It's Valentine's Day...a celebration of love all over the 'civilized', 'known' world. I say that because among the tribals and such, this would be...well...just another day....and they would love each other or should I say one another (depending on whether they are polygamists or polyandrists) regardless. Is there a start or stop to love? Perhaps they would laugh at the thought that one needs to decorate one's love with tinsel and showcase it in a restaurant replete with roses on this one day of the year.
Those of us who live in jungles need one another to survive. There is no time for sophisticated expensive romance, but more an expression of love in child rearing, household management, and other mundane practical concerns that life is colored by. This brick-solid love sinks right down to the bottom of a tub of glassy-eyed glamour. This love is that which is expressed in a matter-of-fact manner, point-blank, blunt, stated simply - as Margot quietly says in Wes Anderson's 'The Royal Tenenbaums', "I think...we're just going to have to leave it at that Richie"...Perhaps the obscenity we impart to our Valentine's Day bash's is really the threat of being stranded on an uncharted island of conventionalism and mediocrity, a black hole of no return.
I am therefore content to spend Valentine's Day in any way that it unfurls before my S.O. and myself. If it will be a day of routine - so be it, if a visit to the doctor for a bad cold and cough is in the offing - so be it, if the doors to a restaurant dinner open up like a shark's jaws in the approaching sea - so be it as well. I will willingly be swallowed - and spat out, hopefully. I will sail our ship of marriage across the seas of love, guided by the star of good sense and faithfulness. My ship will chart the uncertain swells of contentment, and plumb the valleys of bitterness and fury to emerge with its pennant flying high. In that adventure lies the romance.
I hope my S.O., as First Mate, will stand by me, endure me, in this adrenalin driven enterprise. Can't help punning here that the S.O. is indeed my 'first mate' - I, having studied at a convent through school and college, and us, having had an arranged marriage. I know my First Mate sometimes looks upon the journey as a contingency...as I do too at times...but isn't that what life is all about? A shivering amateur thrown into a goosebump-inducing cold vat of life while the universe yells at us , "Swim!" And swim we do...most of us with our partners, sucessfully...some of us thrashing about, while our partners hold us up or yank us down...not unlike the 'managed floats' I'm reading about in my management program...a sort of speculation. Hopefully, we will all reach the threshold of old age intact in mind and body, and rock on azure gentle seas our last days together with each other and with our families, in warmth, our eyes lit by rosy skies and the resplendent setting sun.
Here is a song to celebrate the utter loyalty and faithfulness of love...I like it because I can relate to it completely, being a woman, and also because of the unshakeable determination and resolve it expresses...thank you, Sade:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR5_rTCi-Bo&ob=av2e
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