The Valentine Peace Project

Love. When you think about love, a lot of things can cross your mind: What do you know about love, have you experienced true love yourself or what does love mean in our life’s today?

In a society that becomes more and more individualistic, where narcissism becomes more common than philanthropy, what can we know about true love?

The legend of Valentines Day tells us that in ancient times, soldiers weren’t aloud to marry their ladies because there full attention was needed when they had to fight for their mighty kings and emperors.

One day a young couple visited bishop Valentine, with the urgent request to marry them anyway, since their love was to powerful to dismiss. Valentine, blown away by this big love bubble, was convinced by the young couple that love was more important than anything else, and decided to marry the lovebirds.

Unfortunately faith turned sour for Valentine. When the emperor, who had a hart of stone and didn’t understand the importance of love, heard about the secret marriage he convicted the poor man till death on February 14th. Before the trail was convicted, Valentine, a romantic till the end, secretly gave the beautiful daughter of the guard a little note that said: From your Valentine...

We are reminded of his romantic spirit once a year, on Valentines Day.

We can be romantic as well and buy millions of carts perfectly premade for us so that we don’t have to think about the right words to express our feelings of love. We can go to websites to order gifts pre-selected, which perfectly match your beloved ones profiles. And there is a huge offer of movies about love, or the misery of not having someone to love, that we can see.

However all these possibilities nowadays seem kind of superficial compared to Valentine, who gave his life in the name of love, and it makes you wonder: Are there still people like Valentine left? Who truly care about love, and love only?

Luckily there are. It looks like some lucky people inherited the romantic spirit of our forefather.

One of them goes by the name of Federico Hewson, founder of The Valentine Peace Project.
Trough his project, he invites people from all over the world to celebrate all faces of love and love’s greatest potential: Peace. On Inner-, Community and Global level.

Federico believes in the statement of poet Pablo Neruda, who said that poetry is an act of peace. Poetry explores the hidden knowledge and spiritual dimensions of life - "a little world built to convey something of the larger" (from The Poetic Imagination). It's an opportunity to listen to that small voice inside. In times of a suffering planet and a breakdown of old systems we can still hear the voices in our head to take notice of our deeper selves.

There isn’t a better way to celebrate peace and love, and connecting all three levels of peace, then sharing thousands of poems and flowers to passers to stimulate dialogue and reflection.

Even if you’re no Shakespeare, you can contribute by sending in your poem or go to the website and see if there are other ways in which you can be a part of the project.

We where very lucky that we could be a part of this project, announcing it in a peaceful way, by using GreenGraffiti®. So keep your eyes open when you are walking the streets, while quietly thinking about the right sentences for your love poem….

So here is to Love and Peace, hope you have a wonderful Valentines Day!