lost and found in downtown or "magic is all around"... (31 days of faith....day 10)

  
     A few days ago I went to downtown Los Angeles.  The Arts District.  Murals and other purposeful graffiti,  filled up my line of vision like a yellow brick road.... a path leading me to a secret quiet urban Brigadoon.... or any other fantasy land that I found myself traveling through in my dreams and in my youth; including the fortress that existed underneath my entire town that I called home as a boy.  I knew where the entrance was to my secret clubhouse...and I designed the whole layout on art pads that i drew on while watching saturday morning cartoons like THE BANANA SPLITS.

     Do you ever get beaten down by your surroundings?  Do you ever feel the need for change?   Do you get depressed when you realize, you are stuck?  You can't move...Nothing is ever going to change.  And then one day you take a wrong turn.  You go down some road that has been there your whole life, and yet you have never been on it.  This is a new world.  Your self...Your body...the molecules that form your body have never taken up this exact space before.   That's amazing.  New things can happen....Newness is all around you.   And it took nothing, but getting lost.

      I submit this....to you...but also to myself.  Let's get lost....get lost, and do it with joy.  It's all an adventure, and as much as I want to get lost in the backstreets of PARIS....I often will find myself with the problem in front of me that, that is not going to happen today, or anytime soon....so it leaves me at a dead end....no answers.

     Then one day, one thing leads to another....including a location scout for a short film I wrote, which, the fact that it is going into production, was also a matter of fate and seemingly subtle and meaningless choices....so one thing leads to another, and I end up in a nook of Downtown in a city that sometimes literally destroys me with it's ironic dichotomy of magic and callousness ...L.A....Hollywood U.S.A.    When I was walking around the neighborhood the walls came to life, almost in place of the missing population.  Yes there were very few people around.  It was like I stumbled across Greenwich Village in NYC a few years after some sort of Holocaust, and now the few artists who remained were rebuilding.  I started to breathe deeper than I had in days....or even weeks.   I felt as if I had been transported to a new world ...a new city.... a place to start over.   And all of this happened just miles from the place that was tearing me apart.

     Change can simply be about two things.... PERCEPTION...and just a little bit of EFFORT.  Not even alot of effort.   Ya know?  It's simple geometry sometimes.  We want change in our lives, and all we see are problems.  It's too hard to turn 180 degrees and walk the other direction....so you stay where you are...stuck... And then just turning a simple 45 degrees doesn't really feel like much of a change at all...you can still see the same view...nothing has changed...therefore: stuck.   But tell that to a rocketship blasting into space.  The change of 45 degrees can be a million miles once you get to where you are going.... One tiny turn can change your whole life.  So we can't belittle it, and choose to do nothing and remain stuck....we have to stop saying NO to the tiny answers placed in our path....saying "what's the point?"    the point is... you don't know until you try... and it's not magic... it's science and math....which once upon a time certain scientists and mathematicians were probably burned at the stake for being a Heretic, witch, or wizard.   so.....

     Magic is all around us yeah?   We are never stuck.  Because even when "stuck" we can create a new world right where we stand.  Or maybe there is even a new world or new city right down the street.  Just take one little turn that you maybe never took before.

     I might even see you there.  I will be wearing a brand new hat, and sipping on coffee while shifting my look back and forth between a notebook where I'm writing down this very blog, and a grand painting on the wall across the street which I will be imagining it is a doorway to the next land of wild magic and exploration.... I will call this land Dolce Nouveau....But for now you will see I am just so happy in the city I am in....