It’s the day before Valentine’s Day. I feel called to write this for all the Valentine’s Days that I felt disappointed or sad or just like a loser because I wasn’t having the experience I saw on TV or in movies. I didn’t have flowers and chocolates or a candle lit romantic dinner.
I had real life. Which meant working all day and coming home tired or having a boyfriend that is too broke to do anything or being single and just pretending to not care about any of it. This year I’m married and my husband is attending school in Portland all day tomorrow so I won’t see him at all. And…. I’m fine with it.
I realized somewhere along the way that love isn’t what happens to us on one day of the year or on a picture perfect date. It’s not exclusive to partnership either and doesn’t always look pretty or smell like roses. Love can be messy and confusing. Love is being broke and single and tired. Love is being married and working to put your partner through school. Love is taking care of yourself. It’s walking your dog. It’s recycling. It’s working through childhood issues. It’s letting go of judgement in a fight. It’s deciding to forgive yourself and move on.
Love is the ultimate power we share with all of life. The urge to create, to heal, to comfort, to nurture, to hold and protect, to inspire and to hope. It is the most human and also the most universal of energies. It is the reason we keep getting up in the morning no matter if it’s February 14th or if there is a heart shaped box of chocolates waiting for us from a secret admirer.
This year I have the urge to start reclaiming all the traditional American holidays and making them work for me instead of me getting worked up about not attaining some level of holiday perfection. Not that I’m particularly mad at sending cards or heart shaped candies. I do like Valentine’s Day in theory- but it’s time to run it through a nurture culture filter where we keep what we like and then design something better with the rest.
At North Fork 53 we held Hatsugama (first tea of the New Year) on January 1st because it felt like such a healing and honoring ceremony for our lives here on a tea farm. So repurposing Valentine’s Day for LOVE in my way will look different than yours. I encourage you to think about what fits your life, needs and style. We are all different and our hearts need different ways to express themselves. It’s less about how it’s done and more about intention shift. Most importantly it’s about not feeling constrained by rituals of a holiday that hasn’t evolved with our shifting culture and world.
What could Valentine’s Day reclaimed look like for nurture culture 2020?
For me I will be alone. My husband is in Massage School in Portland won’t be home until late that evening or the next morning. So I have time to think about how I want to honor LOVE in my own way. Honestly I do better loving him than I do myself so it’s more of a challenge to think of love not as romance but as deep nurturance. This is the most profound form of love. At our core we want to be cared for, acknowledged, seen and supported for the imperfect humans we all are. To LOVE another is to do this for them and to be LOVED is to be able to receive in return. It’s also the nature of LOVE to not get it right and to flounder, forgive, and try again. The challenge is to keep on LOVING through all of it.
Valentine’s Day in it’s commercialized form has taken this massive elemental mystical life experience and turned it into a narrow and exclusive club. It’s like taking the entire ocean and presenting it as one very expensive bottle of designer salt water that is only worthwhile if someone else buys it as a gift for you.
LOVE is the ocean. It’s the blood in our veins. It’s our birthright. It’s never not with us and we are never incapable of being loved or of loving. It of course starts with our own self. For as RuPaul so famously says “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
So the parts I’m keeping.
Sending cards to express LOVE. We don’t create letters or works of art that move through the physical mail much these days. Making handmade Valentine’s is now a rare act of self expression and caring in a world of emails and texts. Also who doesn’t like getting a Valentine in the mail? Send to everyone who you can think of who could use some LOVE. Use valentines not as a popularity contest in school but as a way for kids to learn to express LOVE in art and words with the world around them.
Chocolate. Yes. Cacao is powerful euphoric heart opening plant medicine. I’m not talking about Hershey’s. We have been cheated into thinking sugar and chemicals = chocolate. Not so. Dark chocolate in its pure form benefits the mind, body and spirit. Take cacao for the medicine it is and it’s good brain healing for this dark and cold time of the season. Herbal elixirs of rose, cacao, chili and vanilla can remind us how elevating real heart tonic can be.
Flowers. It’s February so it’s not bloom season for where I live in Northern Oregon. There may be a stray branch of flowering quince or an early daffodil or camellia blossom but for the most part spring is still a month off. I choose ditching imported roses for a colorful feast of red winter beets, glistening purple cabbage and red ruffled kale or making a bouquet of early spring branches with their new budding beauty to gift to yourself or to a friend/love.
Romance. If you happened to be partnered this can be fun but more often than not the pressure of getting it right just turns it into a performance rather than a good time. Romance mostly equals putting care and thought into something rather than money. It’s romantic to make a good meal and to sit and have a deep conversation. It’s romantic to give yourself time for a long bath or to read a great book. It’s romantic to listen, to believe in someone’s vision, to give your energy to a passionate cause. Let’s broaden the definition of romance to include deep attention, presence and creativity.
Nurture Culture will mean different things to each individual person. Perhaps what nurtures me and my creative soul is not what nurtures yours. Let this Valentine’s Day be about listening to your own heart to find out what makes it shine brighter. The main thing to remember is that we can create the world we want to live in. We are not losing if we do not match up with the imagery and expectations that are handed to us from the media and marketing agencies. We are also not losing if we do adore everything Valentines it makes us happy as is. We get to choose what we want to celebrate and how. If we choose LOVE we choose well. If we choose LOVE for self first we create R-evolution. If we LOVE ourselves and by doing so overflow LOVE out into the world then everyone wins.