How to Begin the Beguine:Getting started on your ceremony

Let me stop you here. With all the planning you have to do once you choose an officiant/celebrant the crafting of the ceremony itself is the officiant's responsibility. You get to give them your ideas, set the tone and nature of the ceremony and they should be able to take it from there. I try to put my couples at ease when it comes to the ceremony. It is my great pleasure to get to know them so I can create a ceremony that truly reflects their unique love story. I welcome as much or as little input from the couple as they want to give. Once it becomes a chore for any of us it is time to take a break. It's the quality of the energy that will effect the outcome of the ceremony as much as anything.  

So how do you pick an officiant? Good question. ( But guess what? I've got to go see the stars walk the Red Carpet so I will go into that later. For best picture I'm torn between Colin Firth's perseverance, In The King's Speech and just about everyone's athenticity in The Fighter.)  

Speaking of stars if you are looking for a wedding planner plus Chad Michael Peters can do it all from the over-all design, to the flowers and the photography and with such an eye for beauty he will take your breath away. Chad was the planner for the Bohemian Beach Wedding featured on my website as well as the person who designed my website with the help of his able and beautiful assistant, Bethany.

My husband is calling me to come see who just arrived.....More later

Kathleen

Creating a Ceremony

"Love has to spring spontaneously from within; it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together; but while love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened through love itself." Meher Baba

Like any creative process or any story worth telling, a wedding ceremony must have an beginning, middle and end. In ceremonial ritual and rites of passage there must be an alchemy of containment and freedom, holding the space yet allowing sacred spontaneity. This is the first time I've ever tried to put words to what happens during a wedding ceremony because like love, this phenomenon can in no way be forced nor does it ever help to become self-conscious about such things. Aware, yes, self-conscious-no.

" Love is essentially self-communicative;those who don't have it catch it from those who have it. " Meher Baba

                       (photo of Sean Lennon catching some love from Meher Baba while shopping at Blumeria )

Update on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 5:09PM by Soulful Wedding Ceremonies

Beginnings:Ten years ago, I was asked to officiate my first wedding. After talking on the phone briefly the wedding couple and the bride's father and step-mother arrived on my doorstep. I remember ushering them all out to my deck and serving them cream cheese and olive sandwiches while we talked about the upcoming wedding. As you can imagine I was a bit nervous, I hadn't really expected the parents to be there. I already knew I would love Kathy and Pete because when they called and asked about my wedding experience I said they would be my first. Then I added that for all I knew, I may officiate like Mr. Bean in the film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. They said, in that case, I would be perfect. So we ate our sandwiches, chatted and pretty soon we were having a wonderful time. Curly, Kathy's father was a hoot and Judy, the step-mom, fell in love with the Meher Baba quote that I've been quoting in this entry and decided she would open the wedding by reading the entire discourse.  Hundreds of weddings later I always open with some part of that discourse such as,

"True love is unconquerable and irrresistble. It goes on gathering power and spreading itself until it tranforms everyone it touches." 

More about beginnings soon

'Beguine' means the moment love begins

The Wedding Arch-The Sacred Threshold- Begin the Beguine

    Many of you have asked about the wedding arch featured on my website. This arch, also a chuppah for this fusion wedding, was constructed over the course of the summer by the bride's brother. He collected driftwood from Eastham beaches near First Encounter Beach, where in September his sister's wedding would take place.  Before the ceremony, as the sky turned a steely grey and the pools formed by the retreating surf reflected the evening sky, the wedding planner, decorated the arch in preparation of the bride and groom's arrival. As the the family and friends gathered, one of the honored guests gave into the pull of the tides, and ran out on to the sand flats and began to sway and swirl.  I never got a chance to ask if his hilarious, yet haunting dance was some ancient Marin County fertility rite or inspired by the Sufis.

   The entrance of the bridal party, the processional, was down a long steep set of wooden steps, starting on a high bluff and ending at the beach. The attendants were goddesses, the mother of the bride, an Italian beauty,garnered a few whistles, one no doubt from the dancing man. The bride appeared at the top of the stairs on her father's arm. This is always the moment where I look at the groom. The expression on his face, as he gazed up at his bride, told me everything about the nature of their love. Ben was nearly having an out of body experience. It was as if his mere physical form, could not contain his supreme happiness at the sight of his Kathleen. 

Two Hearts

I'm not sure this image came up before. On Valentine's Day when I was furiously working on my weddings and being all officious I remembered that it was Valentine's Day. My husband had brought me three gorgeous bunches of tulips, white, pink and red. He always refers to Valentine's Day as a Hallmark Holiday but he still does something romantic just for me. So I sent him this image of Two Hearts by Mark Chester with a poem.(The print of the photograh is available at the Addison Gallery in Orleans.) Love starts at home. Every time a couple shares their vows it is a chance to renew our own ...it sounds a bit Hallmarky but rather that than snarky...Here's the image but not the poem. That was just for the two of us.  

......Love is an art

Mae West said it best. "Love is not an emotion or an instinct it is an art." I've been thinking about the creative process and the seasons of love. Winter the necessary fallow time the expectant repose ready to sprout into verdant dizzying spring and then sundrenched days of summer and the glorious colors and shades of autumn. The ebb and flow of life and love reminds me of the reading by Ann Morrow Lindberg in her book of reflections Gift from the Sea.  

Gift from the Sea Ann Morrow Lindberg

"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."