In late October, I went to Los Angeles to see Joni Mitchell play at the Hollywood Bowl. The collaborative show, branded as a "Joni Jam," recreated sessions the singer has held at her home since recovering from an aneurysm in 2015. Brandi Carlile, the night's MC, said that when Joni started the concerts, the musicians who joined her "used to just sing [Joni's] songs to her, which is bloody terrifying. And then she just started singing, more and more and more until she sounded like this."

For nearly three hours, Joni played a set list of deep cuts ("Be Cool," "Sunny Sunday") and classics ("Big Yellow Taxi," "The Circle Game"). Her voice was deep and expressive; her contralto uncovered new layers of emotion on songs like "A Case of You."

Joni sat on a Baroque armchair with gold carvings, a stained-glass lampshade casting a pale yellow light. The musicians - including Marcus Mumford, Annie Lennox and Jon Baptise - sat in plush chairs around her. The set made physical the intimate invitation Joni's work extends. But while her songs of love and loss were told like private stories, their universality was obvious to the sold-out crowd of 20,000 singing them. In the particular and the private, she found the universal.

"I'm travelling in some vehicle / I'm sitting in some cafe," she sang on "Hejira." It's the title track of her 1976 album - my all-time favourite - which makes her frequent travels a more existential concern. Listening to her sing it at the Hollywood Bowl likewise made me consider my transience, my constant sense of feeling unsettled, my life as filmmaker not yet established, someone still searching for my own voice.

She played "Amelia," in which she finds in Amelia Earhart's life a kindred route: "Like me / she had had a dream to fly." This restlessness - what Joni called the "urge for going" in an early song - pervades her life and work. It drove her from folk to rock to jazz to classical music; it's kept her painting since she was a child.

These ambitions, she admits at end of "Amelia," have kept her "in clouds at icy altitudes." It is a cold, lone journey, the unceasing search of making art. Arriving anywhere just marks the beginning of more looking. "How am I ever gonna know / my home when I see it again?" she asks in "Black Crow." Is she talking about music? Her country? A family?

Wind - the wind guiding Amelia Earhart through those lonesome skies - sweeps through Joni Mitchell's music. It is a restless wind, but also the wind of home, wherever that is. It's the wind that's "in from Africa," like in "Carey," which tells her she must leave Greece. In "Let the Wind Carry Me," it sweeps her from Saskatoon to Los Angeles. "It's a rough road to travel," she sings. "Mama let go now, it's always called for me."

A few years ago, I watched a 1985 interview Joni gave to CTV News. "Do you still feel like a Canadian?" the interviewer asks. "Well," she says, "I'll tell you a story." She was on the way to the Vancouver airport after time at her house in rural British Columbia. Stuck in traffic and hungry, she decided to pull into a Chinese restaurant for a meal, where she got a fortune cookie that read, "This would be a good day to take a long journey."

"So," she said, "I got on the expressway and I started driving to Saskatoon." At the Alaska border, her tire blew out and she pulled to the side of the road. "I got out of the car and my hair stood out, just like a flag, unfurled," she said. "And I hadn't felt the wind blow like that in so long. Just that one thing, the wind howling like that, the way it does on the prairies, I can't explain to you. But somehow you know, as an animal, that you're near the place where you were born."

When I landed in L.A., I got a message that my accommodations had fallen through. I took an hour-long cab to a hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The receptionist sounded apologetic as he told me the rate; handing me back my card, he said margaritas were half-off during happy hour, at least.

Sitting in the lobby on the night before I was due to check out, drinking a premixed margarita and listening to a cover band play Hall & Oates, I thought of an essay Joan Didion wrote about California's Santa Ana winds: these dry, strong gusts "affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability."

My friends weren't due in until the day of the show; for now I was alone in a city so decentralized it seemed more accurate to call it a collection of independent counties. At all times I was a 30-minute drive (or six-hour walk) from where I wanted to be, so I rented a car. I went around to the museums, where I saw some of the most extraordinary art of the twentieth century. It was a good consolation.

The next evening, I drove two hours north to stay at the apartment of a university friend who is studying music in graduate school. The sky was dark when I arrived. For dinner, we ate the best tacos I've ever had on styrofoam plates. The hills of California surrounded us, sloping in and out of the horizon.

My friend felt the isolation here, too, he said. But it meant more time to make music, more space to hone his craft. He spoke equally of seeking solitude and searching for connection. In her essay, Didion concludes that "the winds shows us how close to the edge we are."

I flew back to Toronto the night after the concert. I was ready, finally, to be home, to walk the streets I've known all my life. But before I unpacked, I had to write down the image of my friend and I on that hill. I'd been thinking about it throughout the plane ride. It would make a great scene in a movie. Who knows if I'd ever use it for anything. I was home.