My Valentine to You

By Christina Carson

So what is love? This seeming taunt that will not let us be, yet like an impish child running hither and yon, jumping up here and there so we chase like blind fools. When in reality it is more like a faithful hound, which if we just sit quietly, stays as constant company and licks our hand.

All too often, we mistake love for well-met need, but you can always tell, for needs met never leave a residue of awe. Comfort, satisfaction, yes, but not the sense of a heart expanding to the point where the cosmos can enter it without a hint of crowding.

Be love’s champion rather than need’s fool, for love, true love is the only language that the heart speaks, the same language through all cultures, races, ages and space, the most inclusive force the earth knows, modeling it through all its creatures to help its one forgetful child.

Love starts from acceptance; the recognition of another as they are, yet moves on to the awareness that skin is no boundary and mind holds no truths. Standing there, the ocean of you floods in to the ocean that’s me, and then there is only the sea. For love knows one and only one; and in that strange contradiction, lives the secret and the answer for: What is love?

Perhaps the time is here to cease exploring what love is not, and shop the shorter list of what love is.

It is not love that hurts, nor love that frightens us. Our fear is of losing our separateness, our namesake, our address which is not even listed in the directory of the universe, but remains merely an idea in our head. To hold on to that thought that thinks us into existence is to say no to love’s knocking, not now, not this life... as if there were another.

Want to know love more than your next breath, then you will see that beyond the pant, the howl, the wildness of passion, there lives a moment where all stands revealed, and you melt away into exquisite freedom uncaring if you ever return.

 A loving Valentine's Day to you.

Christina Carson, Author