Happy February to all of you, my lovely friends and readers. I’m going to start by leveling with everyone here. I hate this month. February is the most unpleasant month of the year. It is wet and gray, windy and bitter cold. February is an ordeal. It is a trial of the soul crafted for the pleasure of a twisted and spiteful god.
At least, that’s according to Iden. You all may feel differently. All I’m saying is that it is going to take more than a cup of hot tea to warm me up. But fear not, my fellow stellar travelers. I am determined, despite the Sisyphean cosmic Nascar race that brings me back to this month lap after solar lap, to stay positive. I will counter my hatred with the only weapons powerful enough to do so. I speak, of course, of love and poetry.
You see, our overreaching capitalist forbearers have given February a silver lining in the form of Valentine’s Day, perhaps the most important day of the year.
OK, hear me out.
I know that most of us have come to see Feb. 14 as just another obligatory stop at Target and that the true importance of Valentine’s Day has gone overlooked. Humor me for another 600(ish) words and we’ll see if I can’t change that.
If you are like me, you have said “I love you” many times and, perhaps, if you are lucky, to many people. That tiny little sentence, “I love you,” contains within it the totality of our human experience, the full weight of incarnation, and yet we often drop these words from our mouths with the same lack of thought with which we drop our keys onto the counter after a day at work. I have heard “I love yous” given with all the enthusiasm of a fourth-grader reciting multiplication tables. This pains my poet’s heart.
Love is the center point from which we chart all other human emotion. We owe it to each other, and to ourselves, to recapture and appreciate anew the great gift it is to be able to give and receive love.
What an effort it must take for our little minds to compress such a massive concept and experience into eight letters. Eight letters isn’t even enough for me to ask if you want fries with that. Expressing love in this way turns it to a dense thing, a singularity when it should be a thing of light and warmth, of vibrant, kinetic beauty.
Valentine’s Day, for all of its consumer silliness, provides us an opportunity to say a proper poet’s “I love you” to those special people in our lives if, that is, we are bold enough to take it. This year, let us agree to not let that opportunity pass us by. Let us promise one another that we will stop whatever it is that occupies and distracts us long enough to decompress our “I love yous.” Let us stand together, breathless, as all the majesty of existence swirls over and around us. Let us reconnect with our divinity. Let us write love poems.
