Excerpt from "Walking"

I love Chicago. A lot. And I write about it sometimes. The is the last paragrapgh of an essay I wrote a while back.

Living in a place like this is the only way I could ever live now, after having tasted it. Living in Chicago is like living in ten different places at the same time; there is never a lack of culture, of excitement, of anything. The city is alive and it breathes a great wind of life into me every time I face it. Even if I try not to, even if I set my mind to not raving about the city in my own mind as a trot down the street to buy bananas on sale at Potash Bothers, I just can’t help it. It not only breathes a great wind of life into me, filling me to the very brim of my being with awareness and fervor, it knocks the wind out of me at times as well. Sometimes I gobble up sidewalks, hungry for, wanting, needing, craving more, and other times I find myself shocked, standing still as a stone trying to comprehend and convince myself that this really is my life; that those really are my feet moving me through the city. Nowhere in the world have I ever felt so real, so alive, so human as I do here, cradled between the shoreline and the skyscrapers.

peace, love, and ponies.

“My first day in Chicago, September 4, 1983. I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland. I knew I belonged here.”
-Oprah