Perhaps the heart is not just a sort of Valentine, nor just a beating thing 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, which jumpstarts 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, a Valentine’s Day coma plunges us into matters of the heart, and references to heartache, heartbreak, heartlessness, heart of darkness, change of heart make something in our breasts lurch or recoil.
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 Aquiantaine’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 landscapes of the heart was written on a masterpiece (a piercing irony) by the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “to realize itself, love must violate the rules of our world.”
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: the details, the personalities, the stakes they pay for, and as we now see, the ages and death of the lovers.
Hemingway said, of the Bergman and Rassellini scandalous love affair: “right decisions are right decisions wrongly made.”
Today, each time Valentine’s Day comes, you wonder if two people and the rules of convention between them can sum up the energy which 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, which tiptoes on the profound bond, extracting from their hearts the elements of compassion, patience, regret, surprise and forgiveness—from a chemistry of an atom called love. Kahlil Gibson said that.
I’ve learned through the years, that to be under the spell of love is to be ruled by the possibilities of the unknown.
The Valentine man was the best part of the day that made my earrings dance. 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 broadensthe 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.
The Valentine man was the best part of the day that made my earrings dance. It is not a 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 space, while we are apart on his medical missions or when we are together.
Rather, it is a mutual affection—re-affirmed 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 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 that love grows.
If you are looking for something permanent, what is it? If you need 100% pure love, you need not mix that with marriage.
I am a modern woman. Never mind the wedding!
In photos are some of the Fil-Am community’s solid rock marriages that withstood and survived time, age, taste and decades of Valentine’s.
