Valentine Earth

While sitting on Hawaiian cliffs someone named End of the World, I find myself thinking about Valentine’s Day in second grade. But why? And why does that hold enough meaning to share? At first, I have no idea. Like song fragments I spontaneously sing, thoughts often arise via subconscious connections. It takes patience and presence before I can coax those connections into full awareness. They only reveal their insights later.

Unable yet to find the link, I think of how the cliffs were understandably but erroneously named. For the abundant sea life, this is the beginning of the world, not the end. Also, just a few miles behind me, Kilauea is currently creating new land via volcanic activity. In the great cycles of creation and destruction, these cliffs are closer to our land world’s beginning than its end. Furthermore, many endings are merely a precursor to the next beginning. Recalling all this brings my subconscious connection to elementary school closer to the light.

As waves crash relentlessly, majestically into the cliffs, I’m first reminded of a more familiar awareness than an awkward second grade holiday. That is, how many of the earth’s most beautiful places are also the most rugged. They’re challenging to reach. They offer many dangers to the careless. They’re difficult at best to tame; and attempting to tame them may only bring about their degradation or demise.

That in turn reminds me of how many of my most beloved people share parallel qualities. They too have been shaped by the relentless metaphorical waves that have battered them, yet stood firm. They’ve taken their injuries and turned them to healing wisdom for others, or turned pain into art. They’ve suffered injustice and turned it to compassion. They’ve survived violence and turned it to fierce inner peace. They’ve kept their sharp edges, and in doing so, have become the majestic people who are both the beginning and the end of the world for me. This knowledge leads to my next step of interconnected remembrance.

To truly love the earth is to love all of its sharp edges too: its difficulty as well as its majesty. The challenge is to lovingly embrace the truth that difficulty and majesty are inseparable. That applies to so society and individuals as well as landscapes—including ourselves. To love with compassionate equanimity is forever an unfinished task. It’s another rugged cliff where the apparent end is only the beginning.

That is likely the reason I think of my second-grade Valentine’s Day. On that awkward day, our teacher insisted that if we made a card for one person in our class, we had to make one for all. Oh, her apparent cruelty! Oh, the workload! I wanted to make only one heart card, for the little girl who was my formative crush, whose name I can barely remember now.

Earlier in adulthood, I remembered that as an empty exercise, born out of some shallow pretense of equality. It seemed like a scheme dreamed up in the marketing department of a certain corporation, too. Valentine’s Day, another fraught commercialized holiday, as likely to trigger anxiety or heartache as bliss.

Now, however, sitting on some of this earth’s most beautiful and dangerous cliffs, that second-grade exercise appears as only another beginning. It was the beginning of learning how to offer loving equanimity—a practice essential to us all, and a practice we never master. It was the beginning of learning how the ending of an early crush is the path towards truer, deeper love. I wouldn’t be sitting on these cliffs with my life’s true love, if that wasn’t so. We wouldn’t be sitting at sunset together, if each of us hadn’t first embraced being the caregiver for other loved ones until their deaths. We’re both cancer survivors ourselves. We wouldn’t be sharing the sunset with such deep celebration and gratitude, without the difficulty it took to reach this shared majesty. This whole path of celebration is an ongoing daily practice of transformation. It’s the endless alchemy of turning challenge into equanimity.

I know this well, by now. Today’s sun going down is the harbinger of tomorrow’s light. The battered cliff rocks are the beginning of someday’s new beaches. The pain of second grade plants the root of mature love. It all holds the key to looking out together at this beautiful, broken time of humanity to see that yes, this is our beginning, not the end. That is indeed our shared challenge at the moment: to send a Valentine to the entirety of this earth, as it is. To see that it’s especially vital when our society is broken and battered and needing support to begin its next healing.

Night falls. As we walk away from the darkening sea, hand in hand, a new song fragment appears in my head. I have no idea yet why. I only know that we’re again reaching the next moment’s majestic, rugged beginning.