month 7: holy moly, we get to do what?

love, 

i'm sitting on the couch while you vacuum. our bike boxes are packed and each room has been prepared neatly for our departure. we're heading to bozeman in just an hour or so. my adrenaline is starting to pump a little more; i feel it rushing in my veins. if we leave the night before our flight, at least we have a lesser chance of being late, per our usual m.o. 

tomorrow, we'll be in vancouver to start our ride down to the mexican border. wtf. i've never done anything like this before. ever. and i can't imagine anyone else i'd rather do this with. can you? it feels both exhilarating and scary...which only equals one thing: YESYESYES!

i feel like this month flew by ridiculously fast. how is that possible? we are pacing ourselves at like 10% of how we lived in the bay. :-\ 

the memories we created this month were stellar: hosting candice & matt, dinner and hot tubbing under the clear star-filled sky at judy's, me leaving you at home for two days while i took wilderness first aid and you....you rode your bike around town, ate burgers, and introverted. we took hikes, slept in, cooked, rode our bikes, ran way too many errands in town, and deepened friendships.

what stands out to me in our relationship is that we became better partners this month. we're a better team because we hold each other more loosely. our marriage got infused with more ease, by way of conflict and resolution and i am more in love with you because of it.

i think even up until a month ago...i could still imagine some semblance of life without you. it would be hard, but i could imagine it. but right now, as i sit here reflecting on our relationship, my heart would ache so deeply if you were no longer part of my life. who else would do all the research!!?! kidding! ;-) 

no really, i think it has much to do with this month being a pretty pivotal month of realizing that we can create whatever kind of marriage we want and that that is a wildly beautiful task at hand. i'm grateful for your kindness and patience, your measured risk taking, and every time you spontaneously break out in another accent. 

you are the love of my life and i love that we are creating our marriage by cycling over 1900 miles over 40 days. whoowee! what will that do for us?! i can't wait to see.......be nice!

I LOVE YOU.

  

planning our wedding: 4 things we delegated that thoroughly surprised us!

it's tempting to want to control every aspect of your wedding, to have it be "perfect." i implore you to let that go of that mentality as soon as possible. it will make life easier! plus delegating is a great solution to wedding control issues. : ) 

the beauty of having six weeks to plan our wedding was that our time constraint made it clear we simply couldn't do all of it. i am so glad for the gift of delegating some things out to people who i love and trusted. 

1. bouquet & boutonniere. i wasn't even sure i wanted flowers at first. they can be very costly! anyway, i can't remember if heather offered or if i asked, but the thought of heather making my bouquet felt like the right call. she's so talented with floral arrangements, and she is so dear to me. i knew having something she made for me would be really special, kind of like wearing annette's earrings. i showed heather a picture of a bouquet i was drawn to for it's simplicity and colors and asked if she could make something like it. i completely trusted her judgement and eyes for beauty and let it go. i was so surprised and delighted by what she created the morning of our wedding. it was...perfect. 

2. the welcome table. oh emily grady. she is a saint. here are a few things about emily i appreciate: she cares a LOT, she got married a few months before us, has a great rustic sensibility, and is impeccably organized. i knew that she and her husband would go above and beyond welcoming our guests because they are naturally like that. they give their all. i merely handed her the stuff i had for the welcome table, asked her to do what needed to be done, and then thanked her. i knew all would be good in the grady's hands. and it was! (see below, the little mason jars and yellow ball flowers were small things that emily brought from her home.)

3. family dinner venue. we needed to find a restaurant to host 30+ guests for dinner on saturday night after the wedding, which was no simple task. we asked my oldest sister to help us with this search, negotiate the terms, and be our liaison. it was so helpful to have my sister do the heavy lifting in this process. easy to say: everyone RAVED about cafe pro bono. the meal was so good that we went back there with our wedding coordinators to thank them, and gave a gift card to one of our speakers to enjoy a meal there as well. we loved it that much!

4. cake & toppers. when chris said he would make a cake for us as our wedding gift, we were thrilled. we didn't know what to expect. but classic chris....he sent us a list of questions to think about regarding what the cake and its meaning to us. when we got back from europe, we met with chris to discuss his questions and share our favorite cake inspiration. in the same discussion, he asked us about toppers. honestly, cake toppers wasn't even something i cared about, but chris mentioned sheri and then things changed. i love her work and i love her, and commissioning sheri to make us cake toppers felt like a good decision. i told her that samuel calls me bird and i call him my bunny and that we do this little affectionate nose-to-nose thing. and with that kernel of information, we had one of the most exquisite and tasty wedding cakes i had ever seen and tasted. (yes, i'm biased.) 

bonus: the day of coordinating. there was of course, delegating the entirety of the day to our friends cara and amy. we did as much prep as we could and then handed over everything to these two extremely capable women. they gifted us with an enormous sense of relief and freedom. having day-of wedding coordinators is like being pregnant for nine months, and right before you go into labor, someone else takes over. cara & amy delivered our baby. how's that for a metaphor? 

ps. if you're looking for a wedding coordinator, cara is available for new clients. i'd be happy to put you in touch (email me at lizsong (at) gmail.com or comment below). 

anyway, all this to say....

there was an element of surprise and delight i couldn't have created if i did everything on my own. i simply loved being surprised on my own wedding day by the beautiful creativity and service of my friends.

as much as samuel and i wanted to host an awesome experience for our community, i think part of what made our wedding so special was that we were also able to receive from our community. we had to stop believing we were "being a burden" by asking for help, but rather we were inviting our friends to participate, to ask them to invest in us. 

a wedding can be a beautiful opportunity to give and receive love from our community. i'll hold this learning close to my heart for many years to come.

how might you let go of perfection and invite deeper friendship/delight/surprise into your wedding planning process? or even into your life?

planning our wedding: regrets

as much as i loved our wedding day, i wish i could've done two things differently:

1) been more inclusive with our invite list
2) hired a videographer

i want to share my regrets because i could only learn these after the fact. if i could change these two aspects to my wedding day, i would.

invite list
initially, i wanted a very small wedding. i'm talking in the order of 20 people or so total. this would've meant we would've had to exclude a lot of people we care about. we "tried it on" for size and it didn't sit right in our guts. so after we made our initial all-inclusive list, we kept narrowing it down over and over until we could get our total count down to approximately 100 guests.

unfortunately, i held onto "100" as some magic number that would keep things "intimate." i'm not sure what i was thinking because there is no magic number.

email invites were sent and while we received responses, we calibrated our invite list. it was only a few weeks before the wedding when i started to feel more flexible about who came. my spirit of exclusivity changed to a spirit of inclusivity. i wanted more and more people to be a part of such a special day. 

but at the same time that my attitude changed, we were also getting very close to the date. i felt bad about inviting people so late in the game. i was afraid it would communicate that i was only inviting someone because a last minute spot opened up, but they weren't on my "A-list." so instead of just being courageous, i decided not to invite the people i had a change of heart about.

i wish i had been honest and brave.

fortunately, i had the opportunity to reconnect with one of my friends after the wedding and before we moved out of california. it was so good to catch up and learn what he'd been up to since he got married earlier in the year (a wedding i was invited to and had attended). my heart hurt that he was someone i didn't invite. so at the end of our conversation, i told him i was sorry that i didn't invite him. i told him that i wish he had been there to participate. i meant it.

videography
it didn't even need to be amazing videography, i would've been happy to have my iphone recording it.

when we got engaged, samuel asked what i thought about hiring a videographer. i told him i didn't care to have one. "as long as we have some good photos, it's fine. i don't want to spend money on it." :-\

i wish i had revisited this topic along the way. since our whole wedding day turned out to be something neither of us ever expected, something more meaningful than what i had imagined...we wish badly that we had it filmed. i wish i could watch mary, alice, don, and heather speaking, to watch the emotions shared between samuel and i, to laugh when i spoke embarrassingly, to catch glimpses of our beloved guests enjoying themselves... all those moments that i couldn't be a part of or was too overwhelmed with emotion to receive fully, i wish i could re-live the day through video. 

i'm also saddened that we won't have something to show our kids one day. 

do you have any regrets from planning your own wedding? what are yours? 

month 1: adjustments, firsts, and singing

my love, 

it's hard to believe that it's already been a month since you and i got married. time has felt elusive since we said our vows and celebrated with our beloved community. we've experienced so much in the last month. you've whet my appetite for our future, for how we'll create our marriage. (yes, i posted this picture even though you think you look a little funny in it. what? i like how it --fine, how i-- came out...)

after that amazing dinner with family, i was eager to head to calistoga to start our honeymoon. i couldn't wait to be with you! we needed time away after such an intense six weeks of wedding planning. can you imagine if we had a longer engagement? lol. i'm not sure we could've handled that. 

i have to say, it felt so natural to get used to sharing a bed with you (a first!), and waking up next to your sweetness. you're really cute when you sleep. i was nervous about starting our marriage because it would be (and is!) such a huge adjustment from single life. i was surprised by how easy it was to be more and more myself with you. and after we got to tahoe, i started feeling so much adoration for you those first few days. i think my heart grew a little bigger. plus, i had so much fun with you roaming around tahoe, tandem biking, hiking, cooking, eating, watching movies, hot tubbing, and other wonderful things married people do together (many firsts!). ;-) 

i think you started singing again more during this portion of our tahoe trip too. i think singing means you're happy and at peace. you'd spontaneously break out in song about something random happening in the moment. "oh look, lizzy is eating again. eating eating eating. lizzy lizzy lizzy." (i know that wasn't even close.) and even though i don't give you much attention when you sing those made-up tunes, know that i think it's adorable and i love you more for them. it's just happening quietly in my heart. 

then we headed south to yosemite with jb & nino for honeymoon part i.5. it was a gift to be able to spend time with your our cousins, even eating crappy lodge food. golly, the food was so bad i remember feeling embarrassed that our french cousins had to eat it. but...redemption wasn't far off. a really good pizza joint, oysters from tomales bay oyster company, and a korean feast can easily cure things. haha.

i remember the day we picked them up in reno, they fell asleep in the back while you drove down the 580s. i took this picture at about the exact time our ceremony started one week prior. i thought, "you are my man." actually, i probably said it out loud given how extroverted i am with you. ;) hehe. i love looking at this photo of you. it makes me feel incredibly peaceful knowing that we committed to living out the rest of our lives together. that you are mine and i am yours. i think it was one of the first moments when i could finally sink into that new reality. 

jb & nino. ahh.... they are such sweet people. i'm lucky that i inherit them into my life by way of you. although my communication with them isn't as fluid as i would hope, what farts can do for relationships is astounding. it was so much fun to share that lodge room and drive all over california with them. and you know what i'd say my favorite part of yosemite was...yup, you guessed it: the black bear sighting!!! it was SO AWESOME when you told us all to stop and look to our right. and just like that... the bear walked right in front of us. my eyes almost fell out of their sockets because i was so elated. it was all of our first time seeing a bear! 

after our cousins left, we stopped by mountain view for a few days to scrub down your apt before handing in your keys. you spent the first day or two by yourself in your old space to clear out your belongings in order to move into my our place. i wondered what went through your head during that time alone, sifting through everything you own. you'd come home to me at night, tired. not because it was necessarily physically taxing, but because it seemed you went through an emotional marathon of closing that chapter of your life. i remember feeling glad to see you at the end of the day. i missed you, even though we were only apart for a matter of hours. as independent as i can be, i've been so surprised that i want to spend all my time with you! (although, writing this alone is pretty nice. haha)

then it was time for honeymoon part ii. friends joining us at our amazing tahoe cabin (thanks to the durdens!). it was so much fun to be in community and practice hospitality with you. we i spent too much on groceries to make sure we had "enough" food. we took them on bike rides. cooked together. shared meals around that giant table. it was such a gift to be with them, and with you. matt makes awesome pancakes and candice is crazy. joy & billy can cook some damn good chicken and mary makes mean meals. and poor tiff, she was so sick! :( and i will never forget the last night that it started snowing. it felt like magic. the snow was so dry and crunchy, we jumped straight into the hot tub! hard apple cider + snowfall was amazing. and waking up the next morning blew me away. we went from warm sunny days to a winter wonderland overnight. i had never seen the torch being passed from one season to the next so clearly, and there it was. all i wanted to do was play, and you were concerned for our safety back home. we had a bit of a conflict later about that and other things, but as usual....we resolved it quickly. (of course after some huffing and puffing and silent awkwardness on the road. i think i'm getting better at conflict resolution. don't you think?)  :)

sometimes in the morning, if i wake up before you, i like to watch you sleep (and take photos). there you are my love! my peaceful bunny.

being married to you is not just about the fun adventures we've been on....but it's the simple daily things. it's all the stuff that happens between these photos. it's the moments we're present to each other. (sometimes cooking, but definitely) eating together, asking about your day even if we spent the whole of it together, being in the same room doing separate things, all the ways you mock me and i can't help but howl, the small looks and expressions, the result of curiosity or lack thereof, the check-ins we have about how sex was, hearing your footsteps and knowing you've come home to me, it's the learnings. lots of learnings.... constant learning. i promised you i would be your best student in my vows, and i hope you feel like you are more known each day. because i certainly feel more known (and therefore loved) by you.

thanks for being you, samuel. for being my beloved. for loving me through and through. you are so good to me, especially when i don't deserve it. i've felt so served each time you: offer me food when i've already had my meal because you know i'd like a taste, tell me you love everything about me when i complain about my growing belly (no i'm not pregnant), open the car door and ask, "ready?" before you close it, ride my emotional waves and stand as a steady rock, & hold me for no reason but as an outpouring of love.

i am in love with you! and i look forward to what's to come. i can't imagine who else i'd rather be on this journey with but you. 

love always, 
your bird-dragon

ps. i know you love this song so here's one more for today. 

questioning "real" friendship.

during a short hike yesterday, i shared with my friend that sometimes i feel very alone in this world. it's been a thought i've been having recently, mostly triggered by some insecurity i have around wondering if i have "real" friends. (i'm defining "real" friendship as people who genuinely know and love me, and care for me - in big and small ways.) 

what's interesting about the conversation is that initially, i thought i was questioning the commitment my friends have to me. but, in noodling on this topic longer, what's clarified for me is that i'm not really questioning my friends.

i'm questioning myself.

"am i a real friend to the people in my life?"

"do i really care about them and make genuine efforts to understand them?"

"am i willing to lay down my life - big and small - for my friends?"

it would be easy for me to sulk about not having "real" friends because that would put the responsibility on other people. but when i take on 100% responsibility for my feelings, what i realize is that i'm actually being invited to go deeper in my friendships - to wholeheartedly share all of me so that people can truly know me (and i, them). it's in truly knowing the other, that we are better able to meet them closer to the inner sanctuary of their heart, isn't it? 

i wonder if my feeling of being alone dissipates as i become that "real" friend to others. i shall try and see.