Love, love, love

There is nothing like the sense of Spring coming into being. For some reason (it can only be Love!), I have been thinking of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as Spring has begun. It has been a very long time since I thought of those words, though I also remember scenes from film adaptations of Lawrence’s words (Alan Bates, figs, a spread of food on white tablecloth, outdoors, interactions of another kind of “boating party.”) How do brain cells remember? Sometimes in visions full-sprung, Venus on a half-shell, Adonis (not necessarily Charlie Sheen) beckoning to the gods of life and love.  Lady Chatterley is instructed by a rough-hewn man who knows of intimate joys of the body she has never contemplated. Ah, how we teach each other when we want to learn!

It is delightful to think of love. 

I once wrote a story about a young woman whose lusts for life were abundant.  She wore white cotton muslin gowns, simply layered over when cooler winds blew, and she wandered far and wide the countryside in wind, rain, and the splendor of sun. When once she came upon a young man asleep, with the innocence of a young girl, she bent slowly by him and with just a whisper of a finger’s motion moved aside his covering to see his manhood naked to the sun, to her eyes all new with such a view. She smiled endlessly as she let the covering return to its resting place, and blew the young man a kiss as she continued her wandering.  These vignettes of life are a pleasure, if trite and sentimental. As my brother told me when he reported to me of my niece’s latest favorite word: fabulous.  She always tries to use her favorite word in every possible sentence. And why not? he said, why shouldn’t she? What a great word! Innocence overtakes us as our minds expand into love. The profound difference between innocence and ignorance is the depth and energy of love leading us, willing “lovers,” into greener pastures, into laughter, into lighter forms of being, no matter the weight of our steps on a stairway.