Reflections on Love

February 4, 2024

“I love February,” a friend declared with vigor in her voice.  “By mid-month the light will have returned, it won’t be dark at 4:30 in the afternoon and my spirits will be lifted!”   

Is it any wonder that Valentine’s Day falls at the same celestial moment as the light returns?  The flow of light wakens the sleeping earth and with it our hearts. Valentine’s Day.  A day for lovers. We buy chocolates, send cards, contemplate romance.  Kiss.  How do I love thee, let me count the ways:

I love the soft light of morning reflected in my sweetheart’s eyes when he stumbles into the kitchen, a raft of wild dreams still floating in his body; I love his hands carefully washing glass soup bowls, unscrewing lids stubbornly clinging to bottle tops, lifting children, touching my cheek. 

But there is so much more than romantic love that is awakened by the flow of light and I offer you this week’s essay on love as an antidote to last week’s dark journey through the bleak cavern of America’s violent history of Christian domination over land and all non-Christians which coincided all too neatly with my entitled wrath over having to walk through USM’s barely lit maze of gray concrete columns and Exit ramps to pay the parking fine.  

“Everything you write is so depressing,” a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time told me when we met recently for dinner, “Now that we are together, I’m relieved to see that you seem fine.  How do you manage to keep from getting really depressed?”

How indeed? This poem, fittingly titled, “The Answer,” by Robinson Jeffers, a brilliant poet who lived beside the pounding surf of the Pacific and was the same age as my grandfather, offers a better response to my friend’s question than I was able to articulate when we were together.

The Answer 

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

Contemplating the severed hand, mine, ours, is indeed an ugly thing. Contemplating it brings me great grief, sometimes anger, sometime fear.  But Jeffers offers not only the warning of the severed hand.  He offers a way to live fully and wholly: love.  Love for the stars, for earth, “the greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.  Love that, not man apart from that.”

And here is Jeffers again:

This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.  It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, and I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affection outward towards this one God, rather than inward on oneself, or on humanity, or on human imagination and abstractions.”

Though Jeffers was using words like God and divine and salvation, he is using them to point to an entirely different experience of these words than put forth by the history of Christianity.  His thinking is in line with ancient Chinese Tao teachings as well as with Native American beliefs about mankind being kin to mountains and trees and all living things.  And being kin to mountains and trees and frogs and loons means that I am both part of and surrounded by their life force. 

The squirrel outside my window now, the one so intent on climbing the iron stand of the bird feeder, the one who will soon drop to the snow-laden ground and scurry up the giant white pine beside the house: that fellow is my kin and I gotta love that fellow’s capacity to run up and down the fungal spotted tree trunks with such fervid ferocity. I feel as alive today (except I need more naps) as I did as a child running the tide line of Jones Beach on a spring day, the gulls calling overhead, the waves racing to shore, throwing themselves onto the sand where they are briefly beautiful.

The answer to my friend is that embracing our dark history opens my mind and heart to love of all kinds. Jeffers doesn’t say that we need to cut off our severed hand, instead he urges us to reckon with that hand and with the forces that created the severed hand and then to be merciful.

To be capable of the kind of domination over prairie and bison and buffalo and Black men and women and Native Americans and, yes, women, requires a huge act of psychic dissociation.  That dissociation dulls the emotions, numbs empathy, drains care and destroys love.  I don’t believe Christopher Columbus could cut off the hands of his slaves unless he was severely dissociated from his capacity to love and empathize.  I don’t believe all those men in covered wagons could have murdered Native Americans without having been shaped by a culture which wired the brain to be psychically cut off from their hearts: men posing as giants with tiny cold hearts. 

By the simple act of being born and raised in this culture, I too know how to dissociate from harm, mine and the harm sewn into the history of this land.  By facing this harm as I have been doing in these dark pages and dissolving the boundary of self between me and the trees and the sky, volcanic changes have happened inside this old body/mind.  

Love has erupted with greater force than ever before: the sun’s first splash of radiance on the tops of the birch trees, the constellation of freckles parading across my grandson’s face, the cat’s soft fur, the cardinal’s splatter of red bleeding from the green branch of the hemlock, the soft bundles of snow swaddling the arms of evergreens: all of it entangled inside me, as is the severed hand.  All of it part of this thing called life.

And all of it made more precious by the fact that I am at the end of this journey, that there is so little time left to savor that light returning in February. Soon this body will go the way of all bodies and I will be on my way as cosmic traveler, dust mote of the universe. 

My only wish between now and that moment is that I commit no more harm with my severed hand and do all I can to love and nurture that which has been and is still being harmed by an old culture of domination and separation, a culture which, I sense, is slowly shifting towards heart, towards the interconnection of all beings: towards love.  Whether we can do it fast enough to avoid the Sixth Extinction is the question, but I will be well on my way as a fragment of the universe before that answer is revealed.