A little tenderness

Love is in the air, or so it will be said, as our amourousness is directed through the funnel of Feb 14th. I like to think that the formality serves as a reminder that love is, at all times, omnipresent.

It populates our songs, it perfumes our days and interactions with fondness and meaning. It can hurt just as well as it salves. The ancient greeks knew it by 8 individual names (and "were wise in dividing the blinding monolith of love into its constituent parts"), broadening it's linear default beyond the purely romantic. Extending across familiar love (storge), self-love (philautia), enduring love (pragma) and so forth... painting an emotion that is seemingly boundless & all encompassing.

Great love can leave us feeling as though the earth has moved, a love felt between persons but so too for prose, dreams, constellations, traditions; love's link threading together all that moves & softens us. All that creates tenderness.

Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset described “falling in love” as a phenomenon of attention. Furthering that, philosopher & political activist, Simone Weil offered that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity".

May we then let our attention grow and nourish a myriad of loves through our lives.

From one starry eyed valentine,

Melissa