As the wedding documenting continues, here is one of my favorite parts: the vows we wrote and gave during our ceremony. Not much more to say, I’ll let the words speak for themselves.

Our Personal Vows

To Ash

I, Andrew, choose you, Ashley, to be my lawfully wedded wife, to be my partner, my companion, and my anchor through the adventures and seasons of life.
I vow to love you without reservation and above all others, to hold you in the highest esteem, to admire your character and beauty, to respect you as God’s creation, and to accept your love with a joyful heart.
I vow to provide for you in all the ways I am able. I vow to protect you, and to lead our household with courage and dignity. I vow to trust your intuition, and rely on your counsel so that wisdom, peace, and love prevail.
I vow to show you kindness and compassion, and to be generous in spirit.
I vow to support you and your passion for life. I will be a positive force for your tremendous spirit, encouraging you and your hopes.
I vow to cherish you as my wife, being thankful every day God let me choose you. I will search out new ways to show my love to you so that neither of us forget the love that has been the foundation for ours.
I vow to celebrate your joys and share your sorrows as long as we both shall live. From my hand to your heart, in the love of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, I thee wed.

To Ace

I, Ashley, choose you, Andrew, to be my lawfully wedded husband, to be my partner, my companion, and my iron through the adventures and plains of life.
I vow to love you without reservation, to honor you with all my mind and heart, to respect you as a spark of our Creator, and to accept your love with a joyful heart. I give you my trust as a provider, protector, and guide.
I vow to show you patience and grace; to turn to you and not on you in times of hardship; to remain tender and open to you through the difficulties of life.
I will work faithfully to inspire and challenge you to be the incredible person you are meant to be, and I commit to being an active force in your life: encouraging you to live generously and responsibly; praying for you and helping you to bear up under spiritual struggles; caring for your physical, mental, and emotional health; and positively reinforcing you and our family.
I will strive to entice you; to make passion and closeness a priority for all our days.
I vow to celebrate your joys and share your sorrows as long as we both shall live. From my hand to your heart, in the love of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, I thee wed.

Our Spiritual Vows

We vow to always keep you at the forefront of our lives — our greatest priority, the foundation of our love, our foremost goal. We will seek to honor and glorify you through our marriage – to stay tender to you and to one another, and open to your movements. We will work together to care for your children, both close to us and far. We promise to make the best use of the resources you’ve given us. We will strive to maintain humility — to deal with sin thoroughly in our lives, to value your edification over personal gain, and to trust you with obedience.

We take seriously the commission to be ministers of reconciliation. We promise to not give up on this marriage, to not take the easy way out: and to do all of this without the intentions of our personal glory, but rather to reflect your message of reconciliation with humanity. We vow to use our marriage and our bond to speak to the world of your boundless love, your forgiveness, and your constant movement towards mankind.

We carry the death of Christ within us, that his life would also be revealed through our bodies. We carry the love of the Father, the most powerful force that mankind can know. We carry the breath of the Spirit, that we may share true life with the world.

Our Communal Vows

Today, you have come here not simply to witness Andrew and Ashley’s union, but to take part in it. Your support has helped their relationship to flourish, and as their loved ones, you hold an important role in their marriage.

Will you surround this couple in love, strengthening their marriage and blessing this family created by their union? In times of conflict will you offer them the strength of your wisest counsel and the comfort of your thoughtful concern?
In times of joy, will you celebrate with them, nourishing their love for one another, for the world, and for God? Will you lift them up in prayer, and help them focus on a marriage that fulfills God’s intentions?

Please give your affirmation with, “We will.”

Part 1 – Part 2

So finally, it was time to dine! Once everyone had gathered at their tables, grabbed a few bowls of soup and stew. This music was fairly simple in its needs – set a happy tone, be pleasant to listen to if one focuses, and be easy to keep in the background if one is busy chatting.

I began gathering music that makes me happy – easy standards, sweet indie riffs, and some tried and true romantic songs. What developed is dinner music that’s light on the ears and buoyant to the mood. What more could you ask for?

Tracklisting after the jump.
there’s more to this article. keep reading…

Hey-oh tea readers! I’m popping in again just in time to drop off my annual Halloween music jam (mwahahaha).

I compiled most of this mix last year for our Halloween house party: it’s eighteen tracks to get the energy moving, but laced with dark and discordant undertones that befit the season. If you read The Fox is Black, you’ll recognize the genius Hellaween II mix by Punchy, which was largely the inspiration for this jam. Tracklist is after the jump, if you’d like to grab some of the tunes. (And fyi, there are some explicit tracks herein.)

Hope you enjoy it, and a very safe and happy Halloween weekend to you all!
there’s more to this article. keep reading…

Back in high school, Char and I had two fairly clear hopes for our future friendship. We dreamed that post-college we would move in together in a small apartment in New York, and we would own two dogs named Merry and Pippin. And for later in life, we joked about being old women together after our husbands died (not any kind of morbid wish, just going with the statistics that women live longer than men): we would, being crazy old women, travel to Ireland specifically to kiss the blarney stone.

Well, we’ve reached the first of those milestones, and things have turned out a little differently than our teenage selves had hoped. Instead of sharing an apartment, we live about two thousand miles apart. And instead of two dear pups, we both found something we hadn’t reckoned on — two incredible, lifelong companions in our respective hubs’.

Marriage has strengthened my appreciation of my girlfriends — and my appreciation for the steadfastness behind Char’s and my friendship. Happy birthday, my beautiful friend, and I look forward to many more to come! And life might not have given us one of our goals, but I’m still holding out for that blarney stone expedition.

Love,
Ash

All photos by Shannen Norman Photography.

There is a deep power in the act of creating — something that cuts down deep to the core of what it means to be a human being. Like giving birth or making art, there is something incredible in the leaning back, the taking in, and the first restful breath after you have furiously and wholeheartedly MADE something. The afterglow is especially poignant when you have created something to be proud of, and sometimes, those magical times (see birth and art), there is a profound awe at the thought that it was better than what you had known was possible.

The truth is that, whether we realize it or not, we are daily making decisions that create our lives. And at the incredible time of engagement, you have a choice for how to create your wedding and (even bigger) how that will influence, and even define, the unfolding of your marriage.

The fantastic thing about weddings nowadays is they call us to wake – to rise – to behold – to be conscious. Something new is coming, and we are invited to partake in making it.

Lots more to come… I feel very protective of this budding time, this new period with Ace and the foundation we’re laying. So it might take a little longer to get back on the blog horse. Thanks for the patience, dear ones.

Grace and peace, Ash

I don’t even know what I can say in the few minutes I have to type out this post, but I wanted to squeeze one last (albeit short and not very eloquent/organized) note in as a single lady.

I suppose that since it is Easter (Happy Easter, by the way!), and with a life-changing event happening in six days (oh hey wedding! how’s it going?), it’s appropriate to share some loose thoughts I have been working on over the last few months as they relate to spirituality and change.

Ace — thank you for the change that has been worked in my life through your ideals, your laughter, your love. You know this already, but it bears repeating: I can’t WAIT to marry you!

…………………………………….

Proposal: change is creation.

What if creation was not so much a singular point in time, but rather something that stretched much farther? What if God’s primary tool and method for creation was not earth or bone or anything physical (which only comprises a small part of who we are). What if his raw material of creation was time, a constantly changing and breathing and expanding and pulsing tapestry of life through ages?

What if, being knit in our mother’s wombs was only the beginning — what if our entire lives bear the fingerprints of the Lord as we grow physically, mentally, spiritually. (A newly birthed child is only the beginning of the person he will fully be someday.)

Therefore:

Life matters because it is the method by which we are created — from the earliest moment of our cellular evolution* to final breath. In light of this idea, age and decay are beautiful** — pain is part of it too. Are we invited to partake in our own creation of ourselves, our life, our world, as we enact change?

There is something more important going on here.

Stagnancy, lukewarmness, apathy are the enemies of a Christian. These are the places where our senses are dulled, and we are lulled into thinking that change (read: creation) is unnecessary and, in fact, unwanted.

Change (though at times difficult, heartbreaking, painful), bears witness to our continual creation. After all, the Lord does not shelter himself from these pains (see Good Friday and “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted“).

Change shows the molding of our lives by a Creator who can take good materials and make something better, and who can take bad materials and make something completely different. Change is the uneasy miracle that pushes us right back where we should be: nestled under the protection of our God.

*DNA — does our creation begin with our sequence (not just our personal sequence, but our human sequence)? Are we more one that we realize?

**How does our frame of reference affect what we view as “good” creation. Do you believe God created mold? Tooth decay? Bacteria? Are these good as well? Give it some thought.

It’s been a bit quiet around here, as my wedding output shifts into high gear, and Char continues soldiering on in the challenge of job finding.

We’ll be back around, hopefully soon, and hopefully with good things to share and good things to show. In the meantime, a preview of things to come.

xo.

Via the CCNY Library Archives

Make every day a time to tell the people in your life they’re loved.

Part 1 – Part 2
Music was an incredibly important part of our wedding day: it was the fabric that wove the hours together. My challenge and joy was to find melodies and lyrics that would guide us and our guests through the day (music, moreso than anything else, is one of our culture’s most recognized emotional and spiritual cues), that would also feel natural and at place for a wedding in the woods. These mixes are some of my favorite – they say so much about how I feel about life, about Andrew, and myself.

Our pre-ceremony mix was meant to provide a focus and a feel for the ceremony about to happen. As I’ve mentioned before, the party is wonderful but for Ace and I, the most important part of the day was the ceremony. We wanted to encourage our guests, with the mood set by the music as they arrived on site, to join us in our hopeful contemplation of this important step in our lives. The mix finishes out on a folkish note*, to ease into the performance of our fabulous live musicians, and ever talented friends, Joel Cathey and Faith Hefty.

I was standing up on the upper deck of our lodge when Faith and Joel began playing…I remember closing my eyes and listening to the ukulele strains of “Into the Mystic” floating up to my room as I paused and breathed for the first time that day. It was a deeply treasured moment when everything slowed down, for just a few seconds.

Unfortunately, the only recordings I have of their performance are these short videos shot by our Flippers. Have I mentioned them yet? I will soon!

*I included our songs for the seating of the grandparents and the processional at the end of this mix. They are both slightly edited down from their original songs (if you don’t have an editing software for music, get thyself a free one pronto! Goldwave saved my life in prepping the wedding music.)

After the introspective and contemplative songs that preceded our ceremony, it was time to celebrate! WE JUST GOT MARRIED, DIDJA KNOW?? Our post ceremony mix was full of songs that radiate joy and spark life, while still fitting in our easy-going feel of the day.

Tracklists are after the jump, in case indie singer/songwriters and old-school love songs are your jam.
there’s more to this article. keep reading…

Well after that rather bumtastic registry post…I think it’s now time for something a little different! And a little different = the hooooomygoodness, I can’t believe we’re so lucky to have these folks/vendors in our lives. Because seriously…I cannot WAIT for wedding day, and a good portion of that excitement is because I am so SO over the moon about our vendors! (Oh yeah, and the whole actual getting married thing…there’s that too.) Bwahaha. So without further ado, I give you part one of my love letters to our vendors.

Almost two years ago, I bookmarked the images below as examples of an interesting and beautiful engagement shoot. It was one of MANY bookmarked inspirational images: found, cataloged, archived, and promptly forgotten about.

Until a few weeks after the proposal, when Ace and I were trying to figure out whether we wanted to do an engagement photoshoot (my thoughts: so expensive! Ace’s thoughts: so cheesy! guess which one of us reads wedding blogs, eh?). I went digging through my photo archives in search of non-cheesy inspiration, saw this one, and thought, “huh. The concept is cool, but that’s actually a wicked awesome photo…whoever shot it knows what they’re doing! I wonder who took it?” And the hunt began.

By digging through the blog where I originally found the photo, I discovered a name: Shannen. “Cool,” went my internal dialogue. “But she probably lives in, like, Maine or something.”

Commence googling. “Huh. She works in the greater LA area!” Cue an internal rush of excitement. More googling. “She went to Cal Baptist!” More + more. “She’s a new photographer! And possibly more affordable!!”

Enter her personal photo blog. And cue my jaw literally dropping as I looked through her photos. Friends…this girl is MAGIC.

Breathtaking, pixie dust sprinkled, light infused M.A.G.I.C. And I’m really, really not easy to impress anymore with photography. And we really, really could not afford the high-end photographers whom I’d fallen in love with (oh, you would like some more linkage? Chennergy, oh how I love thee.)

Anywho. Back to Shannen. As I poured through her photography archives, I saw aesthetic decisions I loved, a knack behind the lens that I could trust, and holy SMOKES can that girl post-process! Need more convincing? Well, okay!

And then I emailed her asking if she’d be interested in working with us, and sent up a prayer that she would be available, and within our budget. And she was! (At the very tippy top of said budget, mind you. But the quality. Oh how you get what you pay for!) Shannen and I met in person, and I must confess that this girl is fabulous. A handshake and a contract later, and I am so relieved and elated to have someone behind the camera who a) has a sense of artistry that I trust, and b) is a genuinely awesome person who I wouldn’t mind spending a wicked amount of time with on wedding day.

I know I am overally gushing but I cannot help it! I am in love with our photographer’s artistry, and this light cannot be hidden under a basket! I am letting it shine!!

SHINE!

If someone gifted us more money for the wedding (or if I end up with a glorious bonus this year) the first thing I’d put that moolah towards would be a few more hours with Shannen on the wedding day. Join me in keeping your fingers crossed? In the meantime, head on over to her beautiful blog and show the girl some love. (Or for the ultimate love, book her! She’s currently living and working mainly in NYC, but she’s fairly bicoastal. And worth it, obviously.)