Love Letters

via Santa Barbara Wedding

My next two weddings have me feeling the love.  Both couples are absolutely bubbling over with love for one another and excitement about their wedding.  It makes me feel good just being with them and has inspired me to share a few of my favorite love poems and quotes.  From your ceremony program to a reading to cocktail napkins and signs at the reception, there are numerous ways to spread the love on your wedding day.

I Carry Your Heart With Me

E.E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is better than your dreams.”

― Dr. Seuss

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“I Like You”

by Samuel Stoddard

I like you and I know why.

I like you because you are a good person to like.

I like you because when I tell you something special, you know it’s special

And you remember it a long, long time.

You say, Remember when you told me something special

And both of us remember

When I think something is important

you think it’s important too

When I say something funny, you laugh

I think I’m funny and you think I’m funny too

I like you because you know where I’m ticklish

And you don’t tickle me there

except just a little tiny bit

sometimes

But if you do, then I know where to tickle you too

You know how to be silly

That’s why I like you

Boy are you ever silly

I never met anybody sillier than me till I met you

I like you because you know when it’s time to stop being silly

Maybe day after tomorrow

Maybe never

Too late, it’s a quarter past silly

Sometimes we don’t say a word

We snurkle under fences

We spy secret places

If I am a goofus on the roofus hollering my head off

You are one too

If I pretend I am drowning, you pretend you are saving me

If I am getting ready to pop a paper bag,

then you are getting ready to jump

That’s because you really like me

You really like me, don’t you

And I really like you back

And you like me back and I like you back

And that’s the way we keep on going every day

And I like you because if we go away together

And if we are in Grand Central Station

And if I get lost

Then you are the one that is yelling for me

“Where are you?”

“Here I am”

I like you because I don’t know why but

Everything that happens is nicer with you

I can’t remember when I didn’t like you

It must have been lonesome then

I like you because because because

I forget why I like you but I do

So many reasons

I don’t know why

I guess I don’t know why I really like you

Why do I like you

I guess I just like you

I guess I just like you because I love you.

Gifts of the Sea

by Anne Morrow Lindburgh

“When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. The only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity, in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.”

Sonnet 17

by Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom, and carries hidden within itself the light of those flowers, and thanks to your love, darkly in my body lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I know no other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you; so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit

By Margery Williams

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. “The boy’s uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

Excerpt from Mere Christianity

by C.S. Lewis

If the old fairy-tale ending “They lived happily ever after” is taken to mean “They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,” then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were.

Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love.

Love in this second sense-love as distinct from “being in love”—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.

They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.

They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

Excerpt from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

by Louis de Bernieres

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.

And when it subsides you have to make a decision. 
You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together 
that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, 
it is not excitement, 
it is not the promulgation of eternal passion.
That is just being “in love” which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, 
and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground, 
and when all the pretty blossom have fallen from their branches, 
they find that they are one tree and not two.

Excerpt from a Letter to his Wife Mary

by William Wordsworth

Every day every hour every moment makes me feel more deeply how blessed we are in each other, how purely how faithfully how ardently, and how tenderly we love each other; I put this last word last because, though I am persuaded that a deep affection is not uncommon in married life, yet I am confident that a lively, gushing, thought-employing, spirit-stirring, passion of love is very rare even among good people… O, I love you with a passion of love which grows ’til I tremble to think of its strength.

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

- from the film Moulin Rouge