I like the ostensible idea behind Valentine’s Day: a day dedicated to the celebration of love. I’m less enthusiastic about its reduction to an occasion to buy cut flowers and chocolates for one’s romantic partner.
I’d like to see the holiday expand beyond that commercialized version to become a celebration of all things loved: love of the planet, the natural world, and biodiversity; love of freedom; love of inclusion; love of gentleness and kindness; love of cherished friends, siblings, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, grandparents; love of a favorite tree or flower or dog; love of a favorite poem or book or idea or theory or song or piece of music or work of art; love of mystery and spiritual unknowables; love of place, of one’s neighborhood. Everyone will have his or her own list, but you get the idea: Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to consider, identify, and appreciate those ideas, things, and people that we hold most dear, making it a celebration of love and gratitude for all the connections, all the goodness, all the beauty, all the life variously and wondrously manifested, all the many objects of our attention and affection.
Whatever one’s list, it would be lovely if the holiday acknowledged and honored a love of love, specifically of the soft heart of love that’s inside everyone. When you get cracked open and brought to your knees—by serious illness or extreme loss, for example—access to that soft heart of love can become much easier. That experience of being cracked open seems to cleave the armor that protects our soft hearts from betrayal and hurt, from unkindness and cruelty, making a certain kind of tenderness possible and likely.
According to (fragmented) historical reports, the original St. Valentine, a martyr of the early Roman Catholic church, was put to death because he wouldn’t renounce his faith. So love of the freedom to cherish and express one’s beliefs is at the root of this holiday. How that morphed into the unidimensional simplicity of annually marking a narrow notion of romantic love—defined largely by movies, mass magazines, pop songs, and TV shows—I don’t know. As currently configured, the holiday seems to exclude so much that the heart is capable of.