I wrote this post while in New York City last week. I never finished it, so I’m posting it now.

It’s the simple things that feel so empowering to me now.

Like knowing that if there’s a subway entrance for the 1 train going downtown on one side of the street, chances are the train going uptown is just across the street. To a New Yorker, this is a no-brainer. To me, it’s a celebration. Here I am in this foreign land where the means of movement and expression are strange and mysterious, and yet I’m starting to crack the code.

On evenings like this, when I take the 1 train to Greenwich Village and the subway conductor (is that what you call them?) comes over the loud speaker to say that if you need to connect to the A or B train you need to get off at the 72nd Street station because the 96 station is closed and I actually understand what that means, and I listen to the music of the subway as my train screeches around curves then coasts almost soundlessly into the 14th street station, and I marvel that I’m here, witnessing this wild and wonderful, unexplainably beautiful display of sound and sight, and spent 2.5 hours in a little dive bar in Greenwich Village listening to a jazz singer I’d never heard of before because I needed to hear some vocal jazz BAD and found her style smooth and easy, so relaxed in her phasing, and I talked to the bartender, a big, sweet man named Kirby, who’s a drummer and a writer whose aunt sings in France, and he pours me the last swig of an almost empty bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz/Grenache and I tip him another dollar before I leave.

Yeah, it’s on evenings like these when I take the subway back to my friend’s Manhattan apartment and there’s a man singing and playing guitar in the Christopher/Sheridan subway station, singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, and I slip him a dollar just as my train comes, wishing it would come later.

And as the train bumps from 14th Street to 18th, I look about me and everyone on this subway train looks beautiful. The woman with long strawberry blond hair. The 20-something man holding a plastic bag full of take-out food, the teenage boys who sit on either side of me playing video games on their mobile phones. And I listen to the screech, bump and hiss of the train, until it glides, almost soundlessly, into a station and I think, why isn’t everyone living in this City?

Why doesn’t everyone scramble here where there is such incredible beauty, color and music everywhere — in the subway, in the street, in the sky, in the people? Why would anyone live someplace else? Why would anyone choose not to live in this cacophony of sound and sight that is so achingly human?

Don’t ever let me become immune to this. Don’t ever let me fall numb to the spectacle, the miracle that is New York City. To the beauty of the people, the buildings, the flow, bump and hiss of this organism I find so exquisitely beautiful and overwhelming to me now. Please, let me always find the joy and exhilaration I feel now, being here in this City that is one of the most spectacular, dramatic, incredible creations I have ever witnessed.