Grow Where You’re Planted…or Plant It Where You Grow [Sunset Observer #51]

February 18, 2017 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

…By Whitney Farmer
@farmer_whitney (Twitter/FLICKR) or farmerwhitney (Instagram) and whitney.farmer.146 (Facebook)
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Un Pop Culture

I planted myself on the floor of the gym in front of the bleachers where the women sat. We had it all to ourselves for the next hour.

Wall Street in Los Angeles – where the gym is located in the Anne Douglas Center of the Los Angeles Mission – is different than Wall Street in New York. It is in the heart of Skid Row where Wikipedia states the “poor…homeless…forgotten in society” live. “Live” seems like too strong a verb. “Fall” and then “stay” fit better.

You can get deals done on Wall Street in L.A., so maybe it is more like Wall Street in NYC than I thought. Pharmaceutical stock there, or pharmaceutical contraband here…Maybe it all ends up in the same pockets.

Val picked me up so that we could carpool into the city from Orange County, taking the 4th Street bridge that appears in moody car commercials into downtown. She had just gotten back from the film festival in Berlin where she had an untold number of juicy conversations about her documentary on Wilma Mankiller. Great name…

The women in the residential program who rode with us in the elevator knew all about this film project. It was the latest genius move from this former McLane High School cheerleader from Fresno – now mogul – who has traveled here for 25 years for this labor of love. They chatted with Val, friends catching up before class started.

The first time I had come here alongside Val was when I moved to L.A., in 1999. Val had started this project through her church to help the women in the yearlong residential program move their bodies for health and for joy. As they have danced and stretched and strengthened and laughed, their bodies have sweated out drugs and hopelessness and other poisons. And when they graduated from the year-long program, they have gone to college and started businesses and raised children and married into love, instead of being dead on Wall Street.

Now Val and her family are moving up near Stanford where the last of her brilliant children is a high-performing Freshman. We talked about me stepping in and leading the exercise classes and Bible studies at the Center. In October, I had just gotten my release from my last doctor to start exercising, and I liked the idea of public failure looming over me as an added incentive.

It feels luxurious to be ushered into the heart of the city via the 4th Street bridge, for the guarded gates to open in order for me to do Sun Salutations with women who just might be heroes and might become friends in a gym built by Kirk Douglas’ wife. I feel rich when I am able to raise my arms in Mountain pose, opening my heart up to the sky as I pull my scapulae together and stretch my troubled right anterior deltoid more each time. I tell these women to imitate the palm trees that guard the city. It says in the Bible that they represent praise to God. They are fruitful and valuable throughout their long lives, full of sap.

So we all raised our arms to heaven and planted our feet firmly on the ground as we started to set down deep roots.

That’s what you do when you have a home.
Quote of the Blog, from my mom, when she learned that the storm that hit Southern California was named ‘Lucifer’: “I know that it had to be an ‘L’ name, but what about ‘Lloyd’ or ‘Larry’…?”

Picture of us in class, courtesy of Valerie Red-Horse and processed through Prisma, at the Anne Douglas Center of the Los Angeles Mission.

For the archive of my previous Un Pop Culture blogs, click here.