Gorgeous ones,

I’ve been finishing things off my 100 Things To Do in 2012 list like nothing else.

Surprisingly amazingly quickly.

I’m feeling like there must be something big coming that will claim my time instead for my dreams to be manifesting this quickly!

(No. No baby! A growth-spurt of my business-baby instead!)

One of my finishings is to finally edit down our wedding photos that our beautiful doula took and create a wedding album.

And I fell in love with one photo.

A photo that just said “Wedding” to me.

It wasn’t the two moments before we had bound together before others.

It was the moment, in the sea, alone.

You see, we’d gotten married in a court house the week before the wedding. Our dear mentor Ellanita wasn’t a court-registered celebrant, so we did the legal bits before. And it was funny and sweet. A wee roadtrip with my sister and my love’s cousin and her son to stand in an old white washed court house in Bowen and become Mrs Dawson.

And it wasn’t the moment we handfasted in front of others an hour before that either. I remember the smell of smudge, and Ostara’s joyful babbling as she koala-ed up and down me, and our hands were held together with lilac and lavendar flamed ribbons. I do remember how his eyes lit up, and how deeply we looked in each other’s eyes, and how I thought

“Wow, this man loves me so very deeply. I forget that, especially when we argue, but look. Look at the way he looks into my eyes. I know this is the right choice.”

And how my Dad cried over us, running over as soon as we were wed to sweep us both into a bear-ish cuddle and cry into your shoulders. “It was too much,” he said later.

“Just the way you two look at each other.”

But those weren’t the moments we married.

No, it was the moment we spread our wings down to the sea. My dad had swept Ostara into his arms, and my love and I left the tribes. I ran towards the ocean, arms outstretched, laughing, wild. And my love followed me, as he does. And we met in the water, in that same place where sea meets land, where he’d asked me to marry him three years before, in the same place we’d fallen in love on our very first date ten years to the day before.

And he pulled our wedding rings out of his pocket. They still hadn’t adorned our hands – Ellanita told us later she felt called to let us do our ring swaps later. And we washed them in the ocean water, and we planted them on each other’s fingers, making the promises in words that had never been rehearsed and instead came straight from our spirits. Simple, organic, true.

“I promise you we will always grow, we will always transform, we will always be becoming our best selves together,”

I tell him.

And I mean it. Cross my heart.

A rose gold ring engraved with an oak tree slips over his finger and there it has stayed.

And he tells me

“Yes. We will have an amazing life together.”

And my opal mermaid ring washes over my hand.

And we looked into each others ocean eyes, smiling, serious, there, witnessed by turtles and pelicans and sea eagles.

Together. Alone.

And that was the moment our photographer photographed us.

Making our truest vows to each other.

*

And it is only now, sorting back through all the photos, that I find that one.

And suddenly, I realise it is the photo I found years before.

A little mini dreamboard of what I wanted my wedding to look like.

It was lo-fi. No crazy wild Pinterest board here. Just a saved photo here, a journal page there, a skerric of a hand-drawn wedding dress.

The photo of a couple being married here was the one that sung to me the most.

The one that made me say:

Yes, that is marriage. That is what I want my wedding to be.

Here is the dream:

And here is the dream come true:

Thus marking off #14 on my Things To Do This Life List written many years before:

14. Hold the hands of my beloved on a beach and say *I do* while looking intensely into his eyes

I have no idea how these things work.

I just know they do.

Somehow, the path of our life takes us where we need to go:

through lessons and medicines great and at times painful,

so we can find our way home to love, to spirit, to ourselves,

to the dreams that are inside us,

waiting for the right moment, the right time, our right selves, to be birthed.

love,