The Winds They Are A-Blowin'...

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."

- Vita Sackville-West 

It's Fall here. Though you wouldn't know it most days, through the 80 degree weather and endless (ENDLESS) sunshine. You might scoff, you of the darker climes, but it is inhumane to live in a place where the weather never changes.  Sunshine, or no sunshine.  Two days ago we had our first bout of the Santa Ana winds...all night long they rattled windows and blew down unsuspecting plants. There is something unsettling about so much movement in the air, but I was grateful for it. Some weather, any weather, is a blessed event after this long, hot, summer.

(And as the winds blow outside, the winds blow within.)

Our apartment has been invaded with critters. Yesterday a cricket fell from the ether right smack into the middle of my keyboard and then hopped merrily off. The crickets are staging a coup, I'm sure of it. And the creepy drawer-dwellers, and the spiders, and even, the other day, a praying mantis, perched on our curtain rod.  Last night I spent twenty minutes trapping and releasing a giant brown spider that had housed itself in one of my scarves. All that work to keep it alive and away from the house, and then as soon as I let it free on our porch it tried to scurry back in. At which point I grabbed a notebook and whapped it, and whapped it, ready to kill.

Lucky for him, I missed.

I find myself, lately, thinking and thinking. Thinking of all the things that need to be done, thinking about all the time I don't have to do them in, thinking about where I'm going and where I've been, thinking about how I'm going to get to the next place, and why I'm not there yet. Thinking about my friends and my family, wondering how they are and what they need, thinking about my mind and my heart, thinking and thinking and thinking and in the midst of the thinking feeling nostalgia for this very moment as it passes me by, unacknowledged.

In a conversation earlier this week I confessed to someone, "I think I ought to be more present, but then I worry that if I'm present, I won't know what needs to be done next and how to do it." And she said to me that I only have this moment to deal with things, anyhow, and that I would just have to trust that I will know how to handle things, when and if they come up. And that in the meantime, there is nothing to do but be in my life.

And I thought about this for days, afterwards. I turned it over. I let the winds wash it around. And I discovered that she was right.

I can only be inspired in this moment, I can only affect circumstances in this moment, I can only take action in this moment, and I can only react to my life, in this moment.  What happens in the future is an unknown whether I'm preoccupied with worry about it, or not. It will come and present challenges and openings, whether I've been thinking about it, or not. But this moment is already here. This sun is already shining. That bird on the wire outside my window is already there. This morning is already upon me. This breath is breathing me, keeping me alive, and this silence is the only one I get. So, you know...use it or lose it.

I trust these winds. They are appropriately timed, all in preparation for the great hunkering down of winter. I will let them blow through and shake free the last dead leaves of summer.

Inspired by John O'Donohue (again)

"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."

 -John O'Donohue

(From his interview with Krista Tippet on On Being)

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.

Whhoooooooosh! I love you!

Do I need to apologize for being so long in posting?  I don't know!  I'm sorry!

Ugh.

Sometimes I just, you know, run out of things to say.  And I figure it's best to spare you all my rummaging around for a straw to grasp, and just let there be these (sometimes) necessary silences on the ol' blog-a-roonie.

But now I'm back!  I've thought of something to say!  Hooray!

Okay, so, last week, as many of you know, there was a crazy weather event here in Los Angeles...on Wednesday night winds of many many miles per hour (up to 40 knots) hit most of the city.  It was very exciting.  All night long we could hear the wind shrieking outside, plants blowing over, furniture being dragged across the outdoor patio by the skinny fingers of mother nature--it was something else.  My husband barely slept.  I, who can sleep through anything (including once in middle school, feat of all feats, sleeping through an honest-to-goodness fire evacuation during an overnight in the school gym)--even I was a little tossy-and-turny due to the ferociousness of the weather.

Now, if you live in a place like Kansas or...New Orleans...or Texas...please forgive we inhabitants of La-La-Land for freaking the heck out about some blown down trees and broken street-lights.  We know not what we do.

But, it was, you know...a moment.

I remember, not long after I first moved to New York in the early 2000's there was that big Northeast blackout.  I was at the Crunch Gym in Union Square, fake-running on some kind of elliptical, when the whole floor just went quiet, except for the whicka-whicka sound of several people who tried to keep on running on dead machines. (Gotta get that burn!)  I went outside, still sweaty, and everyone on the street was gawking up at all the buildings around them...waiting.  9/11 was still very fresh for a lot of people, so I think there was this communal held-breath while folks tried to figure out exactly how worried they should be.

And it was August.  So it was hot.  Really hot.

I was subletting a little studio apartment in Chelsea, and I had no idea whether there were candles or flashlights or any of that, so made my way back home while it was still light out, and holed up.  Later a good friend stopped by with whiskey and some much-needed conversation.  I was in the midst of being heartbroken over a newly ended relationship, and I was new to the city and I had been feeling just so...alone.  It's the funny thing about New York...there are so many people around, all the time, but somehow, when you're lonely, the presence of all those strangers just makes you feel lonelier.  But, I remember, the morning after the blackout, I walked out my door, and instead of just pouring myself into the sea of nameless pedestrians as per usual...I felt like I was, for the first time, walking into my neighborhood.  The power was still out, the sun was still out, and people were gathered on stoops...and in little clusters outside of still-dark restaurants.  People wanted to talk to each other.  To find out "how was it for you?", "isn't this crazy?", "how long will it last?".

I remember that moment as the turning point.  The turning point of my broken heart mending, and the moment I felt like I had finally arrived in New York, as a resident, and not just a scared interloper.

And although Wednesday's weather-drama wasn't nearly so dramatic...the same feeling was in the air.  People were talking to each other.  People were marveling at trees and towers and checking in with their neighbors..."how was it for you?", "isn't this crazy?", and, if they happened to be one of the unlucky who lost their power..."how long will it last?"

I spent the better part of Thursday, the day after the storm, driving from client to class to class to client, and I marveled, the whole day at the traffic.  It was TERRIBLE, yes, there were dozens of blacked-out street lights, but still...it worked.  People, unaided by men in orange vests, in our individual and usually utterly separate cars...we all started working together.  Even at busy intersections, one in particular in my neighborhood where two giant streets split and merge, making for 10 individual lanes of traffic all trying to go and merge and turn and pass...even at those intersections, where people are normally giant a-holes trying to get their way first...we all turned practically nunnish in our deference.  You go, and then you go, and then I'll go.

And I was so moved by all of it...the way that (oh my god, nerd-out alert)...the way that Mother Nature or the Universe or whatever you want to call it, gifts us with these moments, where the curtains that normally hang down between us and everyone around us...get lifted.  Just for a second.  And we suddenly remember that we are in a community of people.  That we are connected to each other.  And that when shit gets crazy, when roofs are blowing off and trees are falling down...that we're not in it alone.  Now, obviously I've never lost anyone close to me in a disaster...and for those who have, I'm sure it's much more complicated than this.  But I hope that those people also, when the dust has settled, have felt held by their community.  I'm holding you, right now, in my thoughts...if that's any comfort.

It's easy to forget--mainly because our relationships with individual people can get so complicated--but we do, for the most part...we do all care about one another.  Or at least we do, when push comes to shove.   And I think it's worthwhile to remember.  Especially when we're grumbling our way through lines or through traffic or through whatever, that those jerks in the car in front of us, that they're the same jerks who are going to slow down and make sure we're alright if our car goes skidding off the road or if a tree falls on our house.

You get it.

I love you. (And I think you love me too.)  Namaste.