Million Miles
It’s a cool grey morning. Hints of blue are emerging to push the clouds aside but the heat of the afternoon is only a vague promise. The water burbles in our garden fountain; elsewhere silence walks abroad.
We’ve been enjoying the process of reacquaintance, this continent of oddities and I. During recent weeks, time and roads taken have been on my mind. It’s disconcerting to acknowledge that a city of sorrowful angels has now been our most enduring home during our wanderings on these exiled shores. Five years have passed since we moved up the Pacific Coast Highway from OC to LA, swopping one abbreviation for another.
Of course, we’ve been associated with Los Angeles, in an embrace which has grown steadily closer, since 2006 when my father first taught here. I strolled from our Buddhist center to the ocean a few days ago, accompanied by a gently insistent sense of familiarity seeping out of the cracks in the sidewalk. We know these streets, inch by inch, every which way you can. We have seen so much and so many come, stay and go that surely by now we are old hands at this particular game.
It’s an unexpected journey, the process of attunement to a foreign culture. Make no mistake, open linguistic borders or not, foreign it most certainly is. Like a blindfolded man reaching into the darkness, misidentifications are made with amusing regularity. Nonetheless, as the years pass, one begins to breathe more deeply; connections coalesce and the tapestry of one’s place within the environment weaves itself into being.
In my experience this process lives and thrives happily, despite moments when the fabric of connection is torn hopelessly asunder. All of a sudden one is caught off guard in the midst of a banal situation and brought face to face with the truth that one will never be anything other than the new kid on the block. Understanding lies forever just beyond reach and one must stare straight into the impossibility of ever seeing this culture from the inside out.
Fascinating really. One is outside looking in while feeling attuned and at home. It’s all part of the language and landscape of exile, a shape shifting and mercurial phenomenon.
