I Heart NY

A year ago, when I was in Paris with Susanne, her son Isaac and my son Ari, we decided to go on photo hunts together. Isaac hunted pandas, Susanne hunted Buddhas and Ari and I hunted for hearts. 

Soon after that, I started a little folder on my Facebook page where I posted all the hearts I found. And of course, you can imagine I found tons and tons of hearts in Paris, the city of love. They were everywhere: graffiti, stores, clothes, bridges, you name it. And then I continued with this adventure and found that London has quite a few hearts too. If you look around, hearts are really pretty easy to find.  And then I came to NY...

I couldn't help but notice the glaring lack of hearts in NY,  besides the classic, I Heart NY slogan. To find them, you really have to search. But really, you have to turn off your searching mind and just turn on your intuitive mind. It just starts with a feeling. But if you're really at a loss, graffiti is always a good place to start looking for hearts, and I eventually did find one. It was small and embedded within a bunch of other graffiti on a median divider on Chambers St that had all sorts of yellow crime tape stuck to it blowing around.  

But that heart came after my walk over the Brooklyn Bridge where when I was at the midway point, I thought to myself,  "I haven't seen a heart in a long time." And then I started thinking about my friend Susanne who I've known since I was fourteen.  And I started thinking about her children and the tragedy of her losing her daughter Shay to Epilepsy.  All of a sudden I felt this overwhelming feeling of Shay. And I became amazed at how Susanne is so much a part of me. And I started to feel that intuitive "heart" feeling.  I knew I was about to come upon one. And three steps later, there was a beautiful, chalk-drawn, pink heart on the pedestrian walkway of the bridge. I looked down, and it took my breath away. I thanked Shay for her sweet visit to me and photographed the heart like ten times to get it right. 

Don't get me wrong, I think New York has lots of heart. It's just not in your face. And sometimes you have to look for it and sometimes you have to just let it happen. New York embodies the intensity of life very well. It's why I and ten million other people, are so attracted to it. What I like about it is that it kicks ass, has a fabulous sense of humor, and is full of people with really big hearts. Hearts that you have to look for, and hearts that you just have to let happen.