Stranger in Paradise To leave home always means something. It requires drastic tectonic shifts in the body and mind of the thing that moves. It's perception shift at its truest. Us humans are environmental creatures and this is never more evident than when your world is suddenly brand new. You are sudenly brand new. This is about L.A., of course. I'm struck not so much by the new surroundings, but the new, maybe better said dormant, parts of myself now emerging. It makes me question at times how much of myself truly belongs to me, how much of what I do and think is just stimulus and response and how much of it is actually of the soul, an artificial construct that I recently have decided to once again believe in. Los Angeles is nothing like New York. It's stucco and new inside and out. The angeled city has no structure to it. Coal refiniries sit next to mansions and water seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. It could appear static. Sunny day after sunny day, it stands at the end of history. Where New York is a heirarchy, a karmic cycle of up and down, success and failure, Los Angeles is Zen enlightenment, every single emotion and facet of life buzzing all at once. I like it. I had not realized how calcified New York had made me. Scratch that. I had not realized that I had become so calcified. In the city (yes, it's still The City to me), I had become too obsessed not with self, but with guarding the self. Days after arriving in L.A. emotions that had become Manhattan schist began to burst forth with the water of love and pain and joy and hurt. In New York, this would have been devastating. I would have hid. Here, I am examing, for the first time, my weakness, my fraility. This is not a clinical diagnosis with the aim to cure, to rid myself of these symptoms. It's the freedom that comes with imperfection. For the first time in my life, I'm considering that it's possible that there are people out there who know more than me, who I can learn from and who I can be weak around. I suppose this sounds all very hippyish, and it probably is. I have always found it hard not to examine the world and myself...and others. It may also sound a bit naive, but I'm excited. I feel new again. Not different from who I am, but open to finding out who I am to become.

posted by Japhy at 7/07/2004 04:16:00 PM || #