Friday, February 2nd, 2007
And they can call me crazy if I fail,
all the chance that I need,
is one in a million
and they can call me brilliant,
if I succeed,
gravity is nothing to me,
moving at the speed of sound,
I just want to get my feet wet in it,
until I drown.
Ani Difranco, Swan Dive
This image of Frida Khalo is on my refrigerator in a place where I can look at it almost all the time. It is a picture of her during her time in New York, far from the warm colors of her home in Mexico. I first saw it on the wall in my sister’s apartment in San Francisco and was taken by it right away. The next day my sister gave it to me as a gift and I cherish this coffee-stained, computer printed image greatly.
How often do many of us feel this way? Like a bright spot of color on a gray landscape…like a fish out of water…like we belong somewhere else. When I feel out of place I look at this picture. I look at her posture and nobility. I look at her radiance. I look at her cigarette. I look at the fact that she did not change herself to suit the environment, and yet the extent to which she herself changed the environment she entered is as obvious as imagining how bleak this image would be without her presence in it. In other words, instead of letting her environment change her, she changed her environment.
And yet from her eyes she saw only the gray buildings…she herself was not in her own image of the world unless she painted herself. Likely why she painted herself so often. It is a metaphor for how often we are a light and do not even realize it. When we don’t invest in ourselves and our wildest dreams it is because we have not fallen in love with ourselves, and when we have not fallen madly and head-over-heels in love with ourselves, it is usually because we can’t see ourselves. Ironically, if we do finally get a glimpse of ourselves it is often altered or mutated by the effects of not having invested in ourselves, causing a kind of loop.
So how to we break the cycle? Be radical. Because yes, they can call you crazy if you fail, but all the chance that you need is one in a million. Because you are one in a million. There are things about yourself that you don’t even know yet, and one of the only ways to find out is to break out of old ways of seeing ourselves…to jump ship into wild waters and see what is waiting for us inside the bright colors of our imaginations. We learn, even when dreaming, to make it seem achievable, often by making it small or setting limits on it. To dream big, to try a new style, to dare, to paint your entire floor rather than a tiny piece of paper, to turn the direction of your life in a totally different way…it takes courage. And true courage comes from something unexplainable, so that the best words I can put to it are passion and desire. It is the yearning of the heart that turns the wheel of the universe.
Take a chance on yourself. You have nothing to lose by believing in yourself boldly and unreservedly. You are the very best aspect of the universe to believe in. You are loved so amazingly by the universe, and that love can give you the wings for any flight. You just have to be willing to be a bird, and to enter the skies…
