You don’t mind if Valentines goes on a little longer, do you?  Hearts like these are too good to pass up.  When they throw themselves at my feet, who am I to argue?

I don’t know what you want for Valentine’s Day, but I think I can guess.

No matter how I turn things over in my mind, when it comes down to this minute, this very minute, I want to be heard.  I don’t know any better way to be heard than this:  look for what is beautiful, and bring it to you.  There is only one letter difference between “hearD” and the word we have been concerned with these last 14 days – “hearT.”

Hear.  Heart.  Heard.

I think you know what I want to say.  I hope you can hear me.

Some hearts do not require explanation or need any complications.  Love happens without words.  It might even be best that way.

Making a leap of the heart is by far my greatest challenge.  I probably ask all the wrong questions.  I ask, “Will things work out?  Will I get hurt?  Will I make a mistake?”  Everyone knows you can’t answer these questions, but it is the curse of adulthood to believe they are relevant to living into what you want.

Instead, I wish I could hear that tender center beating, and comprehend its language, rippling out in shards of life and budding branches.  “Life” is a typo there – I meant to type “light.”  I think I’ll leave it.  Maybe it is just the sign I am looking for.

I try to decipher their stories – unthreaded dots and dashes, dust motes glimpsed in the sunshine beyond a photographer’s shoulder.

Is their business here finished?  I don’t think so.  A shirt lies in a mending basket, waiting to be repaired.  This little girl needed a button in her hair.

What they tell is this:  My heart becomes fuller in the very use by which it exhausts itself.  Her story is still being written.

Mother of pearl fascinates me.  Forming a topography as idiosyncratic as the ridges in a finger print, crystal aragonite platelets accumulate in layers on the inner surface of mollusks, entombing parasites and cushioning the animal’s soft body.  Micron by micron, the crystals combine their refractive power into a zillion infinitesimally tiny prisms, creating an ever changing iridescence that we see only when the mollusk surrenders to the crack of hungry teeth or knives.  Even the scientific description of the process is poetic.

This dual purpose mechanism, both care-taking and defensive, is so human.  It mimics way we build the inner story we tell about ourselves, seen by others in its infinite refractions, and the way we live with how we love.

When I looked up the synonym “nacre,” one thing led to another, and brought me to this poem by Llorca.

The Faithless Wife

frozen heart syndrome:  formed under conditions of accumulating pressure and persistent isolation;  core sample typically reveal lamina such as “wariness,” “vigilance,” and “distrust.”

antidote:  closely observe the sufferer with kind attention;  thaw as desired with words, music and meltwater (tears).