Valentines to ourselves

Feb. 10, 2005

Dear Leslie,

Sunday morning I awoke from an unremembered dream knowing that if I could live my life over I would treat people with more loving kindness.

"The sentences from deep in dreams always seem so clear they need not be spoken or remembered," writes the California poet Jerry Martien. But I will try.

Each person who means something to us has presented us with precious gifts of attention and affection. From the perspective afforded by experience, if I could go back and relive the time with each one I would thank them.

Much of my earlier life was seized by the drama of wondering what to do with the night. Thank-yous were for waitresses.

Maybe it wasn't a dream that provoked this wake-up. I was in St. Louis the night before, hanging out with my best old friend David in the college town of University City. It was after midnight, and a ragtag knot of young men stood on the sidewalk playing guitars. Young women sat at their feet.

"To be young again," David said as we drove past.

I had spent the previous night in a hotel where drunken Mardi Gras celebrants reveled outside my room until 4:30 a.m. The next day they tottered through the hotel lobby with bleary eyes, their necks heavily slung with beads.

I don't yearn for that urge to drench oneself in alcohol, for the delirium of a good time hardly remembered in the morning.

David wasn't talking about that. He was talking about the freedom from care that had the young guitarists and their fans on the street at midnight. The musicians had nowhere else and no one else beckoning them from that place.

David's wife and two children were at home waiting for him to join them in dreamland. I had a professional workshop early the next morning. We had responsibilities to ourselves and others.

David and I once were as the musicians are now, playing in a rock 'n' roll band. I don't recall girls at my feet, but some were especially fond of musicians.

The intervening years have been a spiral of maturation and self-discovery, inquiries into meditation and Eastern religions, misbegotten romances, job and geographic and physical changes, and one marriage apiece.

Living has filled in many of the spaces on the half-blank slate we were in our early 20s. Much of the lessons are scribbled, like reminders to yourself, but some are written in large capital letters.

These are the most difficult ones. If treating other people with loving kindness were easy, there would be no military budgets to be aghast at.

In Buddhism, lovingkindness meditation develops selfless love. The paradox is that lovingkindness must begin with loving yourself.

The valentine given to ourselves makes all other love possible.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.