Sophie and Justin’s Sicilian Elopement

Small is beautiful, so the saying goes, but while this ceremony may be bijou, I don’t think there’s anything particularly small about the love you have for each other and the life you have created together. Two lovers are a world unto themselves, indeed loving another person, makes our own self expand. As Juliet said to Romeo,

‘My bounty is boundless as the sea,
My love as deep, the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.’

She was a passionate teenager, a true Italian, some might say. But a teenager nonetheless. The love between her and Romeo was not measured and did not, tragically, stand the test of time. Thankfully you are not teenagers, even if you did meet when Sophie was just nineteen, still young enough to want to share her heart in a way that was boundless and true. But your love has withstood the pressures of growing up, of living together, of a global pandemic and of looking after pets. And here you are, still willing and eager to lay all your cards on the table and share the gift of your one precious life with another.

I would like to share with you a poem that I thought of a couple of days ago when I was sitting not too far away from here, already two Aperol Spritzes in, on a rooftop bar in Palermo. This is from a poem by the American writer Mary Oliver, and it is called, ‘Summer’s Day’.

SUMMER’S DAY
By Mary Oliver

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass
How to be idled and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?