Invitation to Love

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Some of us await Valentine’s Day with gleeful anticipation, delighting in buying treats or planning surprises for someone special. Or maybe we’re looking forward to a special night out or a romantic weekend getaway. Others of us dread the holiday and all its gushing, glaring reminders that we have yet to find—or have found and then lost—that someone special.

Too often we assume that Valentine’s Day is all about romantic love. What a mistake that is! A day that commemorates love should be an opportunity to celebrate all its many variations—love of self, love of family, love of friends, love of the earth, love of community, love of humanity. Love of the neighbor we greet on our way to work, of the bird sheltering in the tree outside our window, of the sun that warms us and the night that offers us rest. Love of the precious gift of life itself.

May your Valentine’s Day be filled with the multiplicities of love!

Invitation to Love

by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene’er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome. 

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest. 

Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Come when the year’s first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter’s drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.