Are you ready? The Love Month is here. Celebrate love. ?
Hallmark sales spikes, chocolate overloads, scented candles, perfume and flowers top the credit card sales, and people tapping into their sometimes under-utilized romance files.
I do love lots of things and people. All kinds of love. Friendship love. Loyalty love. Compassion, fondness, affection.
All Kinds of Love
I’m also a romantic–big time. My heart is on my sleeve. A part of my heart holds deep abiding love. My emotions run the gamut when it comes to caring/affection/love. One of my favorite scenes in a movie is the opening credits in Love Actually. Families, couples, friends, people of all ages, sizes, shapes, and colors greeting each other at Heathrow Airport with hugs, kisses, laughing, crying. Makes me tear up and smile at the same time. I can also sob at one of the last scenes in Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff carries Cathy to the window so she can see the moors and smell the heather-one last time. (Multiple tissue rating if it’s the Laurence Oliver and Merle Oberon 1939 movie.)
When we flipped the calendar page to February, I felt a little flip in my heart too. Even more so, this year.
Suggestions to Share Love
Some quotes that get me going about love:
Everybody loves something, even if it’s just tortillas. ~ Trungpa Rinpoche
Two-minute free write: I love … pizza, sitting on the beach, cherries, smelling the ocean, seeing the sun rise from my patio, watching my husband make coffee because he is totally immersed and at ease in that one morning activity, naps, my friend JoAn’s carrot cake, walking a labyrinth, books, my office which is also my sanctuary and my creative writing site.
Suggestion: Do a two-minute free write about people, places, things you love. Can you stop at two minutes?
I love this scene- it’s peaceful and cool. It holds the memory of my parents’ retirement home in N. Carolina. They have since died, and maybe the bench is gone too, but I have this photo and memory.
Ya gotta learn to laugh. It’s the way to true love. ~ John Travolta in Michael
I love to laugh. Of course it doesn’t mean I ”fall in love” with my laugh buddies. But laughing relaxes me, and I’m more apt to see love when it’s offered. Laughing helps me forget the “shoulds,” worries, and small dark clouds that can drift across my emotional radar screen. Can you be mad or sad when you’re laughing? Can you be worried when you’re laughing so hard that you actually snort?
My morning meditation group is usually bookended with laughter as well as prayer. Laughing at ourselves, at the funny way the cat sashays across my friend’s computer, preening for the zoom screen.
Suggestion: Who/what makes you laugh? Tell folks. Write about them.
I was at a party feeling very shy because there were a lot of celebrities around, and I was sitting in a corner alone and a beautiful young man came up to me and offered me some salted peanuts and he said, “I wish they were emeralds”, as he handed me the peanuts and that was the end of my heart. I never got it back. ~ Helen Hayes
This has got to be one of the most loving, romantic “scenes” I’ve ever read. I can see it. I can hear the background noise at this party–music, laughing, the range of voices in conversations. And the beautiful woman sitting, waiting, although at that moment she didn’t know she was waiting.
When I first heard my Hank’s voice, I felt a jolt in my heart. What the heck is this? Heartburn? But it was followed by a kind of excited feeling in my stomach and heart. I looked around to see where that measured voice with the easy listening tone was coming from. Then I saw him, but by then my heart had moved towards his. Lucky me to have followed that jolt.
Suggestion: Write about love.
My personal favorite, for fun and for love:
A man should kiss his wife’s navel every day. ~ Nell Kimball
May you find love every day, not just in the love month.
Smiling behind my mask
Ethel Lee-Miller blogs regularly about people, the power of words, and the writing life. She’s retired from professional writing gigs after 30 years of teaching, coaching, editing, and gathering writers to publicly share their work. She is the author of Thinking of Miller Place, and Seedlings, Stories of Relationships. In retirement she writes to inspire, to connect with folks, and for the pure enjoyment of it. Ethel enjoys sharing stories at Odyssey Storytelling, Zoom gatherings, and anywhere there’s a Zoom mic.
