Weddings
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Before every ceremony I conduct a quick and easy eyesight with your guests. It’s all part of the #marriedbyjosh service.
Me at Alex and Laura’s wedding in Adelaide, photographed by Mike Hemus.
Unknown bride looking person
As a wedding celebrant, this is my 2020 email template:
Hi! We start the email with factual text that sucks because COVID is ruining more wedding plans. But then conclude with a sentence ending with an exclamation mark & a smiley face so we still seem like nice people! :)
”A crisis doesn’t have to be a negative event. A wedding is a crisis–one ceremony, one day, over and done. All eyes, all attention, all on this moment. That’s why we do it–even though the chronic condition of the marriage itself is always more important.”
On the off chance that there are people that can’t make it to your wedding, I stream your wedding with epic video and audio quality, so everyone feels like they’re right there … even though they’re at home.
Video streaming is included for free for everyone that books me!
It’s really good that one of our local Brisbane wedding venues can host your little footy final this afternoon, Melbourne.
We’re glad to help any time you need.
Lots of love,
Josh, Queensland.
Anyone else struggling getting their head in a good and peaceful place at the moment?
Luke Fletcher just sent me this pic of Luna from this time last year when we were in New York together for an elopement with The Elopement Collective.
My brain is in a constant state of change, one minute thinking about how nice it is to be at home and to pick Luna up from kindy, next minute I’m thinking about the 44 of our couples who have booked us but don’t have a new date yet and the 180 movements our couples have made to their wedding and elopement plans around the globe, then my mind wanders to the administrative nightmare that is my computer and my inbox and how I should probably accidentally drop the MacBook into a pond to save me cleaning up the files on the desktop, and before long my mind wanders to the reality of our 2020 and where we were supposed to be have been right now, and how a little virus has changed all that. From there it’s not long before I start thinking about the government policies around it all, and what that means for the state of our society and how our futures will all be dramatically different.
I feel such an emotional burden for our couples, for the people contacting me about new wedding plans, and so many of my friends that are battling the same burdens.
Like my own personal antenna in my mind is tuning into everything going on everywhere, so much noise, chaos, and pure humanity. It’s beautiful, and strange, and chaotic, and weird.
It’s a weird 2020, and I feel like it’s going to be a weird 2021, I’m not sure my head will ever be in a peaceful place again.
Shout out to Rob Bell for his podcast about our antennas. It was a weird embrace to acknowledge where my head is at today.
It’s a strange time to be a guy who stands in the middle of your marriage ceremony and breathes your marriage to life.
The most friction in my life this year is my longing desire to see the sun finally set on 2020, whilst also acknowledging my deep desire to be present today, to be aware of what I am learning as running a wedding business becomes ever harder, how I am developing as I attend court mediations on the phone or have hard conversations with people, what weaknesses are being exposed when it all becomes too much, and which relationships really matter when you decide who to call or text about what’s going on, through this pandemic.
Not that the actual illness has affected me, I’m healthy apart from bloody hay fever, but in protecting ourselves and our community from the virus, we’ve lost so much else.
It’s a weird situation. Every day I see people commenting about Covid policies, and I can’t help but feel that if we stopped and took a deep breath that we might draw closer together as a community through this instead of forming deeper divisions between us depending on which politician you think is better.
