Photo by Gregory Hayes, Unsplash
Photo by Gregory Hayes, Unsplash
Love remains our most powerful force for connection, growth, and healing. It's what binds us together, lifts us up, and gives meaning to our journey through life.
Dear Folks,
I’m not sure when or even how it happened, and some might say it never happened, and this is just my imagination. But I can assure you from the bottom of my heart that sadly, yes, Cupid has been cancelled and just might be at death’s door. It saddens me to report this because like most of you, I have some weird attachment to Cupid, and I don’t want to let go. Let’s face it, he is a rather controversial subject to say the least. Who can believe that an arrow shot into your heart could lead to love?
You see, I was walking down the street kinda minding my own business when, through observation, folks just did not look very happy. In fact, some looked like they had the love sucked right out of them. As you can imagine, this was most disconcerting and actually rather painful to see. At that very moment I thought to myself, “Where is cupid when you need him?” These people looked loveless!
Where Was The Love
I decided I would investigate and find out what was going on. Where was the love? I just had to know! I prowled the city like one of those floppy eared search dogs, you know, blood hounds. My nose to the ground, so to speak. I approached a dark, seedy alley and heard a cherub sobbing. I wondered, could it be? Had I found cupid? This poor soul racked with sadness was sobbing its poor heart out.
And there I found him, Cupid, that is. He was half sitting and half lying, one of his own arrows thrust into his sad heart. I wondered if he had attempted cupidicide. I ran to him, I was not just satisfied with solving the mystery. Furthermore, I needed to know what happened—what had driven this cherub to such misery. Somehow, I snapped the shaft in two so I could pull it free without wounding his poor heart any further.
But First A Little History Of Our Cherubic Friend
Cupid’s tale begins not with the chubby cherub we know today, but as Eros, the Greek god of love and attraction—a powerful, sometimes mischievous deity born of Aphrodite. The Romans transformed him into Cupid, maintaining his bow and arrows but gradually softening his image. While early depictions showed him as a young man, Renaissance artists reimagined him as the winged baby we’re familiar with today, creating a less threatening figure who could more easily slip into bedrooms and hearts. His arrows, dipped in both love and suffering, could either inspire passionate devotion (golden arrows) or bitter aversion (lead arrows), making him both loved and feared throughout mythology.
In modern times, Cupid evolved from powerful deity to commercial icon, becoming the mascot of Valentine’s Day and romantic love in general. His transformation from a complex god capable of both creating and destroying love to a benign symbol of romance reflects broader cultural shifts in how we view love itself. Yet even in his commercialized form, Cupid retains a hint of his original power—after all, we still speak of being “struck by Cupid’s arrow” when love hits us unexpectedly, suggesting that somewhere in our collective consciousness, we remember the true force of Eros, that primal god of love who could bring even Zeus himself to his knees.
Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
Bringing Love To Life
The truth is love is always at hand and always a part of you. You have to look no further than yourself and yes self-love is a precursor to other-love, and they work together, one to enhance the other. And Love Thy Neighbor may seem to be a quaint term but truly as a commandment it not only demands respect but is something to nurture because in this brave new world we live in neighbors are only a nanosecond away even if they are on the other side of the earth so we must, yes we must reflect and restate LOVE.
A Deep Dive Into Love
Love is one of humanity’s oldest and most profound concepts, woven through our languages and cultures since ancient times. Our very word “love” carries within it the whispers of our ancestors—from the Old English “lufu” back through Germanic roots to the ancient Proto-Indo-European *leubh-, meaning “to care for, to desire.” This linguistic journey mirrors our human understanding of love itself—something that has evolved and deepened while remaining fundamentally constant through time.
The ancient Greeks, in their wisdom, recognized that love wasn’t a single emotion but a spectrum of profound connections. They saw Eros, the passionate flame of romantic love; Philia, the steady warmth of deep friendship; Storge, the nurturing embrace of family bonds; and Agape, the boundless light of unconditional love. They understood that love could be both the tender care of Philautia—the essential love of self—and the welcoming warmth of Xenia, the sacred bond between host and guest.
Today, we understand love as equally multifaceted—it’s the flutter of attraction and the depth of commitment, the fierce protection of a parent and the loyal devotion of friendship, the passion for one’s art and the gentle care for humanity itself. It’s both the grandest emotion and the smallest gestures—found equally in world-changing movements and in quiet moments of kindness.
Love remains our most powerful force for connection, growth, and healing. It’s what binds us together, lifts us up, and gives meaning to our journey through life. Whether expressed in grand gestures or quiet moments, it’s the thread that weaves through all of human experience, making life not just livable, but truly worth living.
Note to self and others:
Cupid has not been cancelled!
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Lawrence George Jaffe is an internationally known and an award-winning writer, author, and poet. For his entire professional career, Jaffe has been using his art to promote human rights. He was the poet-in-residence at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, a featured poet in Chrysler’s Spirit in the Words poetry program, co-founder of Poets for Peace (now Poets without Borders) and helped spearhead the United Nations Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry project which incorporated hundreds of readings in hundreds of cities globally using the aesthetic power of poetry to bring understanding to the world.
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