A Love Letter to Home

On Place and Perspective

Highland Park during ‘Golden Hour’, A Photograph for Parallel Editions’s Prints for Los Angeles Fundraiser

As many of you might know, the new year in Los Angeles has been a challenging start. On January 7, multiple wildfires erupted throughout the city, causing thousands of people to evacuate their homes. On January 8, I received the dreaded notice: a mandatory evacuation order to leave my home. For the first time in a long time, I prayed.

I prayed for the fires to stop, for the collective safety of my friends, my family, and my neighbors fleeing their homes, for the lives and livelihoods of strangers and small businesses, for sense, and for senseless destruction to stop. Above all else, I prayed I would have a home to return to. I tossed and turned sleeplessly, only to obsessively open FireWatch as the ‘evacuation’ areas continued to expand beyond my neighborhood and into the rest of the city.

Fortunately, my neighborhood was spared. The next day, FireWatch announced that the Sunset Fires were fully contained. For many evacuated residents living in high-risk neighborhoods, there was a sigh of relief followed by a tinge of survivor’s guilt. With the immeasurable scale of loss, having a home spared by the fires came simply came down to a stroke of luck—a feeling that extended into deeper empathy for those whose homes did not survive. For many, these last few days have ebbed and flowed between moments of gratitude and grief.

But as Khushbu Shah poignantly wrote, “Nothing is more revealing of character than crisis.” If there is one word to summarize January so far — it’s humility. In the following days and weeks, my entire LA community mobilized to become a care center for the city, extending themselves outwards to create meals, share resources, and distribute essential items for fire victims. Despite all the moments of despair, the collective care for the community is a light that shines forward. There has never been a greater feeling of solidarity here at home.

In the weeks since the fires started, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to Los Angeles. Despite the numerous risks and challenges that lie ahead, as a business owner with a physical space in LA and a creative whose bulk of work is centered around the city, I’ve never felt more called to help rebuild a place that has given me so much. While many are questioning the safety and feasibility of staying, I keep returning to the same conclusion. Victoria De la Fuentes’s Substack post summarizes it best:

“But how can I leave? And where would we go? We have a business; we built a life here. I spent an afternoon doing an exercise on where we would go; we looked at all the options in the US & abroad. We stalked Zillow, read about neighborhoods outside Manhattan (NYC), made diagrams- and landed back where we were. There is nowhere we would rather live than LA. No other place is equally as child-friendly, creative & opportunity-driven as LA.”

Home is not just a container of four walls — it’s the assemblage of moments that paint a picture of a life. It’s the familiar and friendly hello at your neighborhood coffee shop. It’s the light chatter among fellow students at a yoga studio. It’s impromptu dinners with friends. It’s the daily drive down Sunset Blvd. It’s the joyful late nights at a favorite bar or restaurant. It’s the feeling of relief arriving at LAX. In a moment of solace, I revisited this quote by David Lynch, whose death was ominously timed a week after the fires erupted.

“I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available.”

This passage from David Lynch’s book “Catching the Big Fish” was a driving force behind Lust for Los Angeles, a book I spent years researching, writing and photographing about LA. Although the future is fraught with uncertainty with very large unknowns, I find small comfort in knowing that it’s this city’s relentless optimism and inclination towards what is “light” that will help rebuild again. LA is a city that has always been built by dreams, by dreamers. There’s no doubt that the road to recovery is long, but there’s hope that what can be built has potential to be greater than what has been left behind.

If you are able, here are a few fundraisers and organizations I’m donating to: GoFundMe of Fire Victims which gives direct access to cash for those displaced, World Central Kitchen who are feeding first-responders and evacuees, and of course, the LAFD, of which their heroic efforts could not be overstated. Thank you for tuning in.