Wedding readings

I had a question from a reader a few weeks ago about using not necessarily religious wedding readings….while my readings are all planned out due to the Catholic ceremony, I had researched these a while back and thought they were really beautiful, so I thought I would share them with all of you.

Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings
Confucius (551-479 BC)

Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings.
Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.
Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,
There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.
But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts,
Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,mysweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the rot and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

from A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets ad the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, walking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once.

From The Love Poems of Marichiko
Marichiko (Kenneth Rexroth) (1905-1982)

You ask me what I though about
Before we were lovers.
The answer is easy.
Before I met you
I didn’t have anything to think about.

Who is there? Me.
Me who? I am me. You are you.
You take my pronoun,
And we are us.

Love me. At this moment we
Are the happiest
People in the world.

From Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is – solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.