Below is a segment from this fantastic, low-key marriage ceremony in rustic Wagner’s Cove.
D and D, you lived apart for nearly a year. You missed one another all the time. One night, D heard these lyrics, which emulated how she felt about D. These lyrics reflect the depth of mutual affection: “Everybody let me tell you ’bout my love brought to you by an angel from above fully equipped with a lifetime guarantee. Once you try it, I am sure that you’ll see…Without love…There’s no reason to live without you. What would I do with the love I give All my lovin’ to you I’ll be giving. And I promise, yes I’ll do, as long as I’m living.”
Today, you formally bind your lives. You will never be apart in spirit. Thus, your “happiness floats.” It does not need a formal support system. In the words of “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records . . .Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.
Wedding Officiant in NYC and the Hudson Valley 