It’s warm and sunny and fresh in Oakland, and spring is beginning. There are riots of colored flowers, and that creeping gardenia/magnolia/seasalt/summersand scent of California is back on the wind. It’s starting to overtake the wet dog/wet cedar/wet eucalyptus smell of the winter.
Of all the things that have changed in my life, the seasons are the ones that still have the ability to throw me off-kilter. It’s like earthquakes: the ground should not move beneath your feet. The seasons should happen the same way they always have, spring follow winter follows autumn follows summer. The seasons are immutable, unchanging. Like the sea.
Except the sea I once stared at was the gentle grey swell of the Atlantic. Now it is the thundering boom of the Pacific, blue and austere. The seasons here are not the same. They are wet and dry, cool and cooler, sweater-in-the-morning weather or sweater-at-night weather. The world is so vastly different across the continent, across the ocean, around the corner.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now, drinking too-sweet coffee and watching flocks of seagulls – minus the funky haircuts – wheel over the lake. I’m surrounded by friends, people I love, engaged in that pastime of the chattering classes – writing retreat/blogging workshop/typing with purpose. We are together and alone.
I have things I want to say. I have work I need to do. I have deadlines. I have this moment, and all moments.
I’m thinking about Valentine’s Day.
I always joke that I grew up in an agnostic household. My parents, married for 40 years now, never celebrated. They thought it was a waste of time. Love is the every day. It’s flowers on a Wednesday afternoon, it’s doing the dishes when your spouse is bone-tired, it’s watching football when you’d rather be watching anything else. Love is life. Big gestures aren’t the same as small miracles.
So Valentine’s Day never seems like a big deal to me, even when I’m alone. It’s a Hallmark holiday, a calendar day of Mandatory Fun, like New Year’s Eve, or the Superbowl. It’s love as fascist state, where the currency is tight red roses and ashy drugstore chocolate and crushed expectations.
Eros, or romantic love, is the kind Valentine’s Day is meant to celebrate. Fiery passion, head-over-heels infatuation, the love that’s celebrated in story and song, the kind that’s made Julia Roberts and her rom-com sweethearts a truckload of money, that’s the only love the Valentine’s Day fascists will suffer.
But the Greeks, the immoderate, intemperate Greeks, had four words for love.
Storge, or filial love, is the love of obligation. Parents are obligated to feel affection for their children. Children are obligated to respect their elders. It’s the love of basic human decency. It’s a love that’s so basic that it sometimes get dismissed as unimportant, or feels like a burden more than a gift.
But a child’s first Valentine is often her father or his mother, the person who loved them first, and best, the person who said, as God once said of Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” It’s the love that gives you roots, and wings. It’s the love that lets you send your own love out into the universe, in your time.
Philia is the love of friendship and affection. In a world where we move across the country, across the world, around the corner, in a world where our seasons change and our oceans change, our friends are often where we get our support, our everyday love.
If you’re single, those friendships can make the world a better place. They can mean the difference between living a life and suffering through it. If you’re married, they can be vital reminders of the person you once were outside of a union, a thread that lets you hold on to the tiny core of a person you keep deep inside. People say “my friends are my family,” but too often they forget that with philia comes storge: that you have to nurture and honor your friendships in the same way you celebrate and crave romantic love.
The final Greek word for love is agape. I grew up in the Catholic Church, where this kind of love is sometimes called “pure” love and sometimes called sacrificial love. It’s the love that Jesus supposedly felt that allowed him to give up his life on the cross. It’s love as self-abnegation. The gift is in subsuming oneself completely for another’s benefit.
That seems a bit much for most people. I can’t imagine that – outside of those idle moments in childhood Catechism classes when Catholic kids all over the world dream up scenarios in which they staunchly defend their faith and die bloody, but noble, deaths – most people spend a lot of time hoping they can give up their whole lives, their whole selves, for someone else.
If this is pure love, then most modern people are with Mae West, hoping to be as pure as the driven slush. It’s a harsh and demanding kind of love, at least on paper.
In actuality, people practice it every day. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter – they get a lot of press. But we forget that selfless love can be small and personal, too. Let that car merge on the freeway. Do the dishes when your spouse is tired. Watch football when you’d rather watch anything else. Small gestures are big miracles.
I claim Valentine’s Day for my own. I celebrate all kinds of everyday love. I love the warm sun and the too-sweet coffee and the women who surround me. I love my family and friends, near and far, virtual and “IRL.” I love the world, and my little corner of it. I love my life, and the chance to make it better every day.
The world is vast. It contains universes. It is tiny. It contains 40 inches of snow. It contains the scent of California.
It is enough.
Love, and in the words of the wisest philosophers of our times, be excellent to one another.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
