1. Happy Lupercalia! Here are some lovely bird-themed Valentines for your sweetheart (tag yourself–I’m “now bread”).
2. I posted the essay”The Crane Wife” from The Paris Review a while back and just re-read it this week. It made me so proud of the work I’ve been doing on myself and in my relationship over the last 18 months. Acknowledging that you have needs–and articulating them–and respecting your partner’s needs–is so hard, but the alternative is this:
“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore…In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.
Happy Lupercalia. Be honest with yourself and each other (and run through the street naked).