A Deep River Year
February 12, 2014

It is two days until Valentine’s Day, and we will be braving the winter weather to go to a party at a lovely old house on the Connecticut shoreline.    I will be wearing the tuxedo we found at a consignment shop several years ago.   It happened to be just my size, but even at that I was reluctant to purchase it.   “When will I ever need to wear a tuxedo?” I asked.   Well, as it turns out, on Valentine’s Day of 2014, and any number of other occasions where it is just fun to get all dressed up and remember how lovely life can be.      I even learned how to tie a bow tie (no clip-ons for me any more) and I ordered a beautiful, big red patterned crimson tie for this occasion.   

We need such graciousness in our lives from time to time.   It seems especially fitting that Valentine’s Day falls in the middle of February, when it feels like this season of cold and snow will never end.   We are imprisoned in gray and dirty white, stone and cold, and, at the same time, by the awareness of how cold and lonely our world can be.    So the legend of the original Saint Valentine emerges from a prison, too.   Nobody is sure who the real Saint Valentine was.   Some say he was an early Christian martyr who died in prison for his faith, but not before he cured the jailer’s blind daughter and left her a loving note signed, “Your Valentine.”     Relics of his body are all over the world.  His bones are claimed by churches in Poland and Italy, France and the Czech Republic, in Dublin, Ireland, and even somewhere in Missouri.    But the truth is that all these centuries later, he belongs to all of us.

We nod to him with gratitude this Friday, send cards and flowers and chocolate, and wear tuxedos and red bow ties to parties.   We write our notes from the prison of this continuing winter because if it all ended right here, right now, the only thing we’d want to leave behind as a token for people to remember  us is our love.

Love

Sometimes love is light
As a leaf carried by a breath of wind
To dance across the snow,
A remnant from the heart
Of tree, of earth, of sun—
This lovely sigh of a thing,
That makes everything more lovely.
Sometimes love is heavy
As stone
Enough to break the heart
Of tree, of earth, of sun,
A borne burden, an ache,
A song that keens at death, or loss,
A lever to move a mountain.
We shall find this love,
We shall.
It is what makes life,
And breaks it,
The thing we must find or die.
We would do anything for it.
We carry it into the darkness,
Into the fire, the flood,
Into death to nothingness,
Or perhaps, to the dancing place.
Mostly, it carries us.

--Timothy Haut, Feb. 11, 2014