Love

Love. What other day would be more fitting on which to discuss love? Valentine's Day - Named after a Roman Catholic saint whose life's work remains almost unknown. But don't tell that to the wives of America! Mr. Man better come home this day with flowers, candy, a beautiful trinket, or at least dinner out on the town! Ah love - it has a price,it seems!

Made important by chocolatiers and greeting card manufacturers, Valentine's Day has become one of our favorite holidays. Why - because of love, love, pure love. Who can argue with a day set aside for lovers to play nice with one another. A day to remember, if one has moved beyond chocolate and flowers, that the most important part of a human life is in the love and friendships we hold dear.

This is a day for elderly lovers, like my husband and me to remember why we married in the first place, and to be happy that our love has survived years and years of trials, tears and happy times. What more can we ask? It is the day for young lovers to go to the door with pounding heart to meet that someone who stands there with one red rose. Ah me! Love!

Henry Thoreau, a confirmed bachelor and things philosophic has few words about love and those I found are hard to interpret. Was he shy? Was he stilted by a New England stiff Christian upbringing? Did he fear that such entanglements would cause him to have less time for his Higher Laws, or did he avoid love because he knew he had tuberculosis.? We’ll never know for sure, but I think he might say yes to all of the above. Why? That is the question and the answer may be in his view love was worth more than just chocolate and flowers. Read on:

"Love is a thirst that is never slaked. Under the coursest rind, the sweetest meat. If you would read a friend aright, you must be able to read through something thicker and opaquer than horn. If you can read a friend, all languages will be easy to you. Enemies publish themselves. The friend never declares his love." Mar. 28 1856.

On Nov. 22, 1858, now 41 years old he says, "Here is an author who contrasts love for "the beauties of the person" and that for "excellences of the mind as if these were the alternatives. I must say that it is for neither of these that I should feel the strongest attraction. I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she "beautiful" or otherwise, of excellent mind or not." I wonder if he is not thinking of his friendship with Lydian Emerson.

Jan. 23, 1854. " Love tends to purify and sublime itself. It mortifies and triumphs over the flesh, and the bond of its union is holiness."

I think Henry would agree with Paul and his words on love in I Corinthians 13:4-13 "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in he truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all thing, endures all things. Love never ends. ... For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

Or, as Rumi said,

"Inside a lover's heart
there is another world,
and yet another." ...and another. Love is and will be. Happy Valentine’s Day to all.