Valentine Love

Valentine Love is the focus of Valentine’s Day, and it is just around the corner. February 14th has become special for lovers.  Yet the risk is that red roses and hallmark cards are stealing the show.  When, in fact a day for love, could be just that… A Valentine Day for love, love and more love.  As John Lennon said, “Love is all you need.”  What’s more it is all we seek, all we want, all we strive for, and that is to love and to be loved.

Love is in the air

Love is really what we have come to appreciate most of all since Covid 19 engulfed our awareness and changed our plans.  But it does give us a pause in the traffic to refocus on love.  Love for self, for kids, for family, for animals, for trees, for land and culture, for the earth.

Valentine’s Day

A Day for Valentines gives us the extra special opportunity to feel and to give love for one’s significant other. That is, the love we feel deep inside every day, not just on one day, Valentine’s Day.  This day gives us pause to acknowledge something we carry inside on all days.  I am reminded of a quote from one of Rumi’s poems,

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.” 

Rumi (13th Century Persian Poet)

A Valentine's Day heart for February 14th

A Valentine Marriage Proposal

Of course many couple’s turn to each other on this day and dare to say, will you marry me?  And that is a romantic gesture like no other, the question which precede’s a life promise.  And for that I am reminded of another more modern English author’s words, those of Neil Gaiman, who said, as part of a speech;

The world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.
It’s not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it’s what they mean.
Somebody’s got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn’t want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them.
It’s not two broken halves becoming one.
It’s the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home
because home is wherever you are both together.
Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else’s love, nobody else’s marriage, is like yours,
and it’s a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance you cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.
And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
Your hands will meet, 
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.
That’s all I know about love.
Neil Gaiman

Happy Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine’s Day folks. May your day and your days be filled with love.
Call me after the proposal, and I promise I can help make your Wedding Day even more extraordinary, but oh so real and natural.  Grow a heart tree for your wedding; a love tree, a tree of love, a life of love.