Perhaps the heart is not just a sort of Valentine, or only the beating thing in a chest that sustains life. It is also the well, spring of all faith, hope and love—all the musings on the human heart’s meanings and metaphors, even humor, that jump starts the imagination about its significance as the most popular symbol.
Is a heart filled-life mean it is in the right place? Year after year of Valentine’s Day plunges us on players and references to heartache, heartbreak, heartlessness, heart of darkness, change of heart…makes something in our breasts lurch or recoil.
A poet once asked, in what ways has the heart changed since King Solomon courted new wives with his love songs and Vatsayana collected together in his Kama Sutra some ancient Hindu recipe for good loving and a cleric at Eleanor of Aquiantaine’s court penned The Rules of Courtly Love?
But by what level, what language would one use to describe a romance that breaks all the rules and had gone pretty far… exhausting the categories of the forbidden? Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in his masterpiece “The Labyrinth of Solitude” wrote: “To realize itself, love must violate the rules of our world” (from “The Labyrinth of
In 1936 as the world was preparing to blow itself apart, King Edward VIII enacted his own drama when he abdicated from the throne to marry non-royal Wally Simpson. It was a basic story then and today has barely changed. At present it is only the details, the personalities, the stakes they pay for—and as we now see— the ages and death of the lovers, differ, but love remains a common factor in deciding one’s fate. As Hemingway said, “Right decisions are the right decisions wrongly made.“
In spite of the absence of the vow, lovers can extract a profound bond from their hearts—the elements of compassion, patience, regrets, surprise, forgiveness, surprise—from a chemistry of an atom called love.
To be under the spell of love, I’ve learned through the years, is to be ruled by the possibilities of the unknown.
The beloved was the best part of the day that made my heart dance. 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—warm with ecstasy that can thrive in primitive longings and sudden fugitive convulsions of lust, even without huge caresses that unmistakable accompany romance.
It is not the relationship that has been declared to others, or perhaps even said loudly between ourselves, 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 on his medical missions or when we are together. Rather, it is 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 rediscovered as each day we each find out who we are and how much 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 every day 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!
***
E-mail Mylah at [email protected]
