Exhilaration is my word for 2025. Choosing an idea to define the coming year is part of an annual seminar I often attend. Just thinking about an exhilarating year makes me smile and generates hope and delight and positive energy. However, 2025 has begun with a lot that I find hard to fathom and just the opposite of exhilarating.
The destruction, displacement, and distortion unfolding in Los Angeles defies words. But my mind is full of thoughts. Here are a few.
I’ve moved from “OMG” to negative awe to numbness. Watching the news from LA, a familiar and long-time home for me, brings unease that won’t go away when I’m not watching.
Yes, I’m sad, but I’m contemplating the loss of large portions of a city I lived in and appreciated for almost forty years. I know multiple affected people. Some evacuated, and one has no home to return to.
I can’t imagine the loss of a home and everything in it, much less my neighborhood and the whole town around me. And yet, I live now where that’s exactly what’s at risk from hurricanes and tornadoes. It’s not just true in these two places. We’re coming face to face with what climate extremes have wrought and what the citizens of the world can’t or won’t get under control. I wish I knew that we’ll respond with the speed or to the extent required to fight what we’ll struggle to prevent. Humans tend to believe that waiting until the last moment is OK and that somehow situations gigantic and devastating won’t result in annihilation. We especially want to avoid prioritizing the disruption of mostly comfortable lives in the present.
How would I handle this if I still lived in LA? I don’t know. My last home was in the middle of the crowded but mostly immune San Fernando Valley, where such fire danger could be mostly avoided. My niece is in LA now, where she’s visiting for work and staying in North Hollywood, also in the Valley, and safe. Thank goodness.
I remember other fires in the hills around us, on occasion burning all in their path down to the ocean in Malibu. On my way home from work, I’d see intimidating and dazzling visions of flames creating an orange ring atop the Valley’s defining mountains. Smoke was oppressive. Everyone was on edge.
The worst time for me in LA wasn’t caused by a fire. The 1994 Northridge earthquake threw me out of bed at 5-ish in the morning. When I realized what was happening, I went outside with my roommates. We stood on the top of our hill and witnessed the lights going out in the Valley below, and transformers shooting embers into the sky. In the following days, everything was disrupted. My office was closed. Stores were low on supplies. Gas was challenging to find. I drove down streets where only a few of the houses had collapsed. What made some falter while others were untouched? One parking structure at a mall was turned on its side, the concrete walls resembling a slinky as it started to move. What force could make seemingly unbreakable buildings do that?
If I were in LA now, the apocalyptic views I could observe would be worse than any I remember. Whole towns are gone. Places I knew and passed through or visited often are just gone. My favorite drives to the ocean and along Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) are not only impassable, but no buildings exist for miles except in ashes. What I would see is burned-out homes and businesses, schools and churches, like the damage caused by recent floods in North Carolina, blizzards and flooding in the Midwest, or the horrific fires in Lahaina, Maui.
I remember exciting polo matches at Will Rogers State Park. I love horses, especially when they run in a group across the playing field. It’s gone. Restaurants I loved are gone. One of my favorites is Gladstones where my work team often gathered for lively lunches on the ocean. At the end of Sunset Blvd where it meets PCH, I hear it’s still there, saved by first responders to the initial fire. Places like the exceptional Getty Museum in the Sepulveda Pass were in danger for a time, as was the original Getty Mansion location on PCH in Malibu. Both are OK, their unmatched collections intact. I often stopped at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, also on Sunset just before it meets PCH. Pausing in the serenity of that oasis in the middle of Pacific Palisades was guaranteed to calm tense emotions. I read that it was saved from fire on all sides by a family who protected it for multiple days. One more location I cherish in LA is Inn of the Seventh Ray. Set in the woods by a stream mid-way through Topanga Canyon, I recall meeting friends at the Sunday brunch available on the tranquil outdoor patio. I believe that area has escaped the fires – so far.
Recent LA mudslides destabilized the ground on which another of my favorite places used to sit – the Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, which posed on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Only housing about 100 seats, its glass walls, and gorgeous views made it the most exhilarating room I’ve ever seen. Thankfully, the chapel is being dismantled and moved to a safer location.
I know that the shock I feel pales in comparison to what those affected are going through. Once disbelief wears off, what comes next will overwhelm them for months. How do you execute a rebuild of whole towns and thousands of homes and businesses and community services and roads and …..? How does that happen? Where do the people go while it does? Where do they work? Part of the answer is to believe rebuilding is possible one step at a time by a community that pulls together to re-establish their lives.
My loss from the LA fires is missing what used to be in my backyard but isn’t in my present. I wish that those I know and those I don’t know could avoid what they will endure. I try to turn away this thought, but can’t: ‘What else is in our future that we can barely imagine but must endure?’
Yes, 2025 has begun with an awful demonstration by a menacing world. I see no choice but to remain optimistic and fight back, to search for exhilaration wherever I can. LA burned with an unexpected ferocity. Now we must meet disaster with inspiration and unrivaled willpower. Can we do it?
Comments