Something to be said about love
Being the productive people that we are, we checked one more thing of the to-do list this weekend and hashed out all the details for the wedding ceremony.
We had a stack of readings to go through and three sample wedding ceremonies: “traditional, “contemporary,” and “contemporary non-religious” to pick from. We didn’t like any of the three ceremonies so we made our own by combining bits and pieces from each and filling in the blanks with our own words. We call it “traditional contemporary medium-religious.”
We picked out three readings (more than typical, but since it isn’t a full religious ceremony we need to beef it up a bit) which will be read by our lovely readers. (Hi readers!) There were so many awesome readings to pick from and a few of our favorites didn’t make the cut, so I’ll share them here.
This is an excerpt from “The Velveteen Rabbit” by Margery Williams. We love it. But I think that it is best read, not heard. To hear it, I think just provokes a “What the hell???” reaction from the listener.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Isn’t it so true?
Here’s the other favorite. It just doesn’t seem appropriate for a wedding ceremony but it is spot-on.
“While exclusionary interest in one other human being, which is what we call courtship, is all very exciting in the stages of discovery, there is not enough substance in it for a lifetime, no matter how fascinating the people or passionate the romance.
The world, on the other hand, is chock full of interesting and curious things. The point of the courtship — marriage — is to secure someone with whom you wish to go hand in hand through this source of entertainment, each making discoveries, and then sharing some and merely reporting others. Anyone who tries to compete with the entire world, demanding to be someone’s sole source of interest and attention, is asking to be classified as a bore. “Why don’t you ever want to talk to me?” will probably never start a satisfactory marital conversation. “Guess what?” will probably never fail.”
The above deserves to be credited to someone, though I do not know who. Oh well.
You’ll have to actually show up at the wedding to hear the ones that did make the cut.
We also chose our ceremony music this weekend. Suffice to say it is original : ) No Canon in D for this bride.