Is Love a Fancy or a Feeling? Happy Valentine’s Day

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Today is Valentine’s Day and, on the surface, it may look like I have a lot less love in my life this year than I have in the past. I guess it depends on how you look at things though. In so many ways, I am more hopeful than I have ever been—good things are in my future, I can just feel it. I’ve been thinking a lot about love, naturally, wondering if love is a fancy or a feeling? I think it is both. What about you?

Sometimes, when so much negativity, debt, stress and all that other bad stuff gets in my life, it’s easy to get in a bad place, mentally. Practicality and ‘should’ gets in the way of dreaming, doing what I want to do and thinking positively about future possibilities.

I was listening to The Band Perry song “If I Die Young,” thinking about how I used to view the world years ago. I was much more romantic, dreamy and hopeful. In the video for the song, Kimberly (the lead singer), is put in to a canoe by her brothers. The  imagined scene, many times depicted, is based on the Tennyson poem The Lady of Shalott.

One of my favourite artists, John William Waterhouse created several paintings with the Lady of Shalott depicted:

The Lady of Shalott (1888) by John William Waterhouse

More of everything

I am not one to stop at small goals or dreams — when I dream, I dream big. This year, I’m working on adding more of everything to my life. Well, more of everything positive. Sadness and disappointment was the theme for last year. I have always talked, abstractly, about dreams for the future. There were always so many things in the way of achieving those dreams, though. I was in university and student-poor for longer than I’d like to think about, then moved to Calgary and back again (which cost me a lot of money and many important relationships), but I’m in Vancouver, where I think I belong, again.

Anne of Green Gables movie screen grab

Is love a fancy or a feeling? No.
It is immortal as immaculate Truth,
‘Tis not a blossom shed as soon as youth,
Drops from the stem of life—for it will grow,
In barren regions, where no waters flow,
Nor rays of promise cheats the pensive gloom.
A darkling fire, faint hovering o’er a tomb,
That but itself and darkness nought doth show,
It is my love’s being yet it cannot die,
Nor will it change, though all be changed beside;
Though fairest beauty be no longer fair,
Though vows be false, and faith itself deny,
Though sharp enjoyment be a suicide,
And hope a spectre in a ruin bare.

–Sonnet VII by Hartley Coleridge

When it comes to love, are you practical or romantic? Or, perhaps, a bit of both?