Monday Music Magic ~ "Heart"

This is all that's on my heart today...

Valentine's Day is this Tuesday.  I know I won't be doing any blogs for it, so this will have to suffice for all I want to say about romantic love, and every other kind.  I'm not in a terribly happy frame of mind right now, but thinking about the ones I love brings a smile to my face, and warms my heart.

First, in honor of the genre I write most often in, here's a borrowed perspective on the subject which I find to be very much on the money for me.  How about you?

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest, and it opens up your heart, and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you. Then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life.  You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it.  They did something dumb one day, like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.  Love takes hostages.  It gets inside you.  It eats you out, and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like "Maybe we should be just friends" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.  It hurts.  Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind.  It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. But, "Don't hate love!"

Obviously, not all of us experience the second part of this description, but I'm pretty sure all of us have had the first part.  And for me, that part was worth all the shivery, trembling uncertainty.  Much of what I write comes from that place...it's where I am my most open.

I know the depth of my passions, and who has my heart for all time!  I love you!


Next, that love that makes you want to tear your hair out, and grab hold of the loved ones and smoosh them and protect them, even when you want to throttle them.  I'm talking about mother love.  Or father love, if you're a dad.  I suppose, though I cannot know for sure, that fathers share some of the paradoxical quality of this kind of love...the need to nurture even as you wish you could "take them out (of this world) again", to quote Dr. Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) in "The Cosby Show".  The love of a parent for a child is no more of an easy emotion than is that between lovers.  And those of us who have children share some, if not all of the fruits and frustrations of being custodians of the youth entrusted to us.

My children have my heart, and I miss them when they leave. 


Love of children for parents, and of siblings for each other, are a kind of mirror image of that of parents for children.  The bond of blood, or familial ties where there is no shared blood, makes all our dealings fraught with the power that such a bond inevitably bestows, whether for good or ill.  You know the saying "You can't live with them, and you can't live without them?"  That sums up a lot of sibling bonding and love of children for parents.  And as we age, and the needs of our parents change, we are often forced to re-evaluate those feelings we may have been holding on to, and to reassess what is truly important in our lives.  Growing up changes the feelings between children and their parents and between siblings.  Growing older changes them some more.

My parents and my siblings have my heart, even with all the angers and frustrations and fears, because there is also love and laughter.


Last is the love we bear for our friends, those people who, as someone has said, are "the family we choose".  That love is almost like that between lovers, except you don't want to make wild monkey love to them -- they are "neutral", neither as close as lovers nor as far as strangers, but possessing the unique perspective of both sides.  And the hurt can be as great when things go wrong in a friendship, as the joys can run high when they go right.  What would we be without our friends?  And how unhappy must those people be who cannot share their hearts with someone as "neutral" as a friend!

All my true friends, and we both know who you are, have my heart.