Love Transformed: Exploring the Power of Change

The experience of love, when it hits you that you have found “ the one”, can change your life in an instant. “ What a difference a day makes” says the song – and it’s true: it is the feeling that gets you first; it is certainly the heart, not the head processing this.
Everything is brighter, richer, fuller when you are buzzing along with (especially new-found) love. Clearing rain is a metaphor often used for re-birth, a clean canvass for the emergence of emotions and possibilities … this simple anonymous poem captures this wonder – called “ Renewal”:

The rain had ceased to fall,
new light gave new colour
to leaves and songs of birds.

You quietly entered the room,
softly your arms entwined me

And sunshine followed rain,
new love gave new colour
to leaves and songs of birds.

In his “ A Marriage”, Mark Twain uses a mathematical metaphor for the enrichment of union:

A marriage.....
makes of two fractional lives
a whole,
it gives to two purposeless lives
a work, and doubles the strength
of each to perform it,
it gives to two
questioning natures
a reason for living,
and something to live for,
it will give a new gladness
to the sunshine,
a new fragrance to the flowers,
a new beauty to the earth,
and a new mystery to life

I could imagine the first poem read at the beginning of the ceremony, and Mark Twain’s right at the end – the first about the power of the beloved to transform, the second about the evolution of the relationship to marriage and its potential.