What's Love Got To Do With It?

Love Stuff

“The shelves of bookstores are groaning with self-help strategies, five-point plans to improve our relationships or to make ourselves more attractive to the opposite sex. But love is more like an electrical storm than a pension plan…When it comes, almost always unbidden, love will upset our comfortable routines.”
Roger Housden

I’ve tried to avoid writing about love because it is a subject in which I have no expertise. Twice divorced, I obviously don’t have a degree in compatibility. But here it is—February—and we’re inching toward Hallmark’s favorite holiday, so avoiding the subject would be well, hateful.

Rumi, that thirteenth-century Sufi-Dervish, wrote, in my scant experience, the most descriptive and flagrantly inflammatory love poems ever. In his poem, Buoyancy, he wrote:

“Love has taken away all my practices
And filled me with poetry…

…A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice…

…I am scrap-wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke…”

See what I mean? He was transported to some other place, his brain reduced to gibbering nonsense. Now, supposedly his love poems were written to God, but really, does this sound like a prayer to you? “We’re groggy, but let the guilt go,” he wrote; “Feel the motions of tenderness around you, the buoyancy.” I’m just saying…

Perhaps the reason one should avoid this sort of raving passion is that it takes your nicely ordered, stale-but-predictable life and throws it to the wind. Your days will fall around you like down from a broken-open pillow, and you’ll never, ever be able to gather the pieces back into a neat bundle. Love reduces and fills at the same time, like a fickle wind in untrimmed sails. Love makes us do really dumb things and feel like we’re geniuses while we’re doing them. Love is dangerous. I think you should run like a scalded dog when you feel that throbbing in your heart that signals your inevitable downfall.

That being said, though…Happy Valentines, everyone,
Jane