IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING

I squeezed the juice out of the day. The total amount it had to offer. My thirst for a good day manifest itself into raw need at the end of a week marked by disapproval.

So he picked me up and took me to a plot of nature, knowing what would ease me. And when we arrived I found that there were others– LA natives– executives, work-a-days, blue collars, white collars, pink collars, who had come. Like wildebeests they were drawn to a water pool in the death heat of the Savannah. It was purity they were searching for, I was searching for it too. All that is clean and cool had been lost somewhere to this week of business, traffic, pavement, corporate, smog, time, noise. The stark alternative of what this nature plot has to offer in the midst of a land carved up and spit out by its inhabitants, seemed to be calling, like the Sunni bells that resound the Islamic call to prayer. All who could hear came in a trance. As I surveyed the eager caravans of families and friends unpacking themselves in the parking lot, gearing up for a day of dreamy rest among rose gardens and bamboo forests, I was reminded of these familiar words of refuge, nature herself was calling:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!