Valentine’s
Day was originally known as Saint Valentine's Day and/or the Feast of
Saint Valentine, and it is celebrated each year in many countries around
the world on February 14. It began as a liturgical celebration of one
or more early Christian saints named Valentinus. Over time, stories
evolved or were invented for each saint with accompanying tales of
martyrdom, imprisonment and execution.
It
was during the Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love
flourished, that Valentine’s Day became associated with romantic love,
in part due to Chaucer's poetry about “Valentines.” In 18th-century
England it became known as a day when lovers expressed their love for
each other by offering flowers or sweets, and/or by sending greeting
cards, which gave us the symbols still used today: hearts, doves, and
figures of the winged Cupid.
The
history of Valentine’s Day is somewhat shrouded in mystery, but it is
inspiring that what started out as a rather serious, even morbid day
that focused on pain and death evolved into a day to celebrate romance,
happiness, relationships, and all those other great things that inspire
us and bring us back to the basics of what life is really all about:
love.
Humans
are complicated creatures. We always seem to be in some stage of
balancing our external and internal worlds, quelling or satisfying our
hopes and desires, or searching for something. For one person the goal
may be peace and happiness, for another it might be money and power, and
for someone else it might be to selflessly serve humanity. And at our
very core we all know that we are unique, endowed with our various
concoctions of the good, the bad and the ugly. Bottom line, being
one-of-a-kind also means we are all alone. Add in life’s constant curve
balls, and it is enlightening that most of Mother Earth’s eight billion
inhabitants deal with life and its struggles rather well. What makes
this happen?
Love
in some form or another. Consider this: If we did not love each other
to some degree, there would be considerably less peace in the world and
our problems would be insurmountable.
Backtrack
to the 1967 and the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love.” John Lennon
admitted it was a propaganda song, and stated, “I'm a revolutionary
artist. My art is dedicated to change.” Still, the song seemed a little
too optimistic to me when I first heard it decades ago. The Vietnam War
was in full swing, antiwar protestors were considered traitors, cultures
collided, and people got hurt.
But
now, with the world even more complicated, the message behind that song
seems to epitomize the only real truth. Yes, there is too much tension,
hate, war, poverty and hunger, but as our love grows, so does our
humanity. This world of contrasts does have a way of making some simple
things quite mysterious, like how we often learn about one aspect of
life only after by being bombarded with its opposite. Accordingly,
learning more about love is the result of not knowing enough about it,
or perhaps not practicing it as much as we could.
Granted,
all people see love somewhat differently. Many years ago, a
beer-guzzling, honky-tonk piano player ran it down for me as I drove us
to a dance hall gig. “I see it this-a-way. There’s fifty-one percent
good crap and forty-nine percent bad crap, and that’s just enough to tip
the scales in the good crap direction.” I didn’t challenge his figures
or his mystical analogy, but I did enjoy his crude way of expressing
what he considered love to be, as that was our topic of conversation.
Everything
in Nature grows and expands. So does consciousness, and therefore,
human love. Valentine’s Day evolved from being seen in terms of hardship
and pain to expressing love and happiness. A similar process of
evolution is going on within all of us and throughout our world, whether
we know it or not. One does not have to understand or believe in
gravity for it to work. The same goes for the Infinite Love from which
we came, and for that flicker of love that is at the core of every
human, whether we recognize it or not. Collectively and individually, we
are realizing more about our interconnectedness, and that awareness
lends itself to becoming more concerned about our fellow humans. And
what is that but love.
In
addition to showing our love to those close to us, perhaps this
Valentine’s Day we can boldly contribute our own feelings of love to the
growing awareness of the Universal Love that is unfolding. How? By
loving who we are, where we are, and everything that brought us to this
moment – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then we can liberate ourselves
from what we feel as our limitations and become even greater
expressions of the love we want to see in the world. Every little
contribution matters, be it a chocolate candy to a mate or an anonymous
gift to a homeless stranger. It all adds up.
All
You Need Is Love. It sounds so simple, yet it is so profoundly true. If
we loved each other enough, we would conquer most of humanity’s
problems. Rising waters raise all ships, and though that concept has yet
to clearly translate into sane world policies to the degree it should,
the fact remains that all ships are indeed raised by rising waters. The
ocean of love is growing, slowly but surely. Make this Valentine’s Day
the most special of all, the day when you once again expand your
concepts of love. It’s a win-win scenario, as well as enlightening and
fun! And you can do the same thing again next Valentine’s Day. Or better
yet, every day.
By Gary L. Wimmer ~ Psychic and Author
