An Anniversary Message

It has been a great pleasure for our family to get to know Russ and Gina Garcia in the last years. I wrote of them in a previous blog. This amazing couple have been married for 56 years. Out of respect for the love they have shared and obviously continue to share for each other, I decided to read out a poem at the end of the Voices from the North interview I did with them in 2007. The poem was the famous one of Khalil Gibran's, On Marriage, from The Prophet.

Afterwards, Gina and Russ told me of how they had read two poems out loud at their wedding all those years before. The two poems were both from The Prophet, On Marriage and On Love. I was more than somewhat taken aback because those were the very two poems read out loud during the simple wedding ceremony Lucia and I had at our home in the hinterlands of New Mexico in 1990. (Can you hear the theme song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind?)

The Garcias went on to explain that they remarry each year by renewing their wedding vows with each other.

Today, February 25, 2009 is a new moon and it is Lucia's and my 19^th anniversary. For the second straight year we have honoured each other and our relationship by reading out loud just a few words from our wedding and the two poems from The Prophet that featured so prominently at our simple winter new moon wedding ceremony in New Mexico 19 years before.  The words are:

Marriage is an act of faith and a personal commitment, as well as a moral and physical union between two human beings. It involves the construction of the love and trust of those two individuals into a single growing energy of spiritual life. Marriage should be a life-long consecration to the ideal of loving kindness, backed with the will to make it last.

We read in The Prophet:

True love gives nothing but of itself

And takes nothing but from itself.

Love does not possess, nor would it be possessed

For love is sufficient unto love.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself,

To awake at dawn with a winged heart and

Give thanks for another day of loving.

To rest at noon and meditate love's ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude,

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart

And a song of praise upon your lips.

I've just checked and I can see that the friend who put the words of our ceremony together and who legally presided over the wedding had taken the liberty of altering Gibran's original words to suit the occasion. I trust that you receive succour from their beauty nonetheless. I can honestly say that these words are more meaningful to Lucia and me with each turning of this beautiful planet around the sun.

Marriage remains a sacred commitment to us. For a previous blog I wrote on marriage which contains Gibran's words on the same subject click here.

Love and blessings,
John
http://www.insearchofsimplicity.com/