Thursday, February 14, 2013

Romance comes in Many Forms: Are we not like Two Volumes of One Book of Hot River?

To love another person is to see the face of God.
- Les Miserables

Shall we compare our hearts to a garden
with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,
swooping birds and sunshine, rain
and most importantly, seeds.
- Grey Livingston

...when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them. Curious where Media Dragons head in Sydney in the search for some romance in time for St. Valentine's Day? SilluY: Before I met my Malchekeon, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times ;-) Righto lovers, Valentine’s Day is on Thursday 14th of Feb and the bookings at Yullis were coming in thick and fast ... soo next year you have to book early

Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
- Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me

...like a fine wine, the older the better. An old man in love is like a flower in winter. Love means nothing in tennis, but it's everything in life. True love is like Mittleuropean ghost, which everybody talks about and few have seen. Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly ... Love is being stupid together. When love is not madness, it is not love Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.

Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.
- Lisa Simpson not Sullivan, The Simpsons

The early tradition of Valentine's Day was that it was the date that birds began to choose their mates, only later did the romance extend to the human population. The first reference in print to Valentine's Day is found in Geoffrey Chaucer's The parlement of foules [The Parliament of Fowls], circa 1381:
For this was on seynt Volantynys day Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
[For this was Saint Valentine's day, when every bird of every kind comes to this place to choose his mate.]

Saint Valentine was a priest of the early Christian faith who lived in ancient Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. At that time, 14 February was treated similar to a public holiday to honour Juno, the celebrated queen of the Roman gods and goddesses of women and marriage. Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. Saint Valentine’s Day

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

For many, this will be an inconvenient Lent. St. Valentine's Day, typically celebrated with sweets, falls a day after Lent begins. For Bohemian Australian who like corned beef and suds on St Patrick's Day, that holiday falls on a Friday, which is a day of abstinence. Two popular holidays happen to fall on inconvenient days for Catholics. St. Valentine's Day is the day after Ash Wednesday and St. Patrick's Day falls on a Friday. No Absinthe. Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.

Valentine’s Day is like Christmas and birthdays – a time of year that only serves to remind many of us that we are alone and unloved ;-)By Belinda Beckett

We claim there ain't

Another Saint

As great as Valentine.

Each day we should love more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.
- William Shakespeare

Coda: A brief stop in New Zealand inspires strong feelings for Auckland Which city wins my Valentine?