I had such fun today. I got to go to Chelsea on the West Side of Manhattan, to a giant Martha Stewart Living complex and do a photo shoot for the May ’09 issue of Body+Soul magazine. It will be part of a piece on life-changing moments featuring two other writers and me. Our “call times” were staggered, so each of us was met by the editor in charge, wardrobe stylist, hair and makeup peson, art director, prop person and photographer as if we were real models.

Talk about Fantasy Land! I started reading glossy magazines when I was ten. I’d bought a copy of Mademoiselle in Rome because there was nothing else in English to read. The elevator operator at the hotel, a handsome young Frenchman, saw the title and said, “C’est francais, n’est-ce pas?” I was sold. If reading those magazines could get me that kind of attention, I’d read them faithfully and forever. I wished I could be like the girls in the magazines, but I knew that I was plump and not tall and couldn’t get my skin to clear up. Still, those girls held out the possibility that anybody could be beautiful with a little luck and magic (and of course the product they were selling).

Today in the sunny studio overlooking the Hudson River, I got to be one of “those” girls. In fact, every once in awhile the opportunity comes to me in my work as an author to do something like this for a magazine or on TV, and every time it does the timing amazes me. You see, none of this started until I was well into middle age. Way past the date when any sane person would aspire to start flirting with a camera and get her picture places, the cameras showed up.

This tells me something. It tells me that every good desire, held close to the heart and yet wholly revealed to whatever Power fills the God spot in an individual’s world, is invincible. These desires don’t die. They can alter their shape and form and structure, but their essence remains. It seems to me that the Divine is aching to give us our heart’s desires but we have to open to them in a way that goes beyond “I want it, I want it, I want it.” It’s as if we have to look away, forget sometimes what it was we once yearned for so intensely, and in the forgetting, it shows up — at the strangest times, later rather than sooner, but oh golly, when it does show up, it’s the sweetest, sweetest thing.

It was like that this morning with the good people from Body+Soul. I got to wear a beautiful summer blouse from Elie Tahari and jeans from jcrew in a size I would have died to fit into at sixteen. But they zipped and didn’t rip and now I’d like a pair of my very own.

In the Bible, in the book of Joel (chapter 1, vs. 4), is this pasage: “I will give you the years the locust has eaten.” I love that concept, especially when I see it playing out in my life or in the life of a coach client or a friend. Today was one of those days: I got some of those years back. I’m not the young girl who lived for those magazines and longed to look like the leggy lovelies who populated them. But that girl lives inside me and today she got to play.