All the men, ascending from the backyard, stomping and clapping in unison. Yai-dee-dai-dai-dai, yai-dee-dai-dee-dai-dee-dai. The ancient chant echoed off the walls. My dad snuck in yelps, overwhelmed with joy and surprise in equal measure. He’d never felt such a moment either.
Jodi and Elydé’s faces took turns looking back at me with a glee more pure than any Christmas morning excitement. This was a magic that couldn’t be bought nor wrapped, packaged under a tree.
The women all barricaded in front of me. Crying. Laughing. Yai-dee-dai-ing with their cameras in hand, trying to capture the altered state in our living-room-turned-wedding-venue.
I couldn’t see them through my veil, through the sheer curtain wall being held up by Jodi and Elydé. Only saw later in photos and videos that I wasn’t dripping tears of joy alone in that moment of heightened wildness. We were all there, pulsing together, emotions writhing through us like a singular hive of bees, dancing and singing our way towards euphoria.
I had the best seat in the house. The one that couldn’t see. Take away a singular sense, and the rest grow more and more intense.
The floors began to quake. Thud, clap. Thud, clap. Thud, clap. Faster, stronger, like an accelerating storm.
Time slowed to near stillness and electric magnetism charged every corner, every crevice of the room. The fresh mascara on my eyes fell in faint water lines down my cheeks, my fingers quickly catching the mess of ecstasy. Laughter and tears smeared into one another. Salty joy puddled on my tongue.
A light begun to pierce through the barricade of my beloveds. Thud… clap… thud… clap… the rhythm softened, and simultaneously, roars rattled the ceiling like a crescendoing cymbal. The moment in the song that seems like the ending, but is actually the middle.
The sheer curtain dropped. The room hushed. Seann lowered his fists that had been cheering proudly in the air, fell to his knees in front of me. There was no catching the mess of my ecstasy now. I was a singular puddled tear in his eternal gaze of love. Together, we were one.
“Hello, my beloved. Hello, my goddess.” Greetings that could have been uttered in the era of Aphrodite, or a thousand years into the future.
“I am so so blessed to meet you on this day, in this moment, surrounded by these beloved people. I couldn’t be happier,” he spoke proudly. “In all the infinity and all the expanse of the endless universe, across time and space, this is where I want to be.”
Our hands squeezed together the way bodies press passionately into one another, trying to erase the empty space. I had no words. Just sweet salt water streams flowing through the riverbeds of my overjoyed face creases.
“I am so so blessed. Thank you. Thank you,” he whispered, kissing the tops of my hands one by one.
Then in a sudden but right-on-time urge, he pulled me to my feet and hollered for all the crowd to hear and see.
“I AM GOING TO UNVEIL YOU NOW! In front of all these people!”
I laugh-cried, “With mascara running down my face!”
“You are so beautiful in this gorgeous gorgeous dress. You and our beautiful baby,” he reassured me.
“Are you ready?” he looked to me “I’M READYYYY!,” he belted to the God’s. “Oooowwwlllllll!”
Our beloved wolf pack howled in response, a chorus of various soaring notes, and then quieted again. The art of animal knowing.
Seann’s olive green eyes glowed. A last tender moment before the moment we’d all converged for.
He lifted my veil above my head, let it fall down my back like locks undone after the longest journey home.
A guttural, mmmmhm, growled through him. Our pack chuckled. As did I. He leaned in for a kiss. I received his lips, but only for a moment. For this wasn’t even our official ceremony, just the badeken, and I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to kiss yet. Besides, erotic electricity traveled far beyond our lips. We were transfixed in a moment of communion. There was nothing we could do, or not do, to undo our union.
The Rabbi offered a huddle-like hug to us both, then guided us and our parents upstairs for an intimate blessing ritual before we made official our marriage.
I don’t think life is meant to only ever be this sort of cinematic climax, a romantic dream come true. I don't believe that marriage is happily ever after once you recess from the altar, the chuppah, the dreamtime where you cast a spell for eternal love and partnership.
But I do believe each of us are worth the most audacious spells and rituals we can dare imagine for ourselves. Worth piercing the veil of the ordinary, expanding into the possibilities of extraordinary visions.
It’s not an obligation, nor a requirement for a happy life. Your existence isn’t less valuable, less blessed, if you prefer the simpler, quieter yeses.
But there is a difference between gentle satisfaction, and insecure settling.
Between deep nourishment with the ordinary beauty of a life, and starving yourself from the risk of wanting more.
Wanting costs something. It costs courage. A willingness to put your heart out there. To define your bigger desires and then draw a sword on the old contracts and identities that couldn’t imagine allowing you to trot that valiantly into a new, more ecstatic era.
But this marriage… this baby in my belly…
Both things have me renegotiating more than ever before who I’ve been and how I’ve been living.
I say this next part with the deepest joy, and also a slight hinge of anxiety:
Seann and I are both holding a single bold question as we cross into a totally new life stage.
A question that flips the table of convention.
A question you could hold, too, in any or everything you do.
What are our most taboo desires, and how can we fully follow them?
It’s what led us to decide to have a teeny tiny house wedding. To only invite 60 people. To save the money that we could have spent on a high-end wedding, and instead, both take 5 months off work when our baby comes tumbling into the world.
It’s what prompted Seann to quit his secure, high-paying job of 8 years, and leap into the unknown.
It’s what’s pushing me towards my writing in a way that terrifies me, like all big love does.
It’s what’s guiding our postpartum vision for a very quiet, restful beginning.
It’s what’s inspiring naughty fantasies that feel possibly impossible and totally out of reach, like traveling to Italy and India, Portugal and Scotland, in the second half of our baby’s first year of life.
I write a lot about marrying your soul’s aliveness. About the way Big Love meets you in proportion to your valor.
And yet, it’s not easy to become The One who can show up to life with that much trembling, feral commitment. To ravish your most rapturous vision… and leave the rest on the table.
It’s hard to break up with the alllllmoooost-gets-me-really-going-person… for the unknown of when or where Bigger Love will meet you there.
It’s hard to leave the stable soul-sucking career that you’re loved and admired for… for the death portal of reinventing your reputation and income.
It’s hard to release the habits and old energetic agreements that keep you entangled with a smaller version of yourself, more limited by fear and trauma.
I know because I’ve done all of these things, not over night, but over a decade+ of deep healing and wild ritualizing.
I’ve been married and divorced. I’ve been the CEO of a half-million dollar company… and at the funeral pyre of my professional identity. I’ve alchemized freeze, fight, flight and appease – individually, ancestrally, collectively.
I will face many more endings for the sake of my next beautiful beginnings.
And I hope that life continues to bless me with moments of true, genuine ecstasy in return. Where I am met by the Biggest Love I could ever imagine, stampeding toward me in ways I can’t even see.
I hope I continue to make the room. To hang in the void. To shout to the gods. This! Not that! I’m willing! I’ll do my part!
I hope you do, too.
You know, if you want to.
If ecstasy is calling your name.
If you want to claim the slowing of time, the presence of the divine, the holy moments that only come when you’re one with the vision your soul set out to make real.
Big love. Brazen trust.
xox,
Rachael
PS – If writing & creating & going bigger with your art in your career is part of what your soul is calling you to – and you wanna be in an intimate circle of other bold beloveds on the same expansive journey – hop on the waitlist for the Siren Coven. We don’t begin until the fall. I’ll notify you when it’s time to heed the call. ;) xo
Read this juste make me smile so big, and make my heart full of hope and love and joy. Thank you, and congrats for your wedding !
Huge congrats to you Rachael! Thank you for always inspiring us to dream and love bigger 💙💙💙