L-O-V-E

I woke up this morning wondering what one says on their blog on Valentine's Day when they don't have a valentine. This is not a fact of my life that I lament, but nonetheless it is a fact the defines who I am right now. Do I dedicate a lovely piece to my family? My friends? My loved ones that are no longer here to celebrate with me? To ex-boyfriends? To friends I've lost contact with?

I do not suffer from a lack of people who love me; in fact, I consider myself one of the luckiest people on this planet to have an unusually large number of people who love me very much. It occurs to me that my project for so many years now has been to learn to love myself unconditionally, and that has been the biggest challenge of all.

In searching for a poem that might best describe this particular "voyage" in my life, I came upon a lovely poem by Rainer Maria Rilke entitled A Walk. I read it because I love to walk alone or with friends, and have spent a great deal of time doing so in the last few years. In fact, the miles and miles that I have walked have brought me back in touch with so many things I had lost sight of and so they have become the symbol of change for me.

Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the poem speaks of hope, of moving forward and accepting what lies ahead -- it even speaks of the wind! (I really love the wind, maybe because I'm an air sign...)

Happy Valentine's Day to all! I hope that you all can find love for yourselves that matches that which is bestowed upon you by those in you life who love you most...

A WALK

by Rainer Maria Rilke

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave...

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.