Last night, as I crested one of Highland Park’s many steep streets, I saw a familiar friend in a completely new way. A perfect double row of palm trees. We all know the palm tree, like em or not. Personally, I’m not a big fan. Skinny trunks invade every worthwhile view. Messy firework heads turn the sky into a mere backdrop for their silhouette. One or two is fine, but palm trees sprout from the pavement like a tenacious weed, failing to cast an ounce of real shade in return. Ever waited for the bus and hid from the sun in a palm tree’s thin stripe of shadow? You’re better off standing behind a telephone pole.
But who cares about practicality? They are LA’s most iconic transplant. We will forget last generation’s movie stars, but no one is allowed to erase the palm tree from their memory. Your children’s grandchildren will not know their shape from touch—these giants suck too much water from our dry land and will not be replaced after they fall—but the emblem will remain in perpetuity.
Since the palm tree population will outlive me, I’ve tried to make peace with their figures cross-hatching the city. I admit, I was expecting a little too much. I wanted them to serve a utilitarian purpose and align with my aesthetic tendencies. But the palm tree never promised me anything. Recently I’ve shifted them into the comical category of my visual understanding. The palm tree is inherently unserious. Satirical even, surreal at best.
Until yesterday, when I saw those wispy fronds refract the golden hour glow. I’d just finished a yoga class and I occupied that sea of wide open wonder that you might call an endorphin high. The palm tree was not a palm tree, but a mass of shimmering ribbons twirling in the low sun. I gasped, eyes transfixed but foot still on the gas, headed up the incline. Like most LA based epiphanies, I was in motion and could not stop mid-hill.
What was this vision?
The headline reads: Lifelong Eyesore Surpasses Expectations! Time to recalibrate. I wrote off the palm tree as a joke and here it is, revealing the transitory nature of my emotions. I’ve spent a lifetime averting my eyes from these gawky trees, but this moment held me enamored. All because a bit of sun slid across the fronds at just the right angle, just the right time.
You know the feeling, when the routine cogs slip apart and a bit of the infinite can be seen for just a second. Your life’s trajectory can be shaped by those fleeting moments of unreal beauty that calls you to follow. Calls you to remember. Calls you to imitate, not in idolatry but the honest desire to embody the divine.
That’s really how LA maintains its allure. The tire-marked asphalt and for-rent store fronts are empty vessels, painted with the vapors of our shifting moods. What we make of this city is what we make of ourselves. If we could peel back the layers, we’d find approximately 3.8 million versions of Los Angeles. There might be some commonalities, but no one resides in an identical city. That's the tension and the exaltation. One day you feel out of place in your own hometown. The next day, the bark on every tree outlines a map to your very core.
Needless to say, lately the landscape has been communicative.
I watched the underbelly of a crane swoop just above my windshield destined for the river.
This weekend I spotted a coyote trotting along the sidewalk two blocks from my parent’s apartment. In all my years, a coyote has never crossed my path in the flatlands of Santa Monica. I toggled my headlights to the brights, because I thought I was looking at a stray dog. But no, a slender coyote was looking over its shoulder as it picked up the pace, running from my gaze. I turned off my headlights and let it escape into the shadows.
A couple nights ago, I saw two skunks running in the middle of my street. A flash of white stripes caught my eyes, then they curved towards me and I could distinguish skunks from the shadowy road. Assigning them emotions was so easy: they moved like a pair of lovers, never more than a foot of night between them. I followed their bushy tails (at a safe distance), but they seemed unconcerned with the rest of the world. Usually skunks go out of their way to avoid humans, but the pair skittered right past a guy who was smoking on the sidewalk. I watched him freeze, then realize the skunks only had eyes for each other.
Unity. I saw it three times on the day of the eclipse. On a license plate, then on a concrete wall of the freeway, the letters were three-dimensional, almost sculpted. Late at night, Unity was plastered to the side of a fancy sprinter. I don’t see that word often.
So?
Timing is everything, lighting is important. Both of these are ephemeral.
Perspective hinges on our fingertips. Show me another palm tree drenched in golden sun and I’ll tell you that Los Angeles is for lovers, like the skunks who remind me that unity isn’t just a word. All we need to offer is open eyes, patient ears, the pathways from exterior to interior, otherwise known as our attention. One thing leads to another.
You are alive in your own city, pulsing with landmarks that I’ll never know, but you’re right here with me.
Connection doesn’t care about how many dimensions there are. It subverts and transcends, electrifying this ongoing march of existence. I’m here for all of it.
That’s all for today.
xx
James