so, today is the day when much of the world is celebrating having a heart.
in many of the places i frequent, there are those who will gush of love and romance, but i’m not so sure the marketing and culture have it right, this obssessive focus on couplehood and paired displayed of bonded affections.
what history there is of valentine’s day is hardly romantic itself. the various stories of how it may have come to be all revolve around men who were martyred. the general nature of the acts associated with the holiday, giving of flowers especially, seems grotesque, for all most find it tender.
think about it… what is being said when a man has the genitalia of a plant clipped from its body and sent to a woman as indication of his devotion? Freud would, i’m sure, have a field day.
i’ll bet you’re saying or thinking that i’m being rather negative. but am i? truly?
i am ‘alone’ today, but i am smiling because i’m never really alone. perhaps ‘having a heart’ isn’t as important as giving from the heart… regardless what status or affiliation one has to others.
perhaps the notion of being happy for being with another is less wise than being happy simply to know others.
perhaps the real joy in any given day rests not in how well one measures up to the social standard, the cultural recipe ‘for happiness’ as in how well one tends to those things that create contentment and joy.
perhaps it isn’t as much about public displays or how many glittery, shiny ‘things’ or frilly, decorative ‘things’ or costly, pretty ‘things’ one may give another as it is about how well or consistently one gives of oneself to others.
for all we romanticize, fantasize, and dream of love, is it not true that love, that true love, needs none of these things to be?
is there more meaning in a bouquet than a smile? in a ring or necklace than in a kiss? in a box of chocolates given once a year than in active presence and care given year ’round?
i admit, i generally disdain these manufactured reasons to demonstrate care. too often, i find people assuage themselves of a year’s worth of self-absorption and neglect of others by massive displays on these occasions… as if somehow doing pennance for the previous 364 days of lacking. as if such a thing ever truly works.
that sounds very condemning, doesn’t it? do i not know those who do both; who are tender all the year long, and indulge in these days, these occasions to underscore the regularly given care with a pointed expression of tenderness? of course, goose. but as i’m sure you know, those are exceptions, hardly rules.
i sit here thinking on it, and it seems most i encounter spend their days silently screaming for those regular expressions of care, unable to see or understand how its lacking within insures its lacking without… and a ‘holiday’ like today is a time in which they can wallow shamelessly in romance without seeming too hungry for it. a day when all the pensiveness and yearning may be ‘freely expressed’…. as if no other day will allow it, as if somehow, to do so, be so on any other day is somehow wrong.
does that not seem sad to you? it makes me cry. idealism, of course. the notion that, if every one of us spent one moment, every day, being that ‘above and beyond’ kind of caring we most wish to know ourselves, it is very likely we would never know the sense of its lacking.
and of course, i laugh at myself. once more, getting all snarled up in the thoughts. distractionary thinking is hardly more helpful, is it? yet here i sit, doing it again… the part of me that is just ‘being’ is, at present, rolling on the floor, gasping for air for laughing.
interesting timing, as always… i take a moment’s break to check on something and a quote appears:
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” – James Baldwin
stars forbid. none of that here. heh. i wish there were, though. sometimes, i think all this idealism would lend to such an end, but for the terminal, almost jaded sense of dismay for my own cynicism and its reflection in so many others.
from the corner of my mind, a sarcastic whisper, ‘does this mean you didn’t get flowers today?’ being gurgles and immediately begins another breathless bout of laughter. for my part, i chuckle and kick the thought in the jim-ah, replying coolly, ‘i did not expect to get flowers and the ones i receive arrive in words and a ribbon of feeling that lasts and is sweeter to the senses than a rose could ever be.’
i did, however, send flowers today. being chokes helplessly on laughter and whispers, ‘oh god.. please… stop… you’re killing me!’ before exploding in yet another fit of laughter… my own words at the beginning of this post on the oddness of sending plant genitalia to the object of one’s affections waving its hands and making those goofy, ghost noises, ‘oooohhh…. boo-gah-boo-gah!’
object. affection. hmm. there’s that subject-object duality again. little buddha girl giggles softly from the other side of my head… no, i realize it is not truly that duality in play. rather, i sent them because it made me smile to think of how he will smile to receive them.
but in this moment, i realize i cannot post this yet. he reads here and i’d blow the surprise utterly. hah. so instead, i save this as a draft and will hide it until tomorrow.
i giggle for it… all the silly chasing of myself over this is just… suchness. a hug to me, to him, and to you and then…. letting it go, watching it waft away on the wind. in the end, it doesn’t matter, does it?
i smile. maybe, sometimes, having a heart is just letting yourself do what you need to do to feel it, and to share it with another.
on second thought, no, i won’t hide it.
happy valentine’s day, master sergeant. (soft smile)