Waves

It has been a ridiculously great year for Mr Corn and I; everything from his promotion, to my job change, to his brother getting married, our buying our first house, getting engaged, etc. yet we remain aware that these things come in waves. We certainly aren't trying to be pessimistic about how great everything has been, but we are trying to keep our feet grounded in the reality that there are many more great times as well as hard times ahead.

This has only been magnified by recent events in my family. What has been going on is cruel and excruciatingly personal and will directly affect many of the people who will attend our wedding. But you have to go on. The world isn't going to iron itself out into perfection because of our wedding day. We just have to celebrate it as the joyful occasion it is and try and keep our focus on that.

Below is the reading that Mr Corn and I have selected to be read at the ceremony. It is different from anything I have ever heard at a wedding before; I think because it not only explores the concept that marriage is so much more than the one time joy of a wedding, but because it expresses a truth of what can be expected, rather than the naïve hope of what can never truly be attained.

EXCERPT FROM "THE GIFT FROM THE SEA"
~ By Anne Morrow Lindbergh ~

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.