Vowing to Be Green Together
Mar 15th, 2007 by Jenny
Writing vows for a wedding ceremony turns out to be a very creative business.
A few quick google searches bring up lots of ideas for readings, blessings, funny quips and solemn sayings.
Try searching ‘wedding readings’ or ‘wedding ceremony ideas’ if you want to see for yourself!
Phil and I want our ceremony to follow the green theme a little bit and have included a couple of readings that focus on the natural world and how we are looking forward to living in it together. The ‘Apache wedding blessing’ is very nice, and there are some lines in the ‘Song of Solomon’ about the world being a beautiful garden in which the two lovers go forth. A morning spent searching for popular wedding readings was actually quite interesting.
So now the ceremony is written - our parents will be giving readings and we will be giving each other vows, some about our commitment to each other, some about the things we love each other for, and some about the way we hope to live. Living carefully and appreciating the world is important to us. Phil is still toying with an idea that we should vow to make each other bacon sandwiches, but apart from that our ceremony is almost complete.
The Christian centre who asked to see our humanist ceremony have said they like it very much and feel it is fair to all religions, which I am pleased about. One of the things I like about the idea of humanist ceremonies is that they can be made to suit weddings where people of different religions will be attending and can include everyone!
The Christian centre are now very happy for us to use their field for the wedding. However, their field is a quagmire. I suspect that this time next year, when the wedding is due to be held, it will be deep in mud exactly as it is now and I don’t think we will be able to use it. The field we had previously booked was on well-drained sand, but most other fields in the area are on lower ground and clay soils like this new one.
We have just about exhausted all the local field possibilities for our wedding venue now. Things are getting a bit desperate! It’s back to the venue drawing board. Perhaps another search of halls in the area will turn up something new…
I am reading your plans with interest as me and my othe half would like an outdoors humanist wedding followed by a BBQ, but I cannot seem to find an outdoor space to hold it on!
Hi Liz
Good luck finding a space - a bbq sounds like a great idea! There is a discussion going on about this in the forum at the moment - I have just been explaining to Roslily what my venue plans are. She, like you, would like to hold her ceremony outside! I suggested approaching schools. What time of year are you having the wedding?
I will write a new blog entry on this topic in the next few days too so let me know what you think…
Jenny
Hey, it’s great that other people are doing this - we’re doing the exact same thing (humanist wedding in a field, followed by BBQ) this summer. Conveniently for us, my parents have a field we can use. If you don’t have a venue, you might want to just try asking around - you may just find someone with some space somewhere. There’s no reason why a wedding should damage a venue - in fact it’s likely that’d you’d be able to improve a semi-disused area (in our case, we had a group of friend come over to help move some old building materials and firewood - so the area is clear for the first time in years).
We like to do our own thing and I’m hoping we’ll have something tasteful that’s still a bit of a backlash against the overly lavish and formulaic weddings that seem to happen these days. All the weddings I’ve been to have been lovely, but they generally seem to be indistinguishable from one another and always include some kind of dull, tense bit in a church. It’ll be good to get away from that!
One thing we are doing is buying rather than renting some of the essential gear - including a big tent (20′ x 40′) - that way we can set up a good few days in advance and be sure that at least some of what we need will definitely be available. If you have the space and you can use the venue for a little longer than just the day, I’d recommend this approach - it’s certainly cut the stress for us as we know we’ll cope even if it rains.
Best of luck to both of you