The Taste of Something Sweet: A Small Ritual of Gratitude

As someone whose birthday falls ten days before Valentine’s Day, there were always a lot of red and pink decorations around the stores for my mother to draw inspiration from when decorating for my birthday; and I loved the lacy decorations, the red balloons, the hearts and roses. I still do. They are pretty and passionate and powerful and provocative, and I adore them, especially vintage cards and decorations and handmade tokens of love.

St. Valentine’s Day is also my “Name Day,” the feast day of the saint whose name I share. This is a tradition celebrated by many Ukrainians, and it can be tied to the feast day or birthday of various saints or martyrs. Valya is derived from Valentine, and I always felt a special connection to the saint whose mission was enabling and celebrating love.

I write many different things: some of them are grounded in the real world while others go to mythic places, some of them grapple with the darkness, many of them celebrate beauty. No matter what I am writing, I am a poet at heart and a Romantic. My writing tends to be sensual and descriptive, emotional and wonder-filled. I very much think in scenes and symbols.

Symbols are powerful because they give shape to ideas and emotions. They help us to imagine the possibilities, to manifest what we need by allowing us to visualize with intention. That is so much of what “magic” is—visualizing with intention. And as far as intention, we could definitely use more love in this world.

Viktor E. Frankl, whom I’ve written about before, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I know people dislike or have a love-hate relationship with this holiday. I understand that it’s complicated and muddied by the messages of the media, by toxic relationships we have lived through, by our personal struggles, and by systems put in place that have done irrevocable harm. There’s a lot there, and it’s important, and we certainly do not need to be told on this day, or any day, what love is or should be or how it should be celebrated.

I do think we all need love, however, and I choose to honor this day in that spirit, to see it as a day that remembers and celebrates the kind of love and optimism that Mr. Rogers talked about. For me, the way that he walked through this world with love and kindness embodies the heart of Valentine’s Day:

Deep within us—no matter who we are—there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.  

From The World According To Mister Rogers

and

Love is like infinity: You can’t have more or less infinity, and you can’t compare two things to see if they’re ‘equally infinite.’ Infinity just is, and that’s the way I think love is, too.

FromThe World According To Mister Rogers

Some years this holiday has been happy or sad depending on what was going on in my life and in the world. There have been holidays hectic with kid-related activities, or deadlines and responsibilities that ate up all the time, or emotional heartaches and losses that left little room for optimism.

However, there is one thing I have always tried to do on Valentine’s Day, ever since my parents gave me a small heart-shaped box of chocolates when I was a girl. That Valentine’s Day so long ago, it was the only gift a lonely, disappointed, romantic girl received; and after I got over the feeling of being sad, I took the time to eat one of the chocolates, and it tasted like love.

Ever since then, this is my small, private ritual. On Valentine’s Day, I take a few minutes to savor the taste of something sweet on my tongue (preferably a piece of nice chocolate, but sometimes it’s been a sugar cube or a spoon of honey), and as it melts, I close my eyes and remember the feeling of love: of being loved, of loving wholeheartedly. Because love is a gift, and I am so very grateful. Thank you.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

(If you’d like to read more about the history, lore, recipes, and rituals associated with Valentine’s Day, I encourage you to check out this three-part article written by my friend, Katelan Foisy. Click here for more!)

Valentine by Katelan Foisy. You can buy them digitally on her website: https://www.katelanfoisy.com/market

It’s about time

Very often, there are things that adults like, and things that children like. A great many of these remain separate; worlds that do not collide.

Some things bridge the worlds, things like chocolate, ghost stories, amusement parks, crayons, and puppies. I believe those things are magic because they rekindle, they reconnect, they remind.

The things that children and grown-ups love in common bridge the divide between childhood and adulthood. They exist in a liminal realm where anything is possible and all you need is a good book, or a day to play in the tall grass, or a story by the fire, or a show that transports you into a new world outside the universe.

This weekend our family watched Doctor Who together for the first time. The five of us piled onto the couch. The kids were deliciously scared by some bits and delighted by others. I could tell they felt privileged to watch a “grown-up show,” initiated into the late night television-watching typically reserved for their parents. I had almost as much fun observing their reactions as I did watching the fourth episode of this season.

“Do you know who wrote this episode?” I asked them before it began.

“Neil Gaiman,” my oldest answered. “I heard you talking about it. That’s why you’re letting us watch, isn’t it?”

I nodded. Then it began, and they were silent for the whole thing, hiding beneath the covers that stretched across our laps, peeking out when it was “safe.” My oldest is nearly 8 years-old and spent most of the episode like this:

She was squished up next to me, so I couldn’t get a proper picture, but you get the idea.

This episode was a love letter to the TARDIS, a new addition to the cosmology of the Doctor Who world, and (as Doctor Who should be) it was also an adventure: smart and snappy and delightfully creepy. It’s an episode that I would like to watch again to better catch echoes and allusions I missed the first time.

When it was over, the kids poked their heads up from the blanket and out from behind their hands. I asked them how they liked it. They nodded, serious and a bit frightened.

“We liked it,” they said cautiously. Solemnly. “The spaceship was so cool. Bigger on the inside.”

“Tell me more,” I urged.

*SPOILERS below…sort of*

“I was freaked out by the old guy in the hall and the bloody writing on the wall. Why did there have to be blood?” asked my son, aged 5 1/2.

“I didn’t like the running around the hallway parts,” answered my oldest (the nearly 8-year-old). “And I didn’t understand why they just didn’t hold hands. Then they would have been safe.”

“I didn’t like the door closing between them,” answered my 3-year-old, the Blueberry Girl. “It freaked me out,” she said, parroting her brother.

The conversation quickly turned to how my son would build his TARDIS and where they would travel if they met the Doctor. Then it was time for bed.

Only one of them had nightmares. They all want to watch Doctor Who again.

Like I said: Magic.

Magic and the Literary Continuum

When I was in grammar school, I discovered science fiction and fantasy. It was a natural obsession for me, since I loved all things fanciful and magical as a child. I used to save up earnings from babysitting and summer jobs to buy paperbacks from the used bookstore at the end of the block on the street where I grew up.

I already loved Bradbury and Tolkien and read everything I could find by Zelazny and Arthur C. Clarke, but the used book store was where I bought my own copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and where I discovered Douglas Adams, Heinlein, Le Guin, de Lint, and so many others. I would then carry their paperbacks everywhere, immersed in their worlds.

I devoured Charles de Lint’s Yarrow in junior high, during a time when real life was lonely and seemed hard to bear. Cat, the heroine of Yarrow, enters the Otherworld through her dreams. The story resonated with me on so many levels, and the writing swept me up and inspired me. After that, I read everything by Charles de Lint that I could get my hands on, and I felt at home in so many of his books.

This week, Charles de Lint reviewed my novel, The Silence of Trees, for the March/April issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The review begins:

“Before starting this book, I wasn’t familiar with either Valya Dudycz Lupescu or Chicago’s Wolfsword Press. But I’m happy to have that corrected, because I want to read more of Lupescu’s work…” You can read the rest here.

I thought back to my twelve-year-old self sitting on a swing in the backyard of our Chicago bungalow, reading Yarrow and dwelling so completely in Cat’s dreamworld. Reading Charles de Lint’s review is one of those moments I’ll treasure, like handing Neil Gaiman (whose storytelling I have loved since college) a copy of The Silence of Trees. There’s something so wonderful about being able to share one’s published work with a literary hero. After having lived in their stories, I get to invite them into mine.

In her “Gaga Palmer Madonna” song, Amanda Palmer sings that she’s part of the “music continuum.” I like that image. We are connected to those who came before us and to those who will come after. We are shaped by the books we read, and whether our parts are small or large, when we share our stories with the world, we become a part of a “literary continuum.”

As I write those words, I have this almost comic book image in my head of beloved authors standing behind me and the fuzzy silhouettes of those not yet published in front of me.

🙂

Do you see yourself as a part of some continuum: literary, musical, artistic, philosophical, mechanical, etc?