This will likely not go into Whose Hearts are Mountains, but I wanted a writing exercise on alternatives to Valentine’s Day, mostly to understand the collective members (Archetypes)
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We sat around the Trees, of course, in the deep night. Through the dome, we could see stars; our only other illumination the faint glow of lights that ringed the edges of the dome’s spacious lawn. I looked around at the collective members: Estella with her dusky skin and musical voice; Davis, with his tight curls and stocky build; Summer’s impish face in shadow; Daniel, his tall lanky bulk next to me …

Mari, as always the apex point of the semicircle, sat with her back to the Trees. “Kirsten and Derek” — the pale twins with almost white hair who looked unworldly — “informed me that we hadn’t celebrated Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh, no!” Jude chuckled from a hidden perch in the tree. “Whatever shall we do?”

“You might recall,” Mari said repressively, “we …” She paused to think, and that in and of itself suggested secrets. “We have placed importance on rituals to celebrate and cement our heritage.”

A long silence ensued, the type where people turn to each other and silently ask, “What do you think?” and nobody has anything to say.

I decided to break the silence: “Valentine’s Day is a problematic holiday.”

“Why?” Estella wondered aloud.

Another mystery — why did this group regard Valentine’s Day as a mystery? In the years before the Battles, the media was full of Valentine’s Day ads exhorting consumers to remember their loved one with increasingly expensive items. Could they have missed that? Were they refugees from a monastery?

“The trouble is that,” I explained as if my audience had never heard of Valentine’s Day except in name only, “the holiday celebrates romantic love, love between two bonded partners. It had become a competition over the last century, with the price of the presents representing how much you ‘love’ a partner, and disdain toward people who didn’t have a partner.” Having never had a partner, I’d noticed that last point keenly. “I’m not sure that’s what you want to introduce to the collective. It fosters jealousy and inequality.”

A long silence ensued. “Why did — who would invent that kind of holiday where your happiness was at the expense of others?”

“That’s easy,” I shrugged. “People selling items meant to be romantic. To create a market where people will spend more.” Not for the first time, I wondered if the economic collapse of North America had its advantages.

“We don’t buy and sell,” Summer said, braiding a strand of her hair in silhouette. “Nor do we buy partners, really. I mean, Lilly and Adam are partners, but they don’t own each other …” Daniel nodded his head, and I wondered about Lilly and Adam’s story.

“Ok,” I jumped in. This was folklore. This was what I was good at. “What is your notion of love?”

“Love?” Jude inquired, hanging from a branch.

“Love?” a less-familiar voice at the other end of the semi-circle echoed. “Hmm … I guess love is when you set down your wants to take care of another’s needs.”

“Love is training your eyes outside yourself to the people around you,” Estella intoned.

“Love is allowing the other into the pattern of your life,” Daniel rumbled beside me.

The answers were what I would have expected from a communal society — had these folks always been communal? Were their parents communal? How could that happen without anthropologists like me discovering them and writing about them?

“Ok,” Mari — the premiere Native American anthropologist and my mother’s mentor — called out. “How do we show love?”

As the residents around me fell silent, I took out my notebook, waiting for the answers this unique group had to offer.