If love is the answer, why do we keep forgetting?

 

On the eve of Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year it would seem to be a fairly straightforward call that this is a weekend for goodwill, celebration and sharing love. It seems that not everyone believes this.

I came home this evening in a pig of a mood.  I went into the centre of London today, chose some snazzy new spectacles, went shopping a bit, ate some good Japanese food and then walked around the West End of London until it started to rain.  At the same time all the shops shut and what felt like a million people poured into the streets.  All of them, including myself and my husband and daughter, were hell-bent on getting on the trains and going home.  I am bad in crowds. I get edgy and irritable and generally want to be air-lifted out of the crowd immediately. A man stomped on my foot. I was heavily bumped into more times than I care to remember and I was not filled with the spirit of Valentine's Day.  Not unless we were about to re-enact the St. Valentine's Day massacre!

I then came home and heard the news about a bomb going off in the German Bakery in Pune.  This is down the road from the Osho Ashram/Resort and is the place everyone has been going to for coffee, chips and good cookies, for years.  So far the reports say that nine people have been killed and 45 people injured.  This feels horrible and much too close to home. My thoughts are with all those people and their families.

I need to move my thoughts and heart away from this.  I need to remember the loving spirit I can bring to my world now.  It is the eve of Valentine's Day and though I know this is a manufactured holiday that artificially asks people to express their love by buying over-priced roses and big gaudy boxes of chocolates, I still like the fact that it forces us to stop and think about the people we love.  Forty years ago Ralph bought me a gift for the first Valentine's Day we shared as a married couple.  he bought me... a red soup ladle!  I cried.  A soup ladle - where's the romance in that?  I was so upset.  He thought it was a really great objet d'art.  I thought it was a soup ladle.  Forty years later, I still have the ladle and we still laugh together over that.  I don't much remember many of the other Valentine's Day gifts, but I do remember the ladle.

I cannot believe after forty years, how much I still love this crazy man I am married to.  Madness! I bicker and argue and disagree with him all the time, but the foundation and core of all of it, is love.  Love that I don't really understand and cannot define or explain that exists despite the madness in the world.

Happy Valentine's Day,  Ralph - here's to the next 40!