Real one

Picking up my friend's teenage daughter at six as scheduled, we take Pico to Echo Park to check on the place that I have been housesitting for five, six weeks or so. We note murals that we like on the way, especially the sunsetting palm trees and this one with two yellow tigers painted onto corrugated steel. The tigers have turquoise detailing, which is a color that feels modern again.

In Echo Park, it's my client's apartment that I'm happy to watch and water. Her plants are mostly doing well, like the pothos pair in the kitchen sprouting fresh offshoots of baby heart-shaped leaves, though I can tell the largest rubber fig really misses her. She mentions this guy drooped for awhile after her dog died. It can be freeing to wear your feelings out loud or it can become a burden. Repetitive behaviors morph into patterns and certain patterns turn against us. Before leaving, she put the big plants on cool platforms with metal wheels, making it easy to move them in and out of direct sunlight. I bet she'll get home and roll him in for a steamy shower in reconnection.

Hers is one of those classic Los Angeles apartments, often appreciated more from some distance. She asked me over as she was anticipating a teaching sabbatical in Paris. Should she keep this place? Or let it go, store her stuff and make a jump? Maybe stay abroad?

It's her third home in this building. Obviously she kept it, doing about a month of top to bottom work in there in preparation for her trip, creating both a sendoff and a place to come home to. With past questions answered, this is a home she yearns to live within, ripe for discovering edges, but that's for when and where. Now is for loving knowing it lies in wait. I tend to it. The ripped screens are off the arched French windows. There are stacks of books and a ceiling fan to move the warm air. My children read on floor cushions and the neighborhood church bells sound each hour of our rest.

She has self-generated a lust for what is. I call this loving on the present moment. Loving on and living in the present moment is such a harmonic way to move through the world.

I believe you can harness momentum by doing what you know you need to do. You free up your spaces for the desired new when weights are lifted. Heavy lifting seems to keep you open to a bigger big picture, for you can only ask for what you know exists. Integral to the continual opening is feeling into your next two steps, somehow provided for with the mental to do list checked off. Next steps one and two are there if you trust yourself. You will know, feel, see, or hear: Do this and then do that. Acknowledge ideas you have received with aligned action. Gratitude only stacks the deck.

Consider this and that sweet tastes of direction in surrendered recognition of the vast universal forces at play. What I'm saying is:
enjoy controlling what you can control,
and what I mean by control is:
traversing your unique path with curiosity.

    Push it.

Lately I amp up doing what I know I need to do with a push outside the scope of the project at hand. Yes to conscious language and thus yes to the word choice push. We could use a good push. Do what needs/wants/cares to be done, both in terms of common sense as well as those intuitive nudges, starting as whispers before becoming shouts. From there, you play. Playfully pushing it is an active experimentation versus passive witnessing. Pushing it invites in a multitude of perspectives — ancillary opportunities to work across dimensions of time and space.

        Push it real good.

When we clean the bathroom, for example, we clean when we know it's time to clean, which is often when it's starting to gross us out. We get down with the grossness, allowing ourselves to see it and be in it and do something about it. Then perhaps we rinse before running a hot salt soak. Probably a rad thought pops in. That's where this work has been — courting the muse of clarity through the catharsis of elbow grease. And now it grows in ways that I am growing. Somatic metamorphosis maybe.

Let us go inside of what we've been witnessing in our cleaner and more clear homes and heads. What confuses you? What concerns you?  There's your target. Now what will serve as your sandbox? The kitchen cabinets you unpacked upon move in years ago? Because really, they've never been quite right. Are the cups near the kettle near the tea? How in reorganization are you simultaneously moving backwards and forwards? How are you peeling back a layer of stagnation while making an energetic investment in your imagined lived experience? We imagine so we may experience, bringing the dream from the fourth into the third. We're on quite a dense plane of existence here.

My friend's daughter is sixteen years old and I take a generational pulse on the drive over. How many different ways do you communicate with your friends? A: Lots, through apps. How about with crushes? A: Fewer, through apps. She loses hours trying to interpret boy messages, and overanalyzing those she sends. I tell her it was the same way with landline calls... your dad announcing who's on the phone or hang ups on the answering machine and a friend coming over to support in the call back. You only learn later that of course they meant to call.

I keep talking. Is "popular" even an art school thing, or anything anymore, and isn't it cliché for the rich kid to get a new car for their birthday? It's not and still is, but who even cares, she laughs.

photos by Aria Dries

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