Valentine’s Day is not just a day for celebrating romantic love between two lovers. It also is a day for celebrating self-love, which Ernest Holmes defines in his book The Science of Mind as “the self-givingness of spirit”.

To my mind this is an act of taking some of self and putting it into a new context and expressing in a new way. It’s like breaking off a piece of yourself to regenerate as something else that is beautiful or intelligent, compassionate, soothing, helpful, fascinating, creative, humorous, or caring.

To my mind, this is how oneness becomes more than oneness. This is what unfolding is.

As a recovering self-saboteur, Valentine’s Day reminds me to be loving to myself. To give myself what I need: acceptance, encouragement, tenderness, peace and calm. And also openness to what lies ahead for me to participate in…not just as a creator, but as an observer, a listener, and a feeling, sensing being.

But with all the time spent on devices, managing all the commercial pitches bombarding me, I often feel reduced to being a possible customer, and nothing more.  And with so much of my communication with others online or over Wifi, I wonder if I’m perceived as nothing more than  a bunch of linguistic characters and sounds?

Is my personhood, my self-hood just a complicated, contrived illusion that I can now fabricate and disseminate more quickly, artfully, and globally with so much technology at my disposal?

Let me retreat from that world long enough, today and each day, to turn within and find my essence, my connectedness to the Spirit that animates all life.  In doing so, I find love.