Love Songs

One of my first stitched collages - love hearts for Valentine’s Day

“You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. But I look around me and I see it isn't so.” ~ Paul McCartney & Wings.

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m thinking of love in all its many forms. Romantic love, family love, filial love, human and non human love. It’s an energy vibration, invisible but present.

There’s so much been written about love in poems, songs, letters and books. Classic romances and cheap romantic paperbacks, they all have a place in fiction. And why not? If it helps you believe in the good in people then I say read on.

My favourite film of all time is Franco Zeffirelli’s adaption of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with a soundtrack composed by Henry Mancini. I still cry when I hear it. The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico is another love story of a different kind as is the tragic love of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

Love stories are not so silly that they don’t move our emotions and restore faith in humanity. So singing silly songs about love seems to be the right thing to do on this day.

I’ve made little artist books about all kind of subjects over the years. I’ve included one here of the love that is often painful. It’s titled The Bound Heart and inside after you untie the (heart) string, it says pull my strings gently. The loose and tangled threads say it all.

The spirit inside our hearts is a precious connection to our greater, higher selves.

Let’s celebrate it today and sing a few silly love songs out loud in the shower, at breakfast and dinner and any other time in between. Oh, and don’t forget to pick yourself a bunch of flowers. It’s love in a vase.

Untie my heart strings - from The Bound Heart artist book, 2012.