June 2007 | From the Editor
The Butterfly Effect
When you first move to LA, learning how to connect to the greater community can be quite a challenge. To the untrained eye, our fair city appears as a fortress of freeways, each dingy strip mall neighborhood sprawling uniformly after the next like — as I once heard it described — “a thin layer of margarine across the desert.” Excluding the handful of shopping malls, tourist traps and hiking trails, isolation is practically built into our cityscape. (And unfortunately for many new arrivals, it takes a while to discover the hiking trails).
The first year I lived here, LA loneliness hit me hard. Growing up on the lower east side of Manhattan, my concept of “city” included people — everywhere — walking shoulder-to-shoulder through streets so full of life it was all you could do not to trip over community on every corner. In LA “community” was replaced by “commuting,” with all of the congestion and none of the payoff. It’s much tougher to meet someone’s eye and smile when you’re cutting them off in traffic on the 405.
Now, years later, I’ve managed to right enough of the LA puzzle pieces in my mind to know how to avoid the worst of it — 405 traffic and otherwise. And in my wanderings, I’ve discovered side streets so dense with culture, veins of community so rich, it’s tempting to sink down roots and stay forever.
This month, I had the pleasure to meet with two livewires who are catalyzing LA community — raw food restaurateurs Janabai and Matt Amsden, of Santa Monica’s Euphoria Loves Rawvolution. When I started out at Whole Life Times, Rawvolution was one of my first story subjects. Back then, the duo ran a raw food delivery service. Today, their business has grown into a thriving neighborhood gathering space, both at the café and at Beauty and Wisdom, their adjoining organic bodycare and healing center next door.
In our conversation, Janabai credited that first article as a pivotal moment in Euphoria’s growth, the ripple effects of which she still feels today. “You can’t know how far the magazines go,” she told me. “They pass from person to person. People are still finding us to this day because of that story years ago.”
One of the greatest gifts of working for this magazine has been the chance to meet — and grow — with the larger community. From street fairs to Green Drinks, the Hollywood Bowl to the neighborhood yoga studio, LA is alive with the collaboration of millions working, playing, inventing and creating together. In a city so large and confounding, it’s too easy to lose sight of the ripples — the so-called “butterfly effect” caused by each of our individual actions. But they’re there, thrumming just beneath the surface, giving each neighborhood the distinct flavor and character you can only feel by getting out of your car and exploring it firsthand.
Our goal at Whole Life Times is to highlight the people and projects that make LA such a warm, live, exhilarating place to live and work. And our hope is that each issue connects you in a more meaningful way to this place and to each other. So please enjoy this month’s issue — and when you’re finished, pass it on to a friend. You never know where it might end up.
—Eliza Thomas, Editor in Chief
![[Send]](http://wholelifetimes.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
