“It is a commitment, as each day we each rediscover who we are and how much love our love is capable of giving.”
PERHAPS the heart is not just something in our chest that sustains life. It is also the wellspring of faith, hope and love. All the musings in the human heart — meanings, metaphors, even humor — jumpstart the imagination about its significance as the most popular symbol.
Would a heart-filled life mean the heart is in the right place? Year after year of Valentine’s Day coma, we are plunged into a heartscape on matters of the heart, and references to heartache, heartbreak, heartlessness, heart of darkness, change of heart that makes something in our breasts lurch or recoil.
On Valentine’s Day, we pay tribute to love’s ability to endure beyond years, beyond difficulty, beyond distance — even beyond death.
Love is the most precious gift to us, because it opens the heart, uplifts the mind and inspires the spirit.
It is the sweet companion in our heart’s journey through life’s complexity. However, what defines our intimate relationships? What signs should we look for to discover how love reveals itself? With what insights or eloquence?
A poet once asked: What ways has the heart changed since King Solomon courted new wives with his love songs? Since Vatsayana collected together in his Kama Sutra some ancient Hindu recipe for good loving? Since a cleric at Eleanor of Aquaitaine’s court penned “The Rules of Courtly Love?”
By what level, what language, would one use to describe a romance that breaks all the rules and goes pretty far – exhausting the categories of the forbidden?
A catastrophe in the landscape of the heart was written on a masterpiece (a piercing irony) by the Nobel laureate and Mexican poet Octavio Paz in “The Labyrinth of Solitude” — “To realize itself, love must violate the rules of our world.”
The greatest love is not bound by rules
Why do some people experience enduring love (which lasts a lifetime), while others are only destined to love for a short time? Why are there those who separate either by choice or by fate?
Love is the blossom and fragrance of all human feelings, thoughts, passion and longing which inspires patience of the heart and strength of the mind, and never leaves without transforming us at the very depths of our being.
In 1936, as the world was preparing to blow itself apart, King Edward VIII and Wally Simpson enacted their own drama of self absorbed abdication. It was a basic story that today changed little — only the details, the personalities, the stakes they pay for, and as we now see, the ages and death of the lovers.
Hemingway said, “Right decisions are the right decisions wrongly made (of the Bergman and Rosellini scandalous love affair).”
Today, every time Valentine’s Day comes you wonder if two people and the rules of convention between them can sum up the energy that being in love requires. To be under the spell of love is to be ruled by the possibility of the unknown. Its vistas are inexhaustible, linked by pleasure shared — you can’t put words into these feelings.
In spite of the absence of the vow lovers have, a tale that tip toed on the profound bond that can extract from their hearts the elements of compassion, patience, regrets, surprise, forgiveness, surprise — from a chemistry of an atom called love according to Kahlil Gibson.
To be under the spell of love, I’ve learned through the years, is to be ruled by the possibilities of the unknown.
The Valentine man was the best part of the day. You start looking redundant with life, health and energy. For better or worse, love is bewitching, tenacious and can flourish in its absolute rhapsody. Indivisible, without duration, infinite in its attributes, as it broadens the heart to grow, it is warm with ecstasy that can thrive in primitive longings and sudden fugitive convulsions of lust, even without huge caresses that unmistakable accompany romance.
The Valentine man made my earrings dance. It is not the relationship that has been declared to others, or perhaps even said loudly. It is not symbolized by a diamond or even by a simple bond of gold. It is not defined by time or even the space while we are apart, or when we are together.
Rather, it is a mutual affection, reaffirmed each time we reach out to one another in pure bliss, each time we tell the truth, each time one of us is there to support or comfort each other, each time we share a newly uncovered insight or emotion.
It is a spiritual union continually revealed in each new level of trust, in each new layer of vulnerability…in each new depth of love. It is a commitment, as each day we each rediscover who we are and how much love our love is capable of giving.
It is unconditional giving and true marriage of spirit, whose ceremony of union is found in each and every moment we love one another, whose anniversary is found in each and everyday in which love grows. If you are looking for something permanent, what is? If you need 100 percent pure love, you need not mix that with marriage.
I am a modern woman. Never mind the wedding!
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected]
