morethanenoughtruth

Yesterday at Sunday service I discovered something earth-shattering—something that caused the heavens to open and the lightning to rend the temple veil.  I do not usually expect such insights from a trip to my local episcopal church, but that was a signal experience.  My personal pattern, long acted out in a gathering of others, has been to dread the awkwardness that ensues with cessation of whatever might have been drawing attention to the front of the room.  At that point, each and all are abandoned to the devices of our own personal social graces—or lack thereof—and all bets are off.

I’ve been observing this quandary for nigh onto eighty years and was consistently puzzled about what to do.  At that point, everybody turns to each other and begins talking.  About what?

I don’t know.  Everybody else knows, and they’re not telling.

Maybe I was in the wrong place.  That was the most plausible explanation.  A change of place could solve the problem entire.  A new church.  A new town.  A new family.  A new religion.  A new politics.  If I could find the perfect place all would resolve, and I would fit in– or would I?

Perhaps a change of marital status would be most right and proper.  A life partner could make the impossible possible.  Someone who shared my own commitment to common bed and board would do the trick.  Yes?  No.  Well OK then.  Divorce was sure to be the answer.  A new and different partner would make the crucial difference.  If number two didn’t do the trick, then number three would herald the final solution, once and for all.  Yes?  No.

Maybe I’m not cut out for living-together.  Acceptance of one’s nature is a good thing and must lead to peace vis-à-vis self and others.  But living alone is quiet—too quiet—a jail of solitude.  Lonely.  What about joining?  Being part of some common effort—some sharing of values and ideals.  Just being part of a choir is something I have always done but never understood beyond technology and technique.  A choir is more than an enjoined effort to produce music.  It is people.  I signed up with the choir at Redeemer Episcopal Church, an aggregation of people who share my world view, religious philosophy, and who delight in the same enjoyment of music-making that I had experienced across the entire arc of my existence.  What better situation?

What indeed.  Perhaps the worst ever comeuppance was discovering that stopping for a break, for coffee and a bit of socializing, was as much a minefield in this so perfect place as was Miss. Chater’s first grade or Staples High School’s cafeteria.  Here were people who were as smart as me if not smarter, as educated as me if not more so, and who shared my social status, religious beliefs, political leaning, and who shared my love for all things musical.  So what happened?  Whenever the director called a halt, everyone–everyone but I–instantly fell into a mode of conversation.  I, I alone, stood in their midst and stared in disbelief at all these lovely people enjoying each other, while I stood– stark as a totem pole– in their chattering midst.

Maybe I am too old.  Maybe I haven’t been a member long enough.  Maybe oral or underarm deodorants have failed.  No?  No.  Enough!  I’m kidding myself.  There’s something else afoot.  I decided to set aside all the mental meanderings that led to some inadequacy on my part.  The problem is certainly not something that I am but something that I am doing.  I can’t change who or what I am, but I can and will modify behavior.  No wonder Rachael Maddow always says to watch, not what they say but, what they do.  Observing has ever been my favorite pastime.  I watched.  What I noticed was that as soon as the break was called everyone but I fell effortlessly into discussion.  They, as if hearing the clap of a starting pistol, turned in toward the center of the room and engaged whoever was close at hand.  These were people who had known each other for years as well as those who were newer to the group than even I.  They were employing a learned skill, something acquired and utilized for entire lifetimes of living in a world of naked and conversational primates.

Yesterday morning I awoke and promised myself a change—a change for the better.  After the Redeemer Sunday service, I gathered with others at the Adult Forum and expected to be a part—not an observer.  Rather than importing my considerable resentment at facing a social maze I could not penetrate, I simply determined to find any person and start talking.  OMIGOD.  It worked.

Sure, one Sunday won’t correct a lifetime of gawky, but it’s a start.  If I get carried away with the headiness of progress, I will approach a couple of old friends in earnest conversation who just want me to go away.  There’s a middle way to be steered on this path.  I can count on friends and neighbors to keep me heading straight.  You never get to be too old to learn a new thing.

Consonants are important.  Nobody denies that, but it is what happens in between those t’s, p’s and d’s that dictate hearer’s perceptions of our divine nature or lack of it.  Nowhere is this more effectively driven home than in choral performance, where even the lowliest chorister has a stake in enjoined success or failure.

The French choral ensemble Arsys Borgoyne does a superlative job of delivering vowels beautifully.  A trip online to You-tube selecting Mozart’s Requiem will bear me out.  Arsys Borgoyne pops up as highly representative of the composer’s best expression.  Maybe it’s a French thing as in “French Fries.” Though once renamed “Freedom Fries” they soon happily reverted to the o-la-la moniker.

Wholesale vowel and consonant determinism accrues with a hop across the pond to Great Britain where any representative royal tenses vocal apparatus into a benevolent chasm for reverberation and projection.  It does sound great.  We all agree.  On TV news we watch Katty Kay and resent her nullifying every “r” in her daily drill. That makes her sound hoity-toity—an assertion that she is better—that hers is a superior vocalization.  Maybe it is.  Certainly it is more respectful of the King’s English than my own Texas drawl fracturing it anew with every breath.  Watching John McCain’s funeral televised from the National Cathedral (Episcopal liturgy), I hear that people are waiting to get in, not waitin’ t’ git eun. 

American choirs must, in pursuit of excellence, deal with Katty’s dilemma.  R’s are derided.  Crunching an r clenches the elocution of a singer.  Ideally, lower jaws must float, relaxed and agog.  We are told to mimic an idiot, with jaw seemingly untethered to intellect.  That produces a better sound than the alternative which intimates strain and pain—not gain.  Much like a stutterer who appears instantly cured when singing, I can drop my r’s in the choir room, but staunchly conserve them when speaking.  Vowel mindfulness is definitely a work in progress.

The musical play My Fair Lady features elegant speech for posterity, as Eliza Doolittle and phoneticist Henry Higgins battle the language war onstage, to the delight of audiences everywhere and every-when.  The fun spills over into the battle of the sexes where both sides are postulated to vituperative advantage.  The professor wins the speaking battle but loses the gender war as he succumbs to Eliza’s manifest female destiny.  Both singers make their final exeunt, embracing each other as indictable co-conspirators.

My Fair Lady’s cultural hallmark The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain highlights the universal problem of the diphthong.  Injecting two linked vowels into a single word is a recipe for trouble.  Rain, Spain, stays, mainly, and plain all contain diphthongs—if you have a cockney accent.  What should be a long pure aaaa is tortured– stretched out across the rack of an i and an e– to the smirks and grimaces of listeners everywhere.  A cockney dialect renders it as “The rien in Spien sties mienly in the plien.” It is in the covenant of every choral conductor everywhere to lead singers safely through each and every vowel pair–indeed a valiant endeavor.

My favorite movie has ever been “The Sound of Music” with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.  I never tire of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.    Everyone in the cast is a British native speaker/singer.  All seven children pirouette through the musical score with the perfect vowels of the Kings English.  They were born to that ability.  The adults, too, seem to do it without thinking.  Other productions have been attempted but in my estimation fall short.

Choral directors work hard on vowels, since they are central to excellence.  They make much of precise consonants, but it is the vowels that sustain the sound and can make the difference between pretty-good and marvelous.  A note might be held through fourteen bars of music, and though an initiating consonant may get things started and a final one may signal the end, it is the vowel that sings through the fourteen lovely bars.  Adjusting the color of vowels can breathe beauty into vocal production.  A blatant eeee or aaaa will sing more sonorously if placed a touch farther back in the mouth where it is sure to benefit from complexity of tone.  Eeee mellows into a modestly covered ehhh while aaaa blooms into something richer that doesn’t rattle front teeth.  It’s complicated–but worth the effort.

Turning from sublime to ridiculous in the land of the vowel, we witness Donald John Trump’s abject evisceration of Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III–for what?  For southern speech.  At the beating heart of what southern speakers do to the language is a vowel problem as well as a consonant one.  Yes, his mouth is full of marbles, or at least it sounds like it.  I can forgive Mr. Sessions for his conservative agenda, but I’ll never forgive him for his day in and day out mindless murder of my mother tongue.  Harrump!  That is the kind of rapacious skullduggery up with which Sir Winston Churchill (and I) will not put, evidenced by its requirement that I agree with The Donald on something.

This writing won’t turn readers into vocalists, but it might curry appreciation of the attention to detail that separates good vowels from inarticulate ones.  Our complex human brains discriminate between vowel subtleties much as the eye parses angle of hat on head.  How differently we respond to a hat set straight and level, to one pushed back in affected innocence, to one drawn down shading eyes and visage, to another cocked saucily at an angle.  Who but the supercilious Brits could carry off a fascinator?  Any discussion of the English language leads inevitably to the British Isles, as well it should, in the same tenor as “all roads lead to Rome.”

Other cues, also visual, accrue to length of ladies hemlines as fashion flirts with global state of mind.  Whatever will we do to express our economic truth if skirts give way once and for all to modesty of trousers?  Of course exception often speaks more poignantly than rule, exemplified by a Scotsman’s jaunty kilt.  To a woman, nothing, absolutely nothing is sexier than a man’s bare knee.  To a man, however, a skirt titillates with the not-so-subtle suggestion that access might be gained, that he is free to fantasize at will, cock at-the-ready.

Our language is what makes us human.  While consonants evoke the hard bones of our language, its linguae franca, vowels are its soul, the twinkle in its eye, the moist rich carrier of its song.

The receptionist smiled and proceeded to deliver her patent good-morning-and-how-are-you-today question.  Unremarkable until she added, “And what was your name?”

“My name is Dorothy Martin,” I replied, jaw muscles tensed.  “And it still is.”  To what period of time are you alluding?  When I was born I received my name, printed as a legal fact on my certificate of birth, attested to by the doctor who delivered me into my mother’s arms.  When I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror it was me that I saw.  I was still Dorothy Martin.  As far as I know, I continue to embody Dorothy Martin as a human entity, and plan to continue so doing until as far into the future as conveniently possible.

What is it with younger generations’ obliquity?  Why must they create an angled offset, a safe distance from some perceived confrontation, if not of distance, then of time?  Why must they root their question in the past, where they don’t have to own up to the truth of their own power to ask it?

Why must they enlist my support in performing their job—filling out their form—so we are gathered about our enjoined perception of an IT task, my attention safely diverted from their own real and vulnerable persona? Their face?  Their eyes?  Their presence daring to assert itself?

Perhaps it is a logical extension of valley-girl speech, where everything isn’t something, but only like something.  As if it were something.  The sure test for this error of cognition is to substitute “as if it were” for the ever ubiquitous “like.”  If it follows as a logical progression of thought, the answer is plain.  It’s sad to remark how this verbal crutch has taken over the language, testament to its ability to lower anxiety levels wherever inserted.

Turning to another error of cognition, my own is equally suspect.  Why must I analyze commercial conversations, parsing them out for foolish meanings, whether hidden or apparent? It’s no business of mine if a medical receptionist is totally honest, either to herself or to me.  What goes on inside the head of another person falls outside the purview of my own.  Surely it’s all I can do to police my own level of honesty.  Dissecting dialogue suggests its own form of distancing.  How can I even begin to relate to another if I am busy critiquing their performance? I need to focus on giving a civil reply to questions and saving my energy for more productive pursuits.  If I could actually do something about generational obliquity it might make sense to complain.

The Serenity Prayer addresses separating what we can change and what we cannot, citing as wisdom the ability to know the difference.  Good advice!

My mother snapped a shot
of two-year-old me.
It was to become her favorite,
the one she chose to install
in the small oval frame
touting the provenance
of the bronzed baby shoes
forever fixed
on right and left sides,
shredded toes attesting to
many miles crawled
before that first upright step
presaged many more to follow.
It captured my authentic self
before the world began
working its will
and having its way.

I like to say hello to this picture,
smile and say,
“I remember you.
You were the ‘me’
that got a hatchling
in your Easter basket.
You loved that fuzzy duck.
He was soft and yellow
and oh so very dear.
He was little; you were big;
You wanted to grok him.

“Your baby book said,

‘Cows go moo;
Dogs go woof;
Ducks go quack.’

“He was a bad duck.
You wanted him
to be a good duck
and say quack.

“You put him on the ground.
You set a board on top of him.
You stood on the board—
He didn’t quack.

“That was the day
that ended your duck’s
days of knowing
and began the long
parade of your own.
The first of
a great many
lessons learned.
“Thank your little duck,
two-year-old that was me.
He was a poor quacker,
but as it turns out,
a consummate teacher.”

The concept of spirit permeates our culture.  Language paints feeling with a veritable palate of emotions.  We are blue today.  We are green with envy.  We see red with rage.   We are in a brown study.  The products of distillation are called “spirits” and purportedly elevate our mood.  Recreational drugs give us a “high”, as does sexual arousal.  Poets call on the muse to speak but wait in vain if given mood stabilizing pharmaceuticals.  Feelings of camaraderie, experienced when a group of people cooperate to support a competitive endeavor, are called “team spirit.”  Attempts to describe our systems of feeling and belief are riddled with metaphors of spirit.  Every culture and mythos includes a Holy Ghost of some spiritual stripe.  I wonder when in our evolution the inner voice actually began to speak.  The catalogue of psychological diagnoses is no more, no less, than a way to parse the riddle of spirit.

Modern psychiatry must be somewhat embarrassed by its history of misrepresenting the flow of human emotion.  How many healthy uteri were removed to “correct” hysteria?

“Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women,    which is today no longer recognized by modern medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the Victorian Era. Women considered to be suffering from it exhibited a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and ‘a tendency to cause trouble.’  Since ancient times women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo “pelvic massage” — manual stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the patient experienced “hysterical paroxysm” (orgasm).^”
(Lifted from Wikipedia)

Was this the basis for perceiving women as less than?  Probably so.  Ladies are the more emotional gender, although it seems that testosterone competes quite successfully with the estrogens when it comes to inciting wacky behavior.

It’s fun to pick up a physics book and trace the ideation of hysteresis.  A clear description quickly clabbers into eye-glazing jargon, as alternating current raises and lowers “flux” density within a magnetic material.  The lag thus depicted on a graph describes a “hysteresis” loop, but even the mathematically challenged of us can see this as another instance of how language evolves in the conceptualizations of our species.  Spirit, as light, energy, flow, color, glee, emotion, life, love, pops up at every turn.

Ancient mythologies incarnated emotional states as heroic persona and created whole pantheons of deities.  We have tried since the beginning to understand the “inner presence” and imbue it with meaning that integrates rather than confounds our own personal and empirical observations.  Religion in human society was inevitable as a response to the reality of spirit that underlies all of existence.  I doubt that anyone with a functioning human brain can truly be an atheist.  Even Richard Dawkins speaks with “en-theo-siasm” about his atheistic conceptualizations.  Is it all just semantics?

Einstein wrote, “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.  He who knows it not, and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.  It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion.”

There is something amazing and mysterious that accompanies living as a discrete form of life in our universe.  Much as electromagnetism is generated about an electric wire as electricity flows through it, a spirit flux must be engendered about every living nerve cell that conducts electro-biologic stimuli throughout a living biome.  The totality of that flux might well be identified as the spirit of that life form.  As life on planet Earth evolves, perhaps it is co-creating spirit in the very image of God.  To what better purpose?

Mode of thought fans into a spectrum much like graphing the frequencies of light displays the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic waves vary by length, the distance from a defined point on a wave to the equivalent point on the next wave. The longest science has discovered and put to use are radio waves. Next comes microwaves, a requirement for any replete kitchen. Its’ neighbor groups infrared with its panoply of military applications. The visible spectrum, being the minuscule group humans can see, is illustrated by any box of Crayolas. After violet comes ultraviolet, shorter still and followed by X-rays, that spy on our bones, and finally gamma rays that irradiate food, peer through concrete to verify the integrity of constructs such as buildings and bridges, as well as making atomic bombs.
.
Thought may be concrete or abstract or anywhere on its’ own continuum that stretches in between. Verification of a physical object is as concrete as it gets. Courses in language start there. Le livre est sur la table: The book is on the table. Objectification comes to mind. A book is a book is a book. In being a book, it represents the concept of bookness, in the abstract. Bookness is a distillation of the essence of all that it means to embody the meaning of “book”. A book has many aspects. A book means any book will do, whereas the book points to a specific book. Only that precise book is of interest. My book asserts ownership. It is mine, all mine. Hands off!

Comparison, whether negative or positive, to a concrete object is one step toward abstraction. I can read you like a book asserts that I understand your thought process to the extent that I would if you were a book and I were reading it. Such comparisons initiate similes.

Moving another step toward abstraction, we say an object is equivalent to a concept. Now we have entered the realm of metaphor. Metaphor compacts truth carrying a big bang for its buck. “You are my sunshine.” asserts two things that are verifiably false as well as verifiably true. You aren’t sunshine. You are a person, a human. You aren’t solar radiation, but you inspire in me the same feeling that warm sun on my back in the cool of the morning inspires. And as if that weren’t enough, you aren’t just any sunshine; you are my sunshine. You belong to me in the very significant aspect of cognition that speaks to truth and love. Wow! That’s a bundle. Poetry says a lot for a little, but we are still adrift in the land of hyperbole, since no one really can claim an ownership interest in solar radiation.

Mathematics is petulant and precocious. It is impatient with the excess baggage of prosody, even with compact meaning-dense poetry, throwing overboard the frippery of pronouns, adjectives and adverbs like so much flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of abstraction. Only the essential concept is retained. In mathematical parlance, nouns and verbs are de rigeur. Everything else is conditional. Arithmetic is only preparation for actual mathematics and makes the leap of substituting “3” as a symbol for apple, apple, and apple or orange, orange, and orange, if the requirement is to represent three apples or three oranges. Algebra, in another bold concession to the abstract, substitutes a non-numerical symbol for 3 and allows us to think about and manipulate numerical concepts of any number of anythings, later substituting specific numbers of anythings whenever it suits our purpose to decide what we are actually talking about.

I love Tom or Dick or Harry. Take your pick. Harry? OK. Harry it is. I love his entire persona, his body, his puns, his quirky way of thinking, his gentle manner, his ability to understand me even when I don’t make sense. I appreciate his easy way with people and his talent for making money even when times are tough. I love the way I feel when he glances my way with that certain frisson of prurient interest. I love the way he starts right into solving a problem without trying to decide whose fault it is. I love how he holds me when I’m afraid feeling safe in his arms. I love that when I’m with him it feels good to be a woman. Harry is real, concrete, solid reality, though my love for him may flit and float, butterfly-like, a temptation to weave a net of verse and dance in circles, Harry is a real man. Human fragility aside, he belongs on the solid end of the spectrum, right along with marble and titanium.

Men is quite a different concept, a caricature of the human male animal, the one that wives complain about, always comparing their aging inamorata with twenty-two year old Hooter’s serving maids, or the one who won’t come to the dinner-table while the food is hot and still able to attest to the skill of the cook. You know him. He’s the one who tracks mud right onto that clean linoleum and never even notices. Women tend to despair of men, but they love Harry or Bob, or Tim. That’s because men is an abstraction, easy to grouse about. Bob is real. A man being real has nothing to do with preference for or against quiche; it’s purely a measure of degree of abstraction.

I am willing to concede that this useless essay doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it was fun to write. Forgive me my friends. I can’t help it if such wordplay plies its stream of consciousness through my brain. Who knows? Just maybe you might find it fun to read.

Blood, muscle, sinew, nerve and bone, quickened with apprehension of self, cries out, “Be! Become!” The story of self is universal, a babe born with infinite inheritance, due everything, owing nothing. A god-being, nascent free-wheeling self. A baby at the breast, I break suction drooling warm milk, to smile at my mother. My only memories are of comfort, a beating pulse, movement, limbs thrusting, asserting the priority of release. My beginning is pure. I am all. Then…”The Other”. She is Mother. She is warmth, palliation of senses. Her very act of being initiates my fall from totality, in that she herself is a self, a not-me. My universe is slashed, rent into Me and Thee. Paradise is lost.

It is only now with the clarity of age that I can see my mother, Mary Opal Martin in focus. She once traveled this same path. She once too was incarnate, and now in death is but the legend of her own quest. My own positioning in the flow of the eternal is a gift from her and informed by her separate reality. That I could so dissociate the animal of my incarnation from its spirit flows from witnessing my mother’s struggle to heal the various splinters of her own psyche. I knew from almost the inception that she was adrift, and rooted my burgeoning psychology in the certainty of my own observation and intuition, a firm “not -true” ascribed to her patently incredible “not real.” Whether this resulted in a precocious separation or merely an incomplete one, I cannot say. I know only that from the beginning I embraced the empirical logic of my own thought as rational, and celebrated that knowledge as my own, individual, inviolate integrity.

Maternal imperative and psychological separation kept me isolated from the relentless influence of peers. Mother often pointed out that she was better company than those “stupid girls” who stood in our yard singing “Do-ro-thee-ee”, a tuneful demand that I come out to play. During twelve years pre-high school diploma, I attended twenty-one different public and private schools, knowing only what it meant to be the new girl. Always I beat them at their own silly game, rejecting them before they could reject me. It was safer that way, safer but lonelier, especially in the skin of an adolescent. Having set myself apart from all things maternal, I had no skill in identifying myself as one of a set of female identities. I never once opened the pages of a movie magazine. Being different was a comfort, a shield, a challenge. Human children are cruel, a fact that precludes my gushing “I just adore children” when asked if I like kids. As a youngling, I myself was no less vituperative, only more passive-aggressive. Even now, I constantly remind myself to be, at the very least, true to what is real and good. The result is a slow veering toward a proximate humanity. One thing has always been unquestioned: I do, so very much, love my children. I am scribing these confessions of human frailty and redemption for them, so they will understand how precious, how worth the struggle, is the possibility of becoming human. It was a challenge met by my mother, Mary, and by my father, Kelsey, as they made their own difficult heroic journeys. Having eviscerated my own dragons, I can now appreciate the nobility of their struggles and forgive what in them I had so callously despised. I was their child, and they loved me, even as I love my own three beautiful and heroic sons and the lives they have brought forth to grace our future.

Is it enough to forgive,
or must I forget as well?
If I dwell on it,
chew on it,
reduced to pulp of mind,
surely I will swallow it
in one great gagging gulp.
Where then will it be,
stuck rumbling in my gut,
a toxin to true thought,
that ruminating mind,
a bovine chewing on its cud?
Most surely it will stay,
inured to reason’s blade.
Would that I could cut it out,
Excise all pus and pain,
drain that obsessive swamp,
and free myself this day
and evermore… but no.

It’s not enough to forgive;
We must forget as well.
Open the cocoon of pain,
so it may flutter-flit away
a butterfly of love,
forgiveness giving birth
to all that can become.
We know in some clear place
that forgetting must ensue
if we would be truly free.
We reach for dementia’s hoary hood,
Knowing oh so well that forgetting
Is the path to not-knowing,
and forgetting near so fine
as never having known at all.
I forgive you, and you, and even you.
I forgive all that ever was,
and more loving yet,
I promise to forget.

As wishes turn into kisses
And longings turn softly to sighs,
The lust in me stirs and remembers
How tender, how sweet were our cries.

Our lips touch gently and linger,
While our eyes meet and shimmer and shine.
The earth stops and waits in its turning
As our hands and our hearts intertwine.

The magic mists of morning
Rise to meet an azure sky.
Grass, dew-sparkled, waves
In hushed wind-worried sigh.

Rolling fog casts shadows
On meadow flowers below
While spectral rays of sunrise
Stripe hills with rainbow’s glow.

To God’s capricious artistry
Etched in filigree above
I add with joy the cadence
Of this paean to you, my Love:

A song that wants to hear its singing,
A melody with more than tune to tell,
Text whose words spell more than meaning,
And speak in rhymes that dare not tell

Of moonlit nights with smiles remembered
When all but lovers go to sleep
And prayers of children heard at twilight
Pray the Lord their souls to keep,

Lest reporting jar the meaning
Of quiet thoughts that need no words,
A song that rings in children’s laughter
And scolds bright mornings with the birds.

Come, my Love, and meet the dawning.
Breathe and savor all you may,
For the magic mists of morning
Rise to greet our wedding day.