By anna blaedel
A dear friend recently married her beloved, and I had the pleasure of being present for their ceremony. Under the chuppah, they ritualized and celebrated the love that they are finding and nurturing and savoring and sharing and deepening together. Invested in both honoring and queering ancient ritual, they reimagined the sheva brachot, or seven blessings, traditionally recited, and invited chosen family to offer blessings connected to the broader themes. I was invited to offer a blessing for community, for transforming the world through justice work.
What a sacred practice, remembering and reimagining ancient wisdoms.
What a sacred practice, rerooting in love’s expansive, liberating lifeforce.
What a sacred practice, blessing each other into transformative togetherness.
The following blessing, written for their wedding, shared with you all because blessings spill over like that, and because our love spills over, too. Held, but never contained nor confined. Blessed be the love–theirs and yours and ours–that transforms our aliveness. Ordinary and extraordinary. Blessed. Blessed be. Blessed be we.
Blessed beloveds–coming and becoming together:
Together, we move in fierce and tender rhythms of care, of solidarity, of joyful alliance.
We need each other, and we have each other.
We are from each other; may we be for each other.
Naomi Murakawa asks, Why be a star when you can make a constellation?
Alone, dazzling–one can burn so bright.
But. Beloveds: finding each other, dancing together, we pattern new possibilities.
Possibilities beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond aloneness.
Possibilities born of laughter and dream, of refusal and resistance and recreation.
Possibilities that point us toward sweetness and salve.
We, surrendering into the sacred patterns that heal and hold us.
We, of stardust and spirit and breath.
We, of soil and seeds and spells.
We, of queer and radical rootedness.
Breathing together, we conspire together.
We, of movement and lineage and aliveness that stretches beyond the ages.
We, of elder wisdom and generations yet to come.
We, aligning and realigning into constellations–ancient and emerging–bending our collective life toward freedom. Toward the liberating lifeforce of love. Toward transformation. Toward together. Until all of us are free, until we, we, we are free, until free–we.