Coming back to Reality, SC,  after a month in London was like being Dorothy falling back into her black and white world after the journey through all the colors of Oz. I know “normal” life has to be filled with errands, laundry, dead plants, overdue bills, and just plain drabness sometimes, often. But I wish I could figure out how to see my little, familiar world with the eyes of a stranger. Kind of like falling in love with your predictable husband all over again. Maybe it starts with seeing myself in a new way. Wearing clothes that make me feel exotic and unfamiliar to my own being. Pursuing a project that is all mine, a personal passion, and carrying that around like a secret all day. Wearing perfume that makes me feel like an amoureuse even when no one but me is there to appreciate it. In January, the windows at the Le Bon Marche department store  in Paris were themed around different meetings in 2011: deliciousness, inspiration, greed, love, voluptuousness. The creativity of each one made me want to be, do, make something equally inspiring and witty and beautiful. Now that I’m home, when I walk in my neighborhood, I won’t pass a Middle Eastern grocery with piles of Turkish delight in the window and little cups of pomegranate seeds for sale on sidewalk,  or the news agent with a gazillion papers and magazines or the Waitrose grocery with its inventive packaging or the Tube signs beckoning me on a new adventure. I’ve fallen back into my black-and-white world, and now it’s up to me to film it in Technicolor. To see myself in lights instead of complaining that everything around me is so dull-colored. I promise to try to re-new myself in 2011.

This graffito was chalked on the wall of a parking lot by my office — street art that will be washed away in the next rain. I’ve been having an email dialogue with an old friend about the nature of love.  He’s still looking for that one soul mate, while I believe I’ve had too many. His romanticism makes me feel jaded, while my distance makes him wonder what happened to the teenager he fell in love with. He believes in Forever, but For Awhile has always been my experience. I don’t think one of us is any happier than the other, but he might be more hopeful, and since men have a much easier time dating as they grow older, he probably has more grounds for optimism in that area. But little signs like this one give me a different kind of hope–that in a world where hate, meanness and bigotry seem to be on the rise, someone is out there drawing pink hearts in public.

This week I took a step outside my comfort zone (which is always set at about 80 degrees) by submitting an essay to a writing competition run by a national magazine. Regardless of the fact that I started my own local magazine, I still break out in a sweat to think of sending my work out to a larger venue. After all, isn’t that why I started my own publication — to avoid rejection? I always accept anything I submit to myself!  And then a friend emailed me the link to the competition with the message “Today’s the deadline–do it.”  My first reaction was that there was no way I could write 1500 words off the top of my head in an afternoon. But I feel like I’m saying “no” way too much lately. And I needed a challenge, so why not try? Why not try and not tell anyone in case I couldn’t pull it off? Why not try it, submit it and not tell anyone in case I didn’t win? But in the end it was such a win for me just to prove to myself I could do it that I felt like I was walking on air after I emailed it off to the magazine running the competition. I didn’t go on a safari, I didn’t run for office, I didn’t learn how to parasail. I just hit “Send” and that was huge for me. What is “daring” for you?

It’s the birth anniversary of Frida Kahlo…patron saint of this website, so I had my high school portrait photoshopped in her honor. She wasn’t classically beautiful — after all, how many fashion magazines celebrate the unibrow and faint mustache? — and yet she was riveting because of her talent and her deep personailty. To me, she’s every woman who might decide to be an ugly duckling, who creates despite or because of her suffering, who has the capacity for big love even if it’s not predictable or traditional. Recently I was flagellating myself in retrospect because all the men I’ve been involved with were just plain wrong for me. And yet, and yet …. sometimes there’s a soul  mate you can’t live with in the usual two-car garage, PTA way, but who you will never forget and never regret. Why try to discount it or write it off as “dysfunctional?” Why not accept that he or she birthed a part of you that otherwise would have died or lain dormant? That’s what Frida means to me — the potential realized, the wildness recognized, the life unapologized.