The heart is a muscle about the size of your fist. Its purpose is to move blood through the body, taking in the de-oxygenated blood through the right atrium and moving oxygenated blood through left ventricle back into the body. It, like all systems in the body, is perfect in its symmetry. As in all aspects of life, there is the in and out, opening and closing, acceptance and rejecting, attachment and release. Rather than situating these oppositional movements in a rigid polemic of good and bad, there is great value in honoring the fluidity of the process.
Around Valentines Day—that strange holiday which honored the martyred Saint Valentine of Rome and during the Middle Ages of Chaucer became associated with romantic love—we tend to focus on what we do and do not have. If we have a lover, we tend to evaluate the romantic-ness of that love (that is its presence and lack). If we do not have a lover then our attention is often on the absence of love. And yet, there is such an abundance of love in the world, in our lives. We have the love of the rain, of our friends and family, of the pink and blue streaked sky at dusk.
And too, within relationships, there is often a tension between closeness and distance, between acceptance of love and fear of its limitations. Here to, we have a unique opportunity to open to the full spectrum of de-oxygenated and oxygenated moments of love, knowing that the blood of it moves throughout our system, that we are fed through its circulation.
Whatever the circumstances of your life, your ways of loving, may this day, this week, this month, open you to the fluidity of love, to its presence in all its forms, to your own breathtaking cycle of vulnerability and connection, contraction and release.
