Tag: valentine’s day

The Taste of Something Sweet: A Small Ritual of Gratitude

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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

Love & Words

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Back when Turntable.fm just started getting popular, a few of us joined Neil Gaiman on the site to share recordings of poetry in “Neilhimself’s House of Poetry.” The site had a small selection of recorded poems, but many of us scoured the internet and personal collections to find our favorites to share: Poe, Glück, Yeats, Levertov, Cummings, etc. It was a nice way to spend an hour at midnight while taking a break from writing.

It’s been over a year since the last poetry sharing night, so when I saw that the Poetry Foundation was celebrating with recorded love poetry for Valentine’s Day, I was excited to listen. The Poetry Foundation page is here and will lead you to a selection of recorded love poems. This is from their website:

Send your beloved one of these love poems submitted to our Record-a-Poem group on SoundCloud. Or go to our SoundCloud and record your own love poem.

I was tempted. I know many people protest, but I love the holiday (you can read why here).

So here’s my poem for you, a gift for Valentine’s Day. It’s a little cheeky, a little sexy, and I was more than a little nervous recording it. But Valentine’s Day seems as good a day as any to take risks for things we love, so here goes…

Click here to listen to Sediction by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

 

 

Sediction 

I want to seduce you with my words—wistful and wanton.  I want you

to feel me behind each one. Not brief like breath,

not

quick

like

Cummings,

my lines are long, stretching like lavish strokes to reach you, sliding along the page

to create a scene where you can dwell. Words to slip you inside,

surround you with sounds, and hold you at the threshold between desire and pleasure.

 

When I enjamb, it’s to create tension that can only be released when you move down

to the next line, and if I drop a line, like layers cast away, I do it by design to create

anticipation.

So much is rush and flash and burst in frantic fleeting glances, but iambs

keep the rhythm steady, help me straddle the canon, holding onto Williams’s foot

while riding Whitman’s whimsical waves. Then there’s the break

 

to make you wait, to leave you wondering why and when it will all start again.

Hanging off the end of a dash like Dickinson, I want you—

to imagine. Desire requires space,

the white around words,

the uncertainty of ellipses . . .

 

by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

© 2014 Valya Dudycz Lupescu

 vday cheers

A Strange Kind of Love

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On Valentine’s Day, my oldest daughter went ice skating with her second grade class (where one child bloodied his face, another broke a leg, and her teacher broke her wrist). Luckily my husband took off the day to go with her (and to tend to some things around the house that needed his attention). Each of the kids had classroom parties and returned home to spill out their bags of sweets and cards on the kitchen table to examine before picking out one treat to have before dinner.

The booty they brought home rivaled Halloween. So many children pass out goody bags of candy, pencils, erasers, stickers for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Christmas, birthdays. I can’t help but think that the holidays lose some of their magic when they morph into differently colored versions of one another.

At this age, the kids still give everyone in their class a card or piece of candy. At this age, they may or may not pick out a special card for a friend or teacher. At this age, they haven’t quite gotten into the romantic part of the holiday and the potential heartache that come with it. At this age, they still like Valentine’s Day.

I know this will change.

Sooner than I like to admit, there will be wide-eyed infatuation and puppy love, as well as heartache and drama and tears. I remember it so well: the years I did not receive a card from the boy I liked or from the girl I thought was my friend, as well as the years when I walked hand-in-hand with someone for a few secret steps, or arm-in-arm with a “best friend.” The moments were fleeting, but they charged Valentine’s Day with hope and the beautiful fantasy of what it mean to be wanted, chosen, special.

I think that’s the hardest part—wanting to be special. Kids have this desire even at a young age, but they still look to their parents, teachers, or other elders to recognize them in some way. It’s when the need for approval turns to the fickle whims of their peers that even more heartache is possible—no—inevitable.

It was during the loneliest days of  Junior High, that I began to write. What had begun as classroom exercises with a wonderful seventh grade teacher who insisted on in-class essays, evolved into my earliest journal writing and poetry. The essays earned praise, while the personal writing was mostly rambling pre-teen angst that I kept to myself. The important lesson for me was that in the absence of a real-life audience or peer group, I had a place to express myself…on the page.

In her new book, The Window’s Story: A Memoir, Joyce Carol Oats writes:

There are those—a blessed lot—who can experience life without the slightest glimmer of a need to add anything to it—any sort of “creative”effort; and there are those—an accursed lot?—for whom the activities of their own brains and imaginations are paramount. The world for these individuals may be infinitely rich, rewarding and seductive—but it is not paramount. The world may be interpreted as a gift, earned only if one has created something over and above the world. (You can read an excerpt here, on Scribd.com.)

She eloquently put into words one of my fears and the conflict I experience daily as I try to balance writing and life. Does writing keep me from living? Does living keep me from writing? Yes and yes, and so I teeter from side-to-side trying to celebrate and experience both. Some days are more successful than others.

My seven-year-old received a Star Wars valentine from the boy she likes. She has recycled all her valentines but that one.

And so it begins.