Honoring Love’s Arrival on Valentine’s Day: Field Notes from a Nashville Counselor
On Valentine’s Day, we are easily inundated with shallow renderings of love, pushed to consume and project superficial displays based on a wholly inadequate understanding of what love actually is. bell hooks has written about the need for “sound definitions,” noting that many of us learned early in our lives to think simply of love as good or pleasurable feelings and to equate care and affection alone with love. Drawing from the work of M. Scott Peck, who defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” hooks goes on to say that “affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (p. 5).
We do ourselves and others a disservice when we limit love to a feeling that exists within the context of romance, or even to a similar kind of feeling with family or friends. Love is broader, is deeper, asks more of us, and is maybe more available than we know.
One of the gifts I received for Christmas last year is a daily calendar featuring quotes from inspirational women in history. Most mornings since the year turned over, I have paused to read the selected words for the day while I wait for my kettle to heat the water for tea. This past Wednesday featured a sentence from Alice Walker: “I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.” A quick google search led to her poem, New Face (published in her 1973 collection called Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems), that opens with this very line:
I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple selves;
The new face I turn up to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen.
This morning I woke up early, and the light of the sun was peeking through the edges of the curtains that cover one window and seeping beneath the door that when opened reveals another. I took this to be love, and I honored its arrival with my own, as best I could. Every morning, the sun rises to greet me, to greet you, to greet us, regardless of whether we are able to see or feel it. I believe this rise invites a response, and I believe this mutual exchange can be love.
Happy Valentines Day!
Lynnette Hope, LPC-MHSP, provides counseling in Nashville to help women who feel overwhelmed and off-balance find ease, clarity, and connection. She spent the first five years of her counseling career at a university counseling center, and since 2013 has been a self-employed owner of a solo counseling practice. She specializes in anxiety therapy, midlife growth and empowerment, and young adults and college/graduate students. You can learn more about her work here.