’s good news, and protestors of causes I didn’t even know existed. People who have created memorials for those lost at war or for lives wasted by gun violence. Men in well-pressed suits zipping by on scooters, briefcases in hand, weaving around strollers and the very obvious security guards, who stand seemingly at ease, but clearly attuned to everything and everyone around them.
Of all that I’ve seen on my Wednesday pedestrian commutes, the best so far has been a group of men in robes and large white hats. From a distance I feared a gathering of the KKK, but getting closer I saw that these were dark-skinned men who held signs proclaiming themselves to be Moors. It wasn’t clear what they were protesting, but if their goal was to let the world know that the Moors still live, they succeeded with me. Did you know there are still people who identify as Moors today?
There are always lessons to be learned, and I love my few minutes every week of seeing the world gathered, sometimes to gawk and sometimes to proclaim. We can’t know if the residents of The White House are observing anything that happens outside their windows, but I find hope in what I see – community, curiosity, diversity…and street musicians! As we look forward to Thanksgiving next week I am grateful to witness America on that stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s colorful and messy and so very beautiful in its openness to all sorts and conditions.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson and T.S. Eliot, among many others, have quotes attributed to them about the journey mattering more than the destination. They remind us that transient moments have value and enrich our lives. That the journey itself can bring happiness. I certainly feel that on Wednesday afternoons.
Reaching a destination suggests an ending, but as every musician knows, the journey is all we have. We will never reach a musical destination because we know that something could always be better – a phrase more beautifully shaped, an emotion more clearly expressed, or a technical passage more perfectly executed. I think that’s probably true for every part of our lives. We’re all works in progress, so why not appreciate the commute as a welcome part of life.
Peace,
Sonya
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This blog represents my attempt to put thoughts together on various things that seem to connect – in my mind anyway. More often than not new ideas first involve reaching back to what was and I can only hope that the prehistoric San cave painting at the top of this page inspires all kinds of connections between old and new.
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Notes for a New Day 