Boston & Maine Connection: Celebrating Valentine’s Day All Month Long

Boston & Maine Connection: Celebrating Valentine’s Day All Month Long

Valentine’s Day has become a day of exchanging positive greetings at every level including family and friends and grade school, children exchanging cards if they are physically in classrooms these days.  

The origin of Valentine’s Day was a Roman festival celebrating spring which has evolved into an annual rite of showing love and affection with greetings and sometimes gifts through much of the world. Locally in Midcoast Maine, February 14^th often finds many shop windows in Bath visited in the pre-dawn hours by the Valentine’s Day bandit. You can even find a reference to it in Wikipedia originating as the Valentine Phantom in the 1970’s in Portland Maine.

Origin stories are instructive. They remind us from whence we came. The United States is celebrating its own origin story this year with last month’s inauguration of a new president. Did you watch any or all of the inauguration events? The message was consistent. It was about us, the citizens of the United States of America. It was about the constitution of the United States and pledging allegiance to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

In 1943, at the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Robert Jackson wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”  In other words, many people, many different beliefs, with freedom of expression but unity of country.

The inauguration showed a lot of laughter and twinkling eyes and smiles. There was an abundant show of humility, civility and grace across the hugely diverse population of participants. The message was one of hope – healing – community.  In Amanda Gorman, we saw poise, presence and theatrical timing in delivery.  For me, this was a clear reminder of the importance of the Arts.  A recognition from the stage, in everything she did, from how she dressed to the cadence of her delivery, that Art is Essential. That supporting the arts and nurturing youth artists is important because in the youth is our collective future.

I am an advisor to ArtVan Program and their art therapy work is in great demand right now. Collectively we have invited the community to participate in the February Art Prompt and create a piece of art in the physical world and share it online in the virtual world. Our goal is to Make Art A Community Wide Endeavor – for connection.

This is your chance, as a reader of any age, to leverage the positive gifts of an open internet and participate by creating art and sharing it online (or by emailing a photo of it to Shannon@artvanprogram.org). Please do take this as your call to action to engage with children and families and community. Follow the ArtVan “art prompt” and play nicely with others by posting and sharing your results.

Let’s celebrate Valentine’s Day all month long by sharing good things with others and helping strengthen and heal our communities and our country.