In which Redneck Huck Finn gets f*****d by LA, and escapes the City with fellow outcasts. ~ ed.

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My afternoon/eve away from Tadasana with photographer/artist Robert Sturman, elephant Lindsey Block & yogini/model Liz Arch.

I had a rough, sad, long, but sane day yesterday here in LA.

It’s a city that takes your good faith and love and support and willingness to take the high road when you’re disappointed and twists it into anger and drama.

It’s also a city of beauty and history and sprawl and farmers’ markets and ocean, mother ocean, a city of ambition and naked ambition and closeted ambition and cheap buildings and rich strange plant life and fun.

It’s a city that will confuse your ego and smog your goodness.

So after one of the worst days of my professional life I played it cool and took the blame and tried to talk it over and got a talking to and then left, with three friends, one dear and two new, and I talked with longtime mentors and found similar wisdoms, and returned to the hills high above the City of the Jealous Gods—the day before with lioness Seane Corn and elephant colleague Lindsey…

…where we did a mountaintop video interview about relationships and yoga integrity teaching—this time I returned with my host Robert Sturman, one of elephant’s newer more popular and consistently featured artists—and one of his favorite muses, Liz Arch.

And Lindsey did a video and I sat in the sun and felt sad and let the sun and the rock and the high air lift and open my mind.

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Robert Sturman’s photos of Liz Arch at Topanga Canyon, coming soon to elephantjournal.com

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And though the heavy fog below, like my sadness, rose up the canyon and smothered us, we loved the cool wet mist and on our way down talked tired talk (modeling is tough work, photography is gentle patient work at its best) and I said bye to Lindsey and her dog Cassius and her longtime, handsome boyfriend, Dylan, and Liz and Robert and I went to the Thai place Seane loves, and they continued to give me loving, mindful, yet tough advice.

And then I rode my bike home in the dark and felt so sad, and scared, and then I yawned on the couch and went to bed, after meditating, which took the scare away, and I slept the sleep of a good day to die entrepreneur and would-be bodhisattva.

Photos (the wow ones by Sturman, used by permission).