Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Monday, February 7, 2011
V-Day
A few weeks ago I wrote about all the violence in the air. Wars, assassination,derangement, weaponry, bilious talk-radio rants polluting our next inhalation.
Yet coexistent with all the drek is its polar opposite, love. If the dark side is shouted from headlines it is love in all it's permutations that quietly provides the background music to get us through the day. From sexual passion to mundane civility we are creatures insistent upon expressions of human contact. Is there any moment more life-affirming than being received whether it's making eye-contact with another driver letting him into your lane or an ecstatic joining with a partner?
The very idea of setting aside a day to honor love is a measure of love, of higher consciousness. Valentine's day is coming. I don't want to hear how it's an invention of Hallmark cards or florists or candy makers. For Peggy and me it is the most cherished and celebrated holiday.
We mark dead presidents, war memorials and myths we call religious which are really seasonal rituals. Valentine's Day may not be a union holiday but it is truly more a holiday of union than any other. Why write about it now, a week before the designated day? Because it needs an extended life, a few weeks, a month, any and all days.
The word love itself is not in everyone's vocabulary. Boys have trouble saying it particularly if it isn't heard under their roof. For others the word is thrown around in excess and has become exhausted and limp. We need a way of saying our love that doesn't feel mushy or excruciating.
In fact we need as many gradations for love as Eskimos have for snow. And while we're at it an entire language for civil discourse. The fact that we do not have it must certainly be a function of its relative absence in our social intercourse.
Expressions of love in poetry or fiction are far more difficult than writing out one's shadowy side. Noir is the fall back position sure to get you in the gut. I regard gratuitous language and violence the way I do movie-cancer or vomit scenes; cheap shots aimed to elicit easy sentiment or a short-cut to authenticity.
Love poetry is not to be confused with the doggerel on greeting cards anymore than literature is to romance novels. Peggy and I exchange poems with references to private moments in language understood only by us. What is summoned is a reaching into ourselves and shaping new forms from that inexhaustible source within. Expressing love in words is indistinguishable from any creative act, earned and on-going.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Anniversary
It’s unbecoming to proclaim my good fortune but I’ll do it anyway. And what better place than a blog? Monday is our 24th anniversary. Considering all the gin joints in this galaxy I’m a very lucky man to have found Peggy. She’s showing me how to be willing to be lucky. When the moon is new I see a sickle; she sees it full.
It‘s actually 26.5 years since we’ve been together and 30 years since we met and mingled. I never did learn dance steps; my feet have no memory. Even the mating dance didn’t come naturally but marriage is a dance I can do; the tango and waltz of it, leading and following, the dips and twirls, leaps, stumbles and recoveries. Feeling the music of our moods; the enthusiasms and the quietude.
To be met fully is rare. To meet every day thereafter, rarer still. It defines love itself. To know that I can simply be and be received and at the same time have the opportunity to grow that same capacity for reception within myself. This is a coming together that also nurtures our solitudes and differences. We muse each other.
The bard said to admit no impediments to true minds. I say admit our faults and flaws and let them be no impediment. I’m a world-class chipper of cups and such. I slouch on the couch and constantly lose bookmarks. Mere misdemeanors. I worry too much, plan contingencies. Peggy refuses to rehearse bad-case scenarios. She lives in the moment and spares herself the what ifs. We’ve come to accommodate each other’s mishegoss.
Most mornings she bounces out of bed with a poem marinating in her head. She is an alchemist stirring yesterday’s conversation with a passing image a pinch of an old movie or song, an odd phrase drizzled with a sliver of a dream. She stirs it all in her crucible, filters the glob through her sui generis voice and distills into a remarkable poem. Her number one pencil is like flint on the page causing conflagrations. Not always comprehensible to my unseeing eyes at first, second or tenth reading but suddenly the opacity lifts and I’m inside the poem. This is a gift beyond measure. The nectar of her flowering.
Even then there’s so much more to each of us not to be entered and revealed. An inner world we know enough to remain unknown. This is an unspoken intimacy we honor.
How we met is a French movie of quakes and rubble, an avalanche from a glance, big hellos, half-bottle of wine and dulcimer, Brandywine café, an open window with a curtain swaying, a three-year walk in that lonesome valley, stump of tree, Miramar mist, ebb-tide, ranunculus, whitewater, close-ups and many a long-shot. A magnificent complication. Rupture to rapture.
It‘s actually 26.5 years since we’ve been together and 30 years since we met and mingled. I never did learn dance steps; my feet have no memory. Even the mating dance didn’t come naturally but marriage is a dance I can do; the tango and waltz of it, leading and following, the dips and twirls, leaps, stumbles and recoveries. Feeling the music of our moods; the enthusiasms and the quietude.
To be met fully is rare. To meet every day thereafter, rarer still. It defines love itself. To know that I can simply be and be received and at the same time have the opportunity to grow that same capacity for reception within myself. This is a coming together that also nurtures our solitudes and differences. We muse each other.
The bard said to admit no impediments to true minds. I say admit our faults and flaws and let them be no impediment. I’m a world-class chipper of cups and such. I slouch on the couch and constantly lose bookmarks. Mere misdemeanors. I worry too much, plan contingencies. Peggy refuses to rehearse bad-case scenarios. She lives in the moment and spares herself the what ifs. We’ve come to accommodate each other’s mishegoss.
Most mornings she bounces out of bed with a poem marinating in her head. She is an alchemist stirring yesterday’s conversation with a passing image a pinch of an old movie or song, an odd phrase drizzled with a sliver of a dream. She stirs it all in her crucible, filters the glob through her sui generis voice and distills into a remarkable poem. Her number one pencil is like flint on the page causing conflagrations. Not always comprehensible to my unseeing eyes at first, second or tenth reading but suddenly the opacity lifts and I’m inside the poem. This is a gift beyond measure. The nectar of her flowering.
Even then there’s so much more to each of us not to be entered and revealed. An inner world we know enough to remain unknown. This is an unspoken intimacy we honor.
How we met is a French movie of quakes and rubble, an avalanche from a glance, big hellos, half-bottle of wine and dulcimer, Brandywine café, an open window with a curtain swaying, a three-year walk in that lonesome valley, stump of tree, Miramar mist, ebb-tide, ranunculus, whitewater, close-ups and many a long-shot. A magnificent complication. Rupture to rapture.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Eros Day
To the jaundiced eye (not mine) pizza and beer are to the Super Bowl as flowers and chocolate are to Valentine’s Day. These people (certainly not I) see the two holidays as inventions of commerce. But they confuse cause with effect.
As holidays go I rank Valentine’s Day the most important. Above dead presidents, pseudo-religious observances which are really tied to seasonal changes and all those other occasions which are nothing more than three-day weekends.
Why not set aside a day for Eros? Too bad we need a nudge to remind us but the wake-up call can’t hurt. If Hallmark cards are a beneficiary, so be it. It is a paradox that two of my favorite words, poetry and love, have so few correlatives to express their many varieties and nuances. Was there ever a more over-used, exhausted, yet essential, word than love?
Consider love as desire, as intimacy and life force. Or agape (unconditional, sacrificial). Or filial love, or I love pumpkin ice cream or I love it when Kobe hits that jumper, or my country, love it or get outta here.
Now I want to take issue with Tolstoy who famously said, in the first lines of Anna Karenina that, “All happy families are alike, each family is unhappy in its own way.” I would argue that happiness has as many varieties each with its own story. And furthermore that it is much more challenging to write about love and happiness than about depression, despondency, despair or demented behavior. This is a paucity of our language and perhaps a consequence of Puritan inhibitions.
Love is the answer. It’s in the air. It’s here to stay.
Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark, too soon.
We’re late, darling, we’re late
The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon.
Eros was born of Aphrodite. He was called Cupid and shot his arrows randomly, spreading the good news, mating first with Psyche and then with Chaos with whom he created birds. Not a bad run for the chubby archer.
For Peggy and me Valentine’s Day is an exchange of poems, of reminisces where we’ve been, how we met and continue to meet each day. It is the opportunity to let flow that torrent of affection, to enter into a safe unknown; not to trespass but hold the mystery of each other.
Here we are on the couch, nose in books, feet at each other’s face. I can feel when her eyes lift from the page to read me, our silence on every line. So much passes between us, a thirst quenched from some enormous gourd we have scooped out together.
As holidays go I rank Valentine’s Day the most important. Above dead presidents, pseudo-religious observances which are really tied to seasonal changes and all those other occasions which are nothing more than three-day weekends.
Why not set aside a day for Eros? Too bad we need a nudge to remind us but the wake-up call can’t hurt. If Hallmark cards are a beneficiary, so be it. It is a paradox that two of my favorite words, poetry and love, have so few correlatives to express their many varieties and nuances. Was there ever a more over-used, exhausted, yet essential, word than love?
Consider love as desire, as intimacy and life force. Or agape (unconditional, sacrificial). Or filial love, or I love pumpkin ice cream or I love it when Kobe hits that jumper, or my country, love it or get outta here.
Now I want to take issue with Tolstoy who famously said, in the first lines of Anna Karenina that, “All happy families are alike, each family is unhappy in its own way.” I would argue that happiness has as many varieties each with its own story. And furthermore that it is much more challenging to write about love and happiness than about depression, despondency, despair or demented behavior. This is a paucity of our language and perhaps a consequence of Puritan inhibitions.
Love is the answer. It’s in the air. It’s here to stay.
Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark, too soon.
We’re late, darling, we’re late
The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon.
Eros was born of Aphrodite. He was called Cupid and shot his arrows randomly, spreading the good news, mating first with Psyche and then with Chaos with whom he created birds. Not a bad run for the chubby archer.
For Peggy and me Valentine’s Day is an exchange of poems, of reminisces where we’ve been, how we met and continue to meet each day. It is the opportunity to let flow that torrent of affection, to enter into a safe unknown; not to trespass but hold the mystery of each other.
Here we are on the couch, nose in books, feet at each other’s face. I can feel when her eyes lift from the page to read me, our silence on every line. So much passes between us, a thirst quenched from some enormous gourd we have scooped out together.
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