This is a Valentine Card to everyone who will eat lunch alone today. It is for everyone who will be asked by the “greeter” of that restaurant, “just one?”
The secret of this day is to step out side this culture’s obsession with romantic love and to go deeper into the love you have for every person, plant and animal. You need not experience less love because it has not come to you in an officially sanctioned package. Instead, this can be a day to realize that the pain of loneliness is very helpful in identifying the prison of the ego. It is the part of you that hurts this day that you have held back from the river of life. When you sit in a woods or by a river, you dissolve into reality, but you can only do so when your ego is silent. The ego you have learned from experience is not your true self. If you want to know who you really are look at the periodic chart and realize you are seeing the bare surface of your mysterious source. Consider what you know of physics and realize your home is deeper still. You are the universe rising up to see itself and rejoice. You are nature rising up in the form of a gardener, the stars rising up in the form of an astronomer, life itself rising up in the form of a prophet.
You do not need another to validate your love of the all. If you are feeling the pain of loneliness this day, unshackle your heart. The small loves you have been denied are an opportunity to dissolve into the one big love.
Mike, why don’t we settle this in the steel cage? I can’t imagine any network passing up on the “Battle of the Popes.” Perhaps you have heard of my finishing hold, “the Venetian Blinder?”