The sentences appear towards the end of Jeannette Winterson's unusual novel, Lighthousekeeper. "I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic," her character says.
For such people, the world is a mystical place. Every sunset brings sighs. People's eyes matter. The world turns on relationships. Even a spreadsheet stuffed with numbers can become a piece of art.
Above all, it is love that lifts the romantic through life. It is love that rips the heart & heals it.
"I don't think of love as the answer or the solution," Winterson writes, startling us for a moment. "I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun...as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies."
There it is. We must have meaning to thrive. "What I remember is love," her character sings, "all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in the cafe."
This sentence changed my life. How best to live? Make your life a circle of love & sweep every experience into it.
There are so many images around us it is hard to stay with any one of them. Love's circle invites deeper experiences.
Consider the little girl perched among anonymous adults at a poetry reading - a tiny lighthouse amid a sea of shapes. As I watched her the poet's words became theme music for that moment. I began to admire arms & legs & railings and how all lines diagonaled down as she looked back up.
Photograph means "light writing." The longer I stay with this "writing" the more I fall in love with what I read in this picture.
Love this image for awhile & see what gifts emerge. Love the little girl or boy you were when you were the age of this child.
Thank love, too, for bringing hope in the presence of evil & for carrying you through suffering.
We imagine the lighthouse keeper standing solitary in his tower flashing guidance to life-filled ships. The scientist sees physics in lighthouse beams. The accountant figures the lighthouse's operating costs. The brickmason evaluates its walls.
But, the romantic spins dreams amid the fog that wreathes the lighthouse, conjures stories & may imagine a room below the blinking light as an aerie where a lover's visit illuminates the solitary life of the keeper.
Perhaps, we are all romantics. All keepers of light.
-Erie Chapman
