“Love, that moves the sun and the other stars - L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.”

-- Dante, Paradiso

Above is "Person with Questions" in gouache, water, and chalk pastel on paper, created by me around 1982 during the last years of a marriage I had entered against my better judgement. In 1976 I had married a man I didn't love and had remained in what I then knew as love with a man who was as incapable of love as I was. Still, that man and I were kindred spirits, trauma-bonded by our experiences in connection with the war in Vietnam.

When I looked through my drawings and paintings for something to post for Valentine's Day today, I noticed the heart-like images to the left of the woman in this painting and wondered why I had not remembered them until I saw the image again.

In 2008, when my kindred spirit was in the last months of his life in a VA hospital in California, I used this same image a few days before Valentine's Day and then posted this on Valentine's Day.

Here is my first Valentine's Day post in the first year of my blog. At that time in 2007, early in my blogging days, I had been out of touch with R since early 2003, unable to act as a witness to the alcoholism and drug addiction that continued to destroy him and doing my best to go on with my own life. 2003 was the year he sent me lovely pale purple carnations on the day after Valentine's Day but didn't respond when I tried to thank him and didn't respond when I let him know of my father's death on St. Patrick's Day a little over a month later, and then sent a flower arrangement including red roses on July 3 of that year, the day after what could have been our 35th wedding anniversary. On that day, I was horrified to find myself feeling no love at all for him, only an anger that I had never dared to feel. I couldn't bear to have the flowers in my home and decided to take them to the chapel at the local hospital and to leave them there. As angry as I felt that day, I couldn't bring myself to throw those flowers in a dumpster.

Completely letting go of those flowers proved impossible. The next day I went back to the chapel to see if they were still there. For several days, I returned to the chapel and sat looking at them in the silence. Then the day came when I returned, and they were gone, and I felt both sadness and relief. The anger was gone. I assumed that they had wilted and that someone from the housekeeping department had disposed of them.

I'm not sure why I returned to the chapel an additional time a week or more later but as I entered the silence again, I saw dried dark red rose petals arranged in a chaotic way on the disturbed white cloth covering the altar, and I knew they were the same roses R had sent to me, being used by someone else to make a startling statement. As I approached the altar, I saw an 8-1/2 x 11 inch piece of paper with a child's handwriting on it. It was an anguished prayer to God. The girl was asking God to help her alcoholic mother who was in the hospital for life-threatening complications of alcoholism. I could feel the anger the young girl felt in connection with her mother. Somehow, by letting go of those flowers in the most loving way I could imagine while feeling the long-denied anger that turned out to be part of my healing and regaining my ability to love, I was able to pass on to that young girl what she needed to express herself in the best way she could imagine under circumstances that were pushing her to the edge of her own ability to cope.

Have I told this story before? If so, I must have needed to tell it again this Valentine's Day, and thank you for listening again.

Looking at the hearts on the left side of the person with questions today, I remembered writing a poem about an experience I had in a meditation where I suddenly was aware of tiny hearts everywhere. With a little searching of my bookshelves, I found the poem and was surprised to see that I had written it sometime between December 28, 2003, and Good Friday of 2004:

POEM ABOUT SOMEONE AND SOMETHING NEW

Someone breathing

Someone not alone

Someone walking lonely paths

Someone leaving lonely shelters

Someone finding a lonely ocean

Someone feeling Something New

Thousands of tiny hearts

Within the left side of Someone

Someone's right side perfectly empty

Someone's emptiness graceful as sky

Thousands of tiny hearts

Filling half the emptiness

Something loving the emptiness

Emptiness loving Something

Yes and No becoming simple again

Something New becoming emptiness

Emptiness becoming Something New

Something New and emptiness finding Someone

Someone finding the seasons of a lonely path

Someone finding shelter from a lonely storm

Someone finding a lonely ocean

With Someone sleeping, there was still Something New

Still the emptiness, still a path,

Still a shelter, still an ocean.

And Someone waking up

Feeling sacred hearts everywhere

On paths in and out of time

In shelters from a lonely storm

By the lonely and beloved ocean

Hearts bearing sacred cushions

Of loneliness, emptiness,

And Something New.

As I recall, I wasn't thinking about "Person with Questions" when I wrote that poem, but it describes her well in that moment before she woke up to feel sacred hearts everywhere.

In the past few days, I noticed that the day lily bulbs on my porch are up and that my flowering quince is budding out. Watch for the Red-winged Blackbirds in the cattails. Maybe you can identify some of the other bird voices, including a Steller's Jay:

I'll leave you with a song which I first heard as part of the soundtrack of "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," which tells a story about alcoholism and drug addiction from the perspective of the daughter of a Dexadrine-addicted alcoholic mother whose first love died in a time of war. The mother reminded me of my own mother who also suffered from the effects of using prescription Dexadrine and alcohol. This song from 2002 seems to have planted the seed for the experience I had in meditation and reminds me of what I want to remember as part of Valentine's Day 2015:

And one more thing I came across late in the day today at whiskey river that made me think of one of the gifts R gave to me:

Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.

-- Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost