[Thespiritexpress] Let's Get Married!

[Toni Bernbaum]

This poem says it all……such an honor to have received it then……..and again and again…..each time
I read it, it enters more deeply. 
It speaks to your own true knowing of what it takes to sustain, maintain and keep the sparks flying
in the adventure of relationship.  Your poems are such inspiration, Riante!  You are indeed a treasure
in our lives.  With so much love and aloha!  T

> On Mar 7, 2023, at 8:30 PM, Riantee Rand via Thespiritexpress <thespiritexpress at lists.mcn.org> wrote:
> 
> The poem I wrote for Toni and Ron when they were about to get married.
>> 
>> Holy Marriage – After Annie Lclerc
>>  
>> For our most ancient dream to come alive
>> let’s not flee from commitment
>> but have the heart to face it
>> for it is the true quest of life
>> its highest challenge and accomplishment.
>> Refusing to take a vow is not freedom;
>> free are those who having faced the nature of love
>> its chasms, empty passageways,
>> its triumphs and elations without any illusion,
>> embark on the ocean,
>> determined to live the adventure at all cost,
>> refusing neither the victories
>> nor the wreckages,
>> ready to lose everything they own
>> and willing to gain in the end what’s invaluable,
>> the kept promise,
>> the oath honored without deceit
>> in the meeting of two lives.
>>  
>> There is a time for every season.
>> The inebriation of uncommitted ways
>> is fun to experience for a while and it should be,
>> but when the time for it has passed, it become lifeless.
>> The real tragedy for us would be
>> not to attempt the impossible,
>> to always remain within our own limits.
>> In marriage we constantly show each other those limits,
>> test them,
>> finding each other in our most hidden places,
>> bringing out the secret and shadowy parts
>> of one another.
>>  
>> In each true meeting something unforeseen is present.
>> Every time we love we recreate completion,
>> and save our world from the absurd.
>> Love will be reborn through you
>> because it has only one goal, itself:
>> once more, through you, it gains existence.
>> You are called to love and to help,
>> so that love and service
>> can be of this world.
>>  
>> What makes marriage so illuminating
>> is that it’s one of the relationships
>> that truly puts us to work.
>> Obstinate, undeterred from its purpose,
>> marriage is the pursuit through others
>> of our own truth,
>> our authentic voice.
>>  
>> In the intimacy of bodies and souls
>> we access the reality of the lover.
>> We mix our breaths, our juices
>> when sharing our days and nights,
>> and in this way are entrusted to each other.
>>  
>> There are such things as laws of being.
>> They decree the planetary course,
>> orchestrate the music of the spheres,
>> they arrange the corolla around the vibrant heart of the flower,
>> they give a pulse to the sap
>> that rises from the roots into the tree,
>> they create, for the child, a caring environment in its mother’s womb.
>> These same laws bind the beloved
>> to one another,
>> they breathe within them.
>> Once they have immersed themselves
>> in the glow of sacredness,
>> this in spite of their squabbles, of their severances,
>> of whatever they say, think or do,
>> these laws live within them.
>>  
>> Our most ancient dream comes alive:
>> shared life, share food and drink
>> and which each taste, with each sip,
>> a certainty: I am loved.
>> Let us shout with this oldest of dream,
>> let us weep and laugh with it,
>> tremble with it,
>> let us dance and embrace it
>> this ancient dream:
>> to be loved without any motive.
>> even undeserving,
>> to be loved with no condition, no merit.
>> To be loved,
>> easy as that.
> 
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