WATER

West is a home. This landscape looks as if there is no change on the surface, but slowly transforms. Even while the mountains deteriorate, they hold stories. You can be life giving and destructing all at once.  I tell myself: I only change for me. The water changes for nothing. I question permanence, in me, in land. How does land move through me and me through it? There is this intuition I have of knowing what I need to do for myself. Being near water is an echo, a whisper, a reminder. What I have known I’ve known all along.

FIRE

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” -Joan Didion

AIR

Are you aware of your heart rate? Put your hand on your chest. You can control the rhythm of your heart. Inhale Slowly. Hold it for a count:

1 2 3 4 5 . . . Exhale.

I believe in a world I cannot see. I feel it in the wind, flirting like a Gemini. Heavy and lighthearted. Thoughts fly kike birds unsettling the dust. All things begin and end with a simple breath. We seek stillness yet it is movement that creates authentic expression.

EARTH

SPIRIT

What it feels like inside

Contemplate the 5th element — call it void, ether, spirit, prayer. There is a space that exists where silence and darkness meet. In that space new senses awaken and transformation occurs. Go inside.