When I got Kyla’s wedding graduate post, I thought both that it was deceptively simple, and exactly right. So, just over a year later, here is Kyla meditating on what they reached for when planning their wedding, how they let their values shape the celebration, and how that feels a year later.
I’ve been thinking about how our wedding shaped our marriage, but first I want to go backwards to the summer of 2008 when my Uncle and Aunt got married and describe how their wedding shaped our marriage. During their outdoor ceremony, it began to rain, not just misting, but a steady downpour! Despite this fact all 250 of their guests, because they loved the couple so much and because they were so happy the couple was getting married, sat in the rain and watched. The whole ceremony! In the rain! Everyone was soaked! Afterward I said, “I want to have a community where people are so happy and excited to see us get married that they will sit through a rainstorm to see our wedding.”
When we sat down to think about our wedding we wanted our wedding and our relationship to reflect who were at the time, but to also reflect our hopes and dreams for who we wanted to be as a couple in the future. Who we were at the time is reflected in the whimsy, the colors, and the use of wood, the pie, and the pig roast.
Who we hoped to be was also there but it may or may not show in our photographs: We hoped to find that community my aunt and uncle had. We hoped to honor other peoples’ time, creativity and dreams. We hoped to inspire and support the people around us.
One way we did this was that we delegated creative aspects of the wedding to our talented family members and giving them control over the project. (The invitations, the music, the decorations, etc.) We tried to give people who to be involved jobs that we thought they would love.
Our wedding was almost a year ago (August 1, 2009) and that is really how we tried to live our first year of marriage.
Photos: Mark Frohna Wedding Photography
