I'm not what you'd call religious. Spiritual, sure, and I'm a big believer in the power of faith, but church is not for me. Art museums are for me. I imagine that the way I feel when I walk into an art museum is how it must feel for someone devout to enter a church. There is an immediate release of tension between my shoulder blades. Anywhere in the world, art museums smell the same. Anything twisted and jarred inside of me immediately untwists for the time I'm there. I feel emotions more deeply (both serious and humorous). I consider things more deeply. And the movement through an art museum is sacred, from the tap of my shoes to the hushed voices with which I exchange opinions with friends.

Anyway, the Getty is the Sacre-Coeur of art museums.*
Everything about it is a source of mystery. This is a fountain, through which you can peer down a long, long distance into a dripping pool below. As you walk its cut paths, the city opens beneath you in constantly changing vistas.
The grounds are filled with strange and unfamiliar plants, carefully tended, pungent and wild.
And familiar plants in scales and arrangements that make them seem totally new.

And, like church, it is filled with thousands of tiny, considerate details that affirm that the world is a place worth worshiping, that people are basically good, that life is about the production of art, and that faith matters.
If I lived in Los Angeles, I would regularly attend the Getty.

* Except for the notable absence of modern and contemporary art. Dear Getty: please add modern and contemporary art, and make your insides as exciting as your outsides.

He-Mouse rightly points out that the Pacific smells of fish. I like the smell of the ocean. I like the smell of the ocean even on particularly pungent days, when things are ripe with life, death, kelp, and petroleum.

Clouds Rolling In over Santa Monica

Sea Gulls*

Feet with Deggings**

Clouds Over the Ferris Wheel***

* We have "Lake Gulls" in Chicago, which I don't like nearly as much.

** Celia is totally right. they are comfy. If I lived in Los Angeles, I would be a leggings person. Here, we call leggings "capilene" and wear them under our wool pants.

*** Which I didn't go on. He-Mouse hates Ferris Wheels. Boooo.

I absolutely loved Los Angeles, micies. It's like Chicago (takes forever to get places on the freeway, pollution, lots of people, city smells), but with palm trees, ocean, lush hills, and fragrant flowers on the wind. I'll show you some of my favorite bits over the next few posts.

Pool with L.A.'s Only Taxi Cab*

Shrine at Sunrise

Neatly Stacked Pasta, Joan's On Third

* Have I mentioned my obsession with water? I'm from a dry western state where we name even the tiniest streams and ponds. As a result, I have always gotten fluttery, small-child excitement over pools, and even more so, over the ocean. I love the ocean.