We were at a wedding yesterday which felt like strange timing. Monday isn’t the predictable choice for nuptials – but we’re just recently arrived back in the UK and still feeling a little jetlagged anyway so unexpected and topsy-turvy suits us fine.
The wedding was held at a large house in the countryside, and it wasn’t until we arrived that we realized that we’d been there before. The grounds have lovely woods and an interesting walk which leads past a circle of neolithic 
standing stones. Not a big site or in any way famous, and you just come upon it all of a sudden, right beside the path. Beyond the stones, you can see the roofs of nearby houses through the trees and there must be a road nearby, too, because there is also the sound of traffic. If it weren’t for the archaeological signage, you might walk right on by. But there it is. Eight stones standing in an open ring since about 2000 BC. Contemporaries of the Minoan at Crete and maybe Moses. And a reminder that people have been in this very place a long, long time before we walked this way.
The country house in the middle of the grounds is Georgian, dating back to 1777. It’s a grand sort of place, all Grecian columns, oil paintings and orangeries, and it feels perfectly old and opulent. Old in a different way from the standing stone, of course, but old, too. Especially through Canadian eyes.
But the wedding itself felt fittingly new.
Sometimes when couples write their own vows, it seems they forget to includes any actual vowing and instead fill the space with flowery language which means I love you. But these were real promises – to be patient, to explain, to be present, to protect. Words born of this couple’s life together and their specific hopes to offer each other a strong foundation for their new shared life. It’s beautiful to see how ritual can be so personally crafted.
At weddings, you think about weddings. The last wedding you were at. The worst wedding you were at. And the best. Your own wedding. The weddings you weren’t at – by history, by choice, by mistake or by happen stance. Your parents’ wedding. Yesterday was my parents’ anniversary, so I was thinking a lot about about them. And I was also thinking about my Blue’s wedding – maybe we’ll celebrate that one some twenty years from now.
Rituals have a way of making us think in spirals. When we mark personal milestones together, we come closer to all these distant moments. Something old and something new. I like to think that life with all its growth and change can’t rightly be imagined as tree rings – disconnected and distinct. I think it’s more like open circles or like ferns unfurling, a widening spiral, perhaps, that repeats shapes and forms within itself, each point on the curve connected and complimentary even in the extending movement of growth.
After the wedding, we stayed stayed the night in our friends’ home and then headed back to Edinburgh to begin the work of preparing for our move to Cardiff. There are still so many boxes to fill, goodbyes to say, and sleep to catch up with somewhere in between. I want to tell you about the rest of our trip to Ottawa and about our visit to the National Gallery and about the Janet Cardiff installation there, but I think that will wait until next week when time might just open up a little more.
