A sign above a church entrance, urging people to find treasure where you are. God is everywhere!

I left Olive for Main. Industry is quiet on  Sunday night.

Here, my path is tarmac, paved 28 miles straight through Watts, Compton, Willmington, and Long Beach. Warehouses turn residential, cast in yellow incandescent light against cheap buildings adorned with Gregorian windows and doric poticos with peeling paint revealing its true self.

This is the main street, Main St., and here there are no supermarkets, not even fast food really. Here there are apartments as many blocks east as you can see from Main in the dark. The number of churches fascinate me for a while and I am careful taking pictures with my phone. There is a church called “New Pilgrim”. I endevour to take pictures of every church I see, then I get bored, or scared.

Occasionally I pass bars still open, open-air Mexican food stands, auto body repair shops, the Virgin of Guadalupe painted on a building. The streets are empty.

The random people I pass are indigent, pushing shopping carts in the street, one walks on the opposite side of the street, parallel with me for 2 miles, his hoodie pulled up. I judge him. Another rounds a corner, sees me and askes for a light. He asks if I am from the streets and if I have seen his wife. I tell him no and he continues down the street just south of the 105 freeway calling for her like a lost dog.

While on the facade, I am walking from Los Angeles to Brazil, carrying prayers, this project already seems so much more. For months as I planned I saw the fears come up. The stories,that we make up about people and places we have never been, that we hold as true. The stories that keep us from going here, doing work there, the stories that tell us there are a limited amount of possibilities for us in life. 

I find it more than ironic, that during this planning stage, I was almost as concerned about walking through this section of Los Angeles in the dark, as I am about the other places further south. I walk here with this irony, a dramatic tension, crossing the borders of fears, doubts, worries, places I am not supposed to go at all, yet alone on foot. I walk with this irony in my own mind, expressing here in type, of both having the fears, and leaving them behind, relating to people in a new way, releasing my stories, my judgements, and finding that everything here is perfect. I hope I will find the same further south.