Deep Love

Valentine's Day gives us an unique opportunity to contemplate about deep love. Besides just romantic notions this day opens our heart's door to explore a greater perspective of human compassion. Deep love unifies us to our greater sense of connectedness.  Instead of dividing or separating, this love allows us to share the joy of oneness.

 According to legend, Bishop Demetri of the Orthodox Research Institute, cited that:

St. Valentine was a priest near Rome in about the year 270 A.D, a time when the church was enduring great persecution. His ministry was to help the Christians to escape this persecution, and to provide them the sacraments, such as marriage, which was outlawed by the Roman Empire at that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day

Today I believe we live in a culture of self-persecution where self- loathing is more the rule then the exemption.  Deep love can awaken our compassion providing greater acceptance for life’s circumstances. This profound love is beyond just selfish desire since it honors our greater interconnection. Poets are the gate keepers in best describing this phenomenon of deep love.  There is a transcendental quality with the widening of the human heart.  Below are three magical examples.

First Shakespeare’s Sonnets acknowledges his pantheistic love of all things-

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines and often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.  -Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 Next Rumi reminds us the source of all our thanks comes from just loving presence-

Love asks us to enjoy our life
For nothing good can come of death.
Who is alive? I ask.
Those who are born of love.

Seek us in love itself,
Seek love in us ourselves.
Sometimes I venerate love,
Sometimes it venerates me.
― Rumi, Love: The Joy That Wounds: The Love Poems of Rumi

Finally Petrarch speaks of light beyond heavenly beauty in a simple meeting- 

In what bright realm, what sphere of radiant thought
Did Nature find the model whence she drew
That delicate dazzling image where we view
Here on this earth what she in heaven wrought?
What fountain-haunting nymph, what dryad, sought
In groves, such golden tresses ever threw
Upon the gust? What heart such virtues knew?—
Though her chief virtue with my death is frought.
He looks in vain for heavenly beauty, he
Who never looked upon her perfect eyes,
The vivid blue orbs turning brilliantly –
He does not know how Love yields and denies;
He only knows, who knows how sweetly she
Can talk and laugh, the sweetness of her sighs.

-Petrarch, Sonnet 159

May this Valentine’s Day inspire you to venture into a profound  awakening of greater oneness, light, love and possibility.