I have known love...and I KNOW LOVE now. I have loved many people who have since died and I am grateful to have known and loved them even though "they are lost to me" now...their memories comfort me.

This Valentine's Day I think of precious loved ones that I will be sending only a "valentine from my heart to their memory". I had lost my "first love" and "found him" again after 25 years. LOVE is eternal. Our LOVE has only gotten stronger.

I thought that I "knew" love when I was a christian but now I see that the love that I "felt" and may have even expressed was not FULLY the life-giving, self-perpetuating power that I am beginning to understand it to be now. I believed that "when I became a christian" that I would have more love to give to my first love and others...I realize now that was a delusion. I had denied my choice to love with my heart to accept myself as being a proxy lover in order to "peddle the wares" of a "god" that I made up. I do not feel "dependent" upon a "god" to give me that love, either for myself or for me to give to others. LOVE is IN me and it is expressed whenever I choose to share it.

I no longer feel that it is "meted" out to a "select few". I feel that love has been withheld from me, for me and for others in an "emotional blackmail" sort of way. We would only "know love" if we "knew god". I do not feel nor have I ever believe that "love is earned" but in many ways, christianity has subtly reinforced that delusion with "acceptance" and "belonging" that one "feels" when they are "a child" or part of the "family of god".

I appreciate LOVE more now. I think that having the ability to express love "without strings" is the greatest Valentine's gift that I have received in a LONG time apart from this 2nd one with my TRUE LOVE...