Our kind of wedding
Neither of us wanted a big wedding. Anna and I wanted to focus on the marriage more than the wedding. We were planning to elope to Costa Rica. In hindsight, we are very thankful that we decided to share our celebration with a very special group of friends and family.
There were 13 of us on board. The boat was a surprise to most of the guests. They were just told to meet at a nice pub. We paraded them through a beautiful waterside park that would have served nicely as a wedding site. After a few pictures, we continued down to the pier and boarded the boat. Anna’s “procession” down the pier escorted by her sister Louise was perfectly impromptu. Then we headed out into the Sydney harbor.
We found a quiet spot in Neutral Bay and had a brief ceremony officiated by Subhana, a woman I had met at a meditation retreat in India 10 years earlier. Anna and I didn’t write many of the words, but we chose them all carefully from multiple sources. Why re-invent the wheel when someone else had already suggested: “Marriage is the joining of two lives, the mystical, physical, and emotional union of two human beings who have separate families and histories, separate tragedies and destinies. It is the merging and intermeshing not only of two bodies and two personalities, but also of two life stories. Two individuals, each of who has a unique and life-shaping past, willingly choose to set aside the solitary exploration of themselves to discover who they are in the presence of one another.”
After the ceremony, we headed back into the harbor for celebratory toasts and a magnificent sunset. The boat dropped us off near the famous opera house and we dined at Cafe Sydney overlooking the Bridge and the Opera House. The food and wine were magnificent, but the real joy for me was sharing the experience with close friends and family. That being said, Anna and I were both happy to fly off to New Zealand the next morning.
We had never had a week alone together. We knew we were appreciating it as it was happening, but like many of the magical pictures we took, the magnitude of what we were experiencing together took some time to fully understand.
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