Writers used to write about love all the time – my favorite, Gabriel Garcia Marquez does it beautifully and even grumpy Wendell Berry is always offering love poems to his wife. Today, the subject of much fiction is anxiety and depression, and that is a turn-off.  In our time, writing about love seems out of fashion. Life is seen as too cynical, too ambivalent, too sophisticated and we are preoccupied considering the endless reports of our imminent doom. We are supposed to be too guilty to feel love or deserve it. Or too sorry for ourselves.  If artists used to work to capture love, now they seem to warn us against it. I’d like to offer my own one-writer revolution and change direction. Today, artists and writers need to remind people that love exists, not that it doesn’t.

I am writing more about love, and I’m happy about it. With Valentine’s Day looming, I am peppering the farm with Valentine cards and notes, drawings and offerings, a sort of one-week love festival. In my mind, every day is Valentine’s Day. Having lived with out life, I am reborn, and determined not to let one day go bye again without remembering and invoking it. Love is everything, after all, and it needs to be reclaimed. And shouted from the rooftops.

I remember one evening a few years ago when I looked across the road from the farmhouse and saw a light burning in the Studio Barn, and I felt my heart flip right over. Everything in the world that I wanted was in that Barn, I realized. Money didn’t matter. Security didn’t matter. The judgement of others did not matter. Anger and argument and self-pity didn’t matter.  None of the things I worried about day and night mattered. But it wouldn’t be simple. I had to change. To open up. To take one leap off the cliff, and then another. And then, many more.

Sometime later, I went over to that barn and I shouted through the door, “Hey! I Love You!” and I have been shouting it ever since, because it is the real truth, the real faith, the real purpose. She put an arrow through my heart, and it is lodged there still, and forever, and this feeling is larger than a day, or a life, or a pain in the foot, or a mean-spirited remark, or some sad or tragic news, as will happen in or time or any other.  Once I got that, life changed, and this feeling will carry me through this world and into the next.

It is the point, after all.