Saint Valentine's Day

 

   

* Love without reason or context or separate object. Love as the essential principle of our being. *

A day devoted to love . . . for indeed, isn’t it so that all of us all around the world want to love and be loved? Simply that: to love and be loved. Maybe the most fundamental of all desires, one that permeates human society and is evident to the bursting point in so many ways, especially today.

Valentine’s will be a day when the established beliefs surrounding love will be on full display, and restaurants, florists, resort hotels, chocolate shops and greeting card companies will see rich profits. Of course, there are also the wine distributors and video streaming services that provide the many bottles of Chardonnay and the unending entertainment diversions for the people alone at home tonight thinking that something is wrong.

Many unfortunate men who heedlessly overlook the very strict rules surrounding this day will be sleeping on the couch for a while.

If one is so inclined, a day like today is a brilliant opportunity to consider what actually is going on. What is “love” after all, and is the Hollywood and pop music version of love we have been taught to cherish in fact authentic? How has this come about, and why have things been so prominently expressed in the specific form of romantic love, as if it overshadows all other?

For me as someone who has not been partnered for, what, maybe 200 years now and without much motivation to change that, I feel that I have an outsider’s vantage on the whole parade. I want for the moment to put aside all of the conventional thinking and deeply consider these questions.

I want to see love not only in its objective form or as a mercantile exchange—“I will love you if you love me,” but love as a fundamental attribute that is not generated or induced. Love without a reason, love as the essential ground of being of who we truly are, love as another word for the inherent attraction of subatomic particles and the unified field of the universe. Love not as a merely human domain, but as an ultimate principle which is not created, but ever exists.

Love for a partner, for a friend or family member, for God or for the suffering world has a new context where ALL is included and embraced and nothing excluded. Again, love without reason or goal or object. Love as the shining forth of the awareness that fully encompasses all phenomena in the form of “good” and “bad,” “wished for” and “not-wished for,” “me” and “not-me.”

So yes, hooray, a celebration of love on this day—and on all days. Love without limit, love amidst all conditions, love beyond birth and death. May it be so.