"I think it makes a huge difference, when you wake in the morning
and come out of your house, whether you believe you're walking into a dead
geographical location, which is used to get to a destination, or whether you're
emerging out into a landscape that is just as much, if not more, alive as you,
but in a totally different form—and that it subsists primarily in silence,
stillness, and solitude. But that if you
attend to it…and if you go towards it, with an open heart and a real watchful
reverence…that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to
you."
I believe I owe Los Angeles an apology. It has been years now, since our move from
New York to LA…a move which was supposed to be temporary. A move which was
supposed to create a parenthetical in
our lives and not, as it has, a full stop. New sentence.
The landscape of New York is undeniable. I remember once, on
a trip from my apartment in Brooklyn to my then-job in Times Square, counting
all of the different environments I passed through along the way.
1. quiet and
cold and cobblestoned on the streets of my beloved DUMBO.
2. smelling faintly
of urine and punctuated by the scrabbling of rats on the Brooklyn side of the
subway.
3. silent—all of us headphones
on in the train car.
4. boisterous and gruff underground in Times Square, a
thousand elbows all trying to get up and out first.
5. even more boisterous
and even more gruff, up street-side.
6. And finally, the dull hum of fluorescents
and air conditioning and smooth steel corporate elevators, whooshing from floor
to floor, inside the sound-thick walls of my office building.
This, I remember
thinking, is why we all keep eyes pinned neatly down as we make our ways from
home to work and back again—could the body, if it were left alone to osmose all
of this—could it even survive it? It doesn't seem likely.
Los Angeles is not like this. Los Angeles is a place of
roads and yards, of 1920's duplexes upon duplexes. Of lines of impossibly tall
palm trees. Of cars and billboards and surprising succulents growing roadside.
It's a place of buildings and order and doorways. It's a place of pods. Pods
with wheels and pods with porches and pods within pods within pods. Sometimes,
when you're driving down a familiar street, on a day when the layer of smog and
marine gust has cleared, you'll suddenly realize, as the peaks of the Sierra
Madres tower into view, that you are in a valley. In a desert. In the bowl of a
hundred mountains. The landscape of Los Angeles, just like its mountains, comes
in and out of view.
I have not been kind to the landscape of my new (gulp) home.
Hence, the apology.
I realized the other morning, while curling around Tracy
Street, slowing for the dip in the concrete, and for the cop who is always
parked outside of the nearby high school, (the same high school where the final
scene from the original movie Grease
was shot)—as I was taking the shortcut, left down the tiny alley where it seems impossible that two cars might fit, and yet, they always do—it
occurred to me, as I was driving these roads, that I have spent nearly all of
our almost 34 months here, stubbornly untouched by the body of Los
Angeles.
Maybe it was the NPR interview, humming along in the background,
with a local artist who was talking about her favorite parts of the city.
Street corners and museums and cemeteries I have never been to—talking about
them as if they were the soft spots and creases of her own anatomy. Maybe it
was the whisper of worry in the back of my head about my husband, about how
much he misses our New York, and about how hard it can be on him—the hours in
the car, the hours in front of screens, the feeling of isolation that is so
common in la-la-land. I was, in my head at that moment, making lists of things
we ought to do. Ways out. Ways in. When suddenly it landed on me, like a rock
might come thudding onto hard-packed soil…that it is time to honor the
landscape that IS.
When we are children, loving the minutia of butterflies and
sidewalk cracks and the sticky tar of pine trees around us, is simple. Natural.
Like breath. It requires no commitment, because it just is what we know and have known and will know, and we have no fear
that loving one landscape precludes loving any other. We drink it in, because
it is what is there.
But as adults, what is around us becomes so tied up in what
we are and what we aspire to be and what we need in order both to be and to proceed
to be better, that it can become, in
the words of John O'Donohue, "a dead geographical location". This is
what we have done to LA, my husband and I—not just because, as it seemed
perhaps at first, it is not our kind of
city, but more than that, out of some kind of stubborn insistence on the
preference of one landscape over another. And with it, a denial of the life of
the landscape around us. And with that denial, it's so clear now, comes a
denial of some part of our own life. And livelihood. How, really, can you
thrive in a place that you refuse to fully breathe in?
Last week, my husband and I rose early and drove to a part
of town we'd never been to before. A little suburb just north of LA where there
is an "old town" and a Sunday market praised for its quaintness. It should also have been praised for the
enormous heads of cauliflower and dozens of varieties of hummus and fresh-caught
salmon and strawberries nearly ready to burst, all on offer there. We walked up
and down the long aisle of vendors, holding hands and taking pictures of
chickens spinning on a rotisserie. (The smell of coal-grilled chicken makes me
feel like I'm nine years old again.) And we ate eggs and bought hummus and
talked about things we wanted, and how we might get them. And as we headed,
happy and full, back to our car, the mountains, which had been hidden earlier
by morning fog, rose up to cradle us.
