Romance

I was thinking about romance. It entered my mind via stealth, rather than in any real obvious way. And then it was there as both word and feeling. But I couldn't quite pin it down and maybe it can't really be pinned down, and that's what so magical about it. Oscar Wilde wrote To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance and maybe that's so, but it wasn't this kind of romance I was thinking of, or was it?  I was watching television last night in a dreamy state (I'd woken too early that morning and I was by this time in a soft stupor, open, vulnerable) heard the presenter mention the romantic poets Wordsworth and Blake and their desire to address intuition and emotion, rather than logic. I remembered my blog post last year called 'All is risk' and how my emotions are almost always linked with the natural world and in that case the sound of rain outside and condensation on my kitchen window. Romance here distilled in minute drops of water; each fragile spherical mass a particle of thought, a strange ectoplasm - romance yes, but in a most unusual way.  My tired mind probed minute aspects of the week to discover when the romance seed was planted. Since I felt ill for much of the time, I wondered whether it was my vulnerability to the world that had made my inner body call to be lifted up and away from the  commonplace, to escape to something more, to happen on an epiphanous moment - but is that romance?  The more I think about it, the more I realize romance (or the thought of it) arises through external provocation, which in turn produces internal arousal.  It has entered my psyche and eats the moments with a voracious hunger. I always thought I was a realist, perhaps I'm a romantic?