Roses are Red

This weekend we celebrate Valentine’s Day.  Roses, chocolates and heart shaped candies printed with words in tiny letters:  be mine, true love, forever. It is thought that the first association of romantic love with St. Valentine’s Day was through a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer entitled:  Parliament of Fowls (1382), a poem that reminds us of the power of nature.

“For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day
When every bird comes there to choose his match
(Of every kind that men may think of!),
And that so huge a noise they began to make
That earth and air and tree and every lake
Was so full, that not easily was there space
For me to stand—so full was all the place.”

As I treasure all of my books, I pause when I suggest that one is a favorite over another, as there are so many books on my bookshelves that I pull down again and again. Notwithstanding, one of the books I have read in the last few years that is a favorite is Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, published in 2014.  While she takes us through the fascinating world of falconry and training a goshawk she names Mable, Helen Macdonald is really writing about her grief over the unexpected death of her beloved father, a press photographer in London.

Last year, Helen Macdonald’s book of essays, entitled Vesper Flights, was published.  Over the last two months I have been leading a series of conversations around these essays and once again find myself reading and then re-reading her stories as she leads us walking through fields or looking up into the sky, encouraging us to see the world through a different lens. Her essays teach us about the birds, animals and the other creatures that inhabit the earth and in poetic language she offers a perspective into the mysteries of nature.

This weekend we are not only marking Valentine’s Day we are also reaching the one-year anniversary of when we began to hear about the COVID-19 virus. A spring not one of us will ever forget.  I recall those days.   The landscape from my windows, looking across brownstones and buildings, high-rise structures many of them, never changed. What did change was the sound. The streets were silent, pierced occasionally with the shrill of sirens. Ambulances, one after another carrying individuals, alone, to a hospital.

In August, I left for Dublin, New Hampshire and spent the month in a restored farmhouse on a hill overlooking the mountains. With a view across vast fields filled with Black-Eyed Susan’s and Queen Anne’s Lace. A sky that stretched down and above, vast enough to watch as the stars emerged. Glittering in the black heavens. Here the sounds were those of crickets, the birds in conversation and the wind whistling through the trees.

Each morning, on a long walk, though the woods, I gathered rolls of white bark from fallen birch trees. In the evening I would pile a stack of books on top of the bark to flatten it. I wasn’t in my studio and didn’t have the appropriate tools for bookbinding. It didn’t matter. Did any of us have the tools for dealing with what was upfolding? The politics, the pandemic, the death, one after another, of those who were Black. Just because?  I created an edition of ten small books that are small with brown paper pages, a series of ten. Numbered and dated. Being in nature was healing.

St. Valentine’s Day was originally a feast day.  Enjoy the feelings of romantic love, the sweet taste of chocolate and the beauty and scent of flowers that can fill a room.  Remembering that for all of us perhaps it is nature, all that is around us, that is the true love we all share.