Weekend Meditation: Each Day is Valentine’s Day

It’s Valentine’s Day, which I’ll admit had me distracted for a minute. I had my heart-shaped potato picture all lined up, and my quotes about love and food and courtship all ready to go. But in the end, I couldn’t make it happen because I actually don’t believe it’s true.

There isn’t just one day of the year to celebrate love, and there are so many ways to love and people to love and different kinds of love, and the heart is so much more wilder and spirited and tangled than any heart-shaped box of chocolates. So I took it all down and am advocating instead that everyday be Valentine’s Day.

I want to encourage heart-shaped boxes of chocolate in September and June and November, and special candlelight dinners for you and your best friend and gifts of sexy black lingerie on Arbor Day. And more celebrations of the love you feel for all sorts of people and places and activities.

So I’m not trying to take Valentine’s Day away. I’m just taking its basic premise–that there is love and it should be celebrated–and suggesting that there are many, many moments in one’s life to recognize and honor and whoop it up over. That whatever fills your heart and animates your life is quite naturally something you’d want to share. That, as Hafiz says, each person met is a lover.

With That Moon Language

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’
Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though,
think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

(Images: Dana Velden)