Divide & Conquer

Pardon if my entry is wrought with typos... My arms are still shaking from my first pre-wedding workout.

As Larissa mentioned in her previous post, in order to not go crazy and accomplish more in a short amount of time, we decided to sort of "divide and conquer" on some of the research that goes into many of the major components of our wedding.  She took lead on photographers, it was my job to find someone to marry us.

The internet really is a wonderful thing.  I shudder to think at how much more difficult all of this would be without the world wide web.  By simply Googling "Rochester NY wedding officiant" I was provided with an adequate range of choices.  Getting married outside in nature rather than in a house of worship offers us many more choices than a traditional religious-based ceremony.  We knew what we did not want, and we knew we wanted choices and flexibility, but beyond that it was sort of up in the air.  I found websites for a few officiants who looked super-flexible as to what they would include in their ceremonies, and who would travel to the Finger Lakes.  As responses started flowing in to my inbox I realized officiants must be one of the first things people book, as many had no availability for our date that was only 6 months in advance.

One of the first I contacted, however, said she could perform a ceremony as late as 2:30 pm on our targeted date.  After a few negative responses from other options we decided to set up a Skype call with her.  Unfortunately, the tech gods did not smile on us and the officiant couldn't get her mic to work, so it turned into a simple phone call rather quickly.  Reverend Kris has been doing this for many years and has a super-cool website with a TON of options of readings, poems etc, along with a basic outline of how the ceremony should/could flow.  It's up to us to sort of "plug in" readings and ceremonies that we like to make it all truly our own.  Then she'll take our draft, offer suggestions, and make it all flow together nicely.  Larissa checked out a ton of books from the library regarding wedding readings (who knew there were books full of just poems, quotes, sonnets, and readings on love and marriage?!).  So there's no shortage of possible material.

We're also looking at some sort of "unity ceremony" as well.  There's this handfasting thing that i had never heard of, but is really cool.  There are also ceremonies that involve pouring wine or sand together to signify marriage.

So now we're in the process of finding readings that are "us".  Good thing we've got some time.  Have any good ideas for quotes/readings/song lyrics?  Post them in a comment!

Check out Reverend Kris' website to see what we have to work with.

~T