Valentine’s day has always been a favorite holiday of mine. It’s ranked a lowly “hallmark” holiday, a chance for makers of plastic trash & candy to rake in another season’s worth of dough… & still I love it. To me, the hallmark aspect is it’s best characteristic. When I was a child, the act of making and giving a card to every single person in my class - even the kids who were strange or unpopular - seemed like a powerful practice. I had to think of something nice to say to everyone.
This song is a Valentine of sorts. I wrote it a few years ago while I was reading A Course In Miracles (a self-study spiritual curriculum designed to shift perception from fear to love by undoing the belief in separation). One of the fundamental premises of ACIM is that all sin is an illusion, a mistaken belief, a missing of the mark due to the bent arrow of misperception.
What is Sin?
Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where the truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else. - from A Course In Miracles
I think the purpose of A Course In Miracles is to, belief by belief, entirely rewrite your view of reality. It really takes true devotion to commit so I never got more than a few days into the year long course. Each day a new thought would be presented that you’re meant to pause & meditate on multiple times a day. An example is lesson 1, “Nothing I see in this room means anything” which moves to “these thoughts do not mean anything, they are like the things I see in this room,” to “I am upset because I see something that is not there” and on and on for 365 days. If you get over all the “God” & “our Father” language it’s actually a really psychedelic book. “God” is psychedelic I suppose.
Sin is considered the absence of love rather than an act against God.
But I thought of this song because I have been “sinning” a lot lately. That is, looking at the world & my personal world, through a veil of negativity, with an absence of Love disguised as love (“caring” to the point of pain, anger & worry.) I have been driving myself mad with this kind of caring. Believing that there are so many wrongs they could never get right. This inability to control or fix the external seems to result in hyper-fixation with my own health, striving for perfection & control of the only person I can - myself. Maybe it’s something to do with day 5 of ACIM - “I am never upset for the reason I think” - indicating that our upset with the external world simply gives insight into our internal conflict & is an indication of our misperception. That nothing is actually wrong in the world, it’s simply our way of looking at it that is wrong.
But the real lesson of the book is not to deny that there are troubling things happening in the world - that have always been happening through history in one form or another - but it’s a way to re-program our minds to look toward the light. To be glass half hopeful. In looking with eyes attuned to the truth that underlying all of life is goodness & love, we can bring that truth to the fore.
So I have been imagining the whole world as my classroom & that I have to send a Valentine to everyone, even those who I don’t like, who are creepy, who are too cool, who are bullies, who are bad. Because we’re all just in this strange school together. There are a million reasons why people are the way they are & maybe some just need to be shot by a straighter arrow (of love, of course) through the heart.
