Speaking of Marriage

My college roommate got married last weekend!  

I have never seen anyone so excited to get married. It was life affirming to see such pure joy in two people's commitment. It made me feel proud to be married.

She is from Massachusetts and found an amazing place to get married, New Marlborough, in the Berkshires. The ceremony was in a meeting house that was built in 1771, and the reception and lodging was just down the street at the Gedney Farm, two old barns that have been converted. There was no TV, no cell reception, no wifi, no nothing. Just old friends, good people, and the excitement of two people coming together to spend the rest of their lives together. And peak foliage. Did I mention peak foliage? 

All together awesome sauce.

Sharing a Poem: Love and Marriage

For What Binds Us
by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down-
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest-

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

"For What Binds Us," by Jane Hirshfield from Of Gravity and Angels (Wesleyan University Press).