Cerulean blue slips across twilight like the shadow of a wing on a pond of snow as I ski out of the forest. It mesmerizes me. Breathlessly, I carve around the perimeter to avoid desecrating the clearing, and halfway I stop. The universe stops. My soul stops. Magic is about to begin. Allow me to share…

For all the fiery chaos of infinity, there are moments of profound stillness that must be obeyed. Nature has its altars, after all. The clearing is one of them. Synchronized with the sinking of Earth’s star below the horizon, the day’s abandoned colors dart over the open snow like fairy sylphs scrambling to safety. For a helter-skelter moment, the clearing throbs as if time has slipped a gear. Day has ended; where is night? The colors meld, searching for a proper alchemy. Lavender. Lilac. A single crimson spark intrudes like the glowing tip of a wand from another dimension. Then a nameless hue begins to pulse – once, twice…gone! Enter the deep bruise of night fanning through the trees like a black wave spending itself on a vanquished shore.  

Did I really see it? Often. I can sense it coming – this changing of the guard at the edge of night when nothing owns the earth – because suddenly the creatures of light vanish and the nocturnal eyes of hunters flash open. A door opens, life inhales, and I am permitted to cross the border into magic again.

It is February once more. The shortest month but packed with passion that January ushered in. Ushered some of my readers in as well, I’m happy to say. Last month’s Sullygram made a pitch for healing relationships, and a lot of response came in, some of which thanked me for the inspiration. Tut-tut…when you thrive on solitude as I do, you take any vicarious thrill you can get. Kidding, kidding! I respect your privacy, and one of the great myths of life is that passion ages gracefully. Happy to say, in my experience it’s more like disgracefully. I’m amazed that attractive women – even attractive young women – seem interested in me, though I’ve always known that people vary vastly in age match-ups, depending on their attitudes, lifestyles and mental energy.

Valentine’s Day is the bull’s-eye heart of February, splitting the month halfway on the 14^th, which I like to think signifies dual Valentines. So, excuse me, Cupid, while I divvy up your heart. As I wrote a few years ago, one half is for soulmates, true loves and inamoratas – romantic idealists! The other half is for practical lovers – committed live-ins who enjoy sexual regularity and continuous intimacy.

You can be both romantic and practical, of course. But if you are, it calls for a daily – or nightly – metamorphosis. Congrats if you keep Cupid in a drawer where you can take him out for a couple hours come night, and come dawn put on your day duds like Superman and Superwoman. Not always easy to keep the nuances of romantic idealism alive for the other 22 hours of routine living. Dreaming and snoring are not synonymous, and the metamorphosis tends to regress after intense intimacy. It sucks to go back to being a caterpillar when you’ve just been palpitating like a butterfly. Not to mention, it takes forever to get anywhere when you have no wings, and putting on shoes is a nightmare for caterpillars (…though skiing is the bomb!).

Of course, you recognize which state of being I favor. If you’ve ever enabled your romantic ideal with someone, you know you cannot disenfranchise them from your core being. Or as I once put it, there is something not quite dead in the human instinct for an all-in-one transcendent match. Thrilling rushes of fresh passion or the depth of familiar assurances, each is like a magnet inherently struggling to complete the other’s opposite pole. Miss either one and a part of you remains unfulfilled. Like the thin note of a violin above the storm, you feel more than hear the piercing urgency of an aching desire that has no path to satisfaction. The incompleteness comes like a lightning strike, bleaching out the carousel colors of your life, its rolling thunder interrupting the soporific music of the modern world. Nothing connected with fear or guilt or anger. Just loss. A sense of loss struggling against the broad socialism of our times. Romantic idealism took a hit when individualism went out of fashion. You can’t really separate a mindset between, let’s say, a blind social insect crawling in a line and an eagle arcing freely through the sky any more than you can stop water from soaking through a whole sponge. 

So, wishing you a single soulmate this Valentine’s Day, and if that’s not possible, then I wish you dual (never duel) Valentines and a very happy metamorphosis!

A dozen photos below: #1-5 my ski haunts round the clock; #6-7 photos by friends Jan Lockert and Lexy Worth; #8-12 some light play after growing a Vandyke mask on my sorry puss to fend off arctic blasts on Nordic trails.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan