home sweet home

it's just after ten in the morning according to my computer but it still feels like two in the afternoon. have been up since seven, a sure sign that my system is screwed. i am many things, but a morning person is not one of them.

am completely a stranger in my own home. it has only been a month but the objects in my home seem foreign and dulled somehow. i am tempted to get a garbage bag and completely sack the lot of it. it's the colours. my apartment is an art deco place with wood floors and dark wood cabinets, doors and trim. after the airy, luminous colours that were my visual palette for so long i want to let the light in somehow but the overcast sky and the resultant darkness which surrounds me now seems wrong.

i suppose the fact that i left the day after the last day of school didn't help. all of my loot from my students is still sitting in bags and boxes everywhere, still waiting for a home.

felt like a bit of a tourist coming back into toronto yesterday. only a month but the aesthetic of both france and italy were so different that my eyes are still adjusting. crazy. imagine what a year away would do...

now that i am back i have already had niggling feelings of a need to roll up my sleeves and turn my attention back to work. feel the inner pragmatist reaching for the phone to sort out my finances and work out a plan to get myself back in the black before christmas. feel that this next month should be focused on paying for my indulgences with projects that will require my all of my attention. incredible, this guilt. incredible how a place can be so attached to a state of mind. had no idea how much tension was holed up in these walls. it's infected with a years worth of work and worry. have to open up the windows and buy a couple of plants. need to be as kind to my space as i have been to myself of late.

so clear to me now. so much easier to get perspective from a distance. when you are given the opportunity to witness and participate in another way of living life, it makes the life you were living before you stepped out of it for awhile seem so narrowly focused. fine to be inspired about changing your life when reading a novel on a beach without a watch on your arm but the real challenge is to bring those lessons into your alter ego's domain. am hoping that a clear out of all that i do not emotionally connect to in my home anymore will help to sustain this fresh perspective on the sense of self i have cultivated in warmer climes and among scintillating sea/city scapes.

didn't write for the last few days of the trip because i was just too engrossed in the living of it. just wanted to be there. it's funny. looking at my pictures (all 600+ of them!) some of the most treasured moments of my trip are not captured in them. am pleased by this. it means i remembered to be in the moment when it counted. did some participating to balance out the observing. historically i have always been more of an observer than a participant so anytime i see the balance shift a little more toward the centre, i am encouraged...there's hope for me yet!

actually lost weight while i was away if you can believe it! i guess a month without processed food, snacking and walking everywhere works. having no agenda or stress helped too i suppose...

am so grateful. was so consistently blessed with gorgeousness, opportunity, great food and company that i didn't feel worthy of it at a certain point. felt gluttonous and greedy. was ever aware of my good fortune. hope to accept it as a gift rather than fear it as a before to some darker after...old habits die hard...

thanks for listening. hope that if you've been in a place where you feel bound that you were able to escape for awhile with me. am excited to see my city, and my life for that matter, with fresh eyes. hope to continue to regale you with more discoveries of both the strange and the familiar.