Wedding speech for my dear Lucia and my dear brother, Hannes
Long time ago, on a party on the Prater island in Munich, I was asked what love is. Me, back then had no proper easy answer available – possibly also because the question was asked in French, which I did not speak that well back then. My answer was somewhere between trust, friendship and passion – but I was rather overwhelmed.
Today, I feel much more ready to give an answer. You both contributed considerably to this. You helped me to better understand love. My following words are a tribute to what you both have built and are building each day again and again. But before we are getting to my love approximation attempt, I want to ask all here in this room what love means for you? How did Lucia und Hannes impact your perspective? I want to invite you all, to pose this question to yourself and maybe if you have an answer to share, feel free to put in this little book throughout the day.
Now to my answer. Since I am a scientist, I cannot skip the methods part. No matter if in museums, books, podcasts, in conversations – I assessed the question. However, in the end, it was probably my own little emotional rollercoaster bringing the greatest of all lections. Throughout the year working on this speech and looking for an answer, I did not always feel like love. Soon, I learnt that writing about love requests love itself. Big doubts came up if I am the right person for this task and to be in charge of this speech. Until I realised that my outside-the-classical-model-living stage is making me to a good love detective. So often society tries to tell us that love is reserved for romantic love with marriage as an end goal with everyone not reaching this yet being incomplete and pitied. But love is so much more – from selflove to love for the people around us, to more-than-human-beings and to our planet. Realising its width and power and how to cultivate it, allowed me to combine my inspiration with your story. And this story I thought to know already. Soon, I needed to realise: Love is seeing and hearing the other perspective, to feel into the other(s) and to accept that the own perspective is not all-comprising. How to integrate your both perspectives was my first crucial learning. I sent you questions and your answers helped me to get closer to grasp some words for love, without reducing and simplifying it (too much). Based on your answers, I picked four faces of love. Let us start with the first:
Love, the connecting
No matter if for Lucia the soccer field around her house in Nesselried causing fascination or for Hannes bringing together little football teams on different beaches or your travels to South America and Africa, you both have always been looking out for what is holding us/ humanity together. And then, so unexpectedly, just two streets away from each other, you found the probably greatest of all connections. Similarly, being a safe, familiar harbour, while still opening up a new world, full of new music to discover, new perspectives, new places. A magical interplay between the familiar am curiosity, you both found what is connecting you be it the music, sociability, history podcasts, hiking, discovering and questioning, the small joys of life, the simple being, like the floating in water. Meanwhile you trusted the connecting force of the water and let it play the connecting role that it obviously has: no matter if in the Murg or in the Liebach here close by the waterfalls, or in the Futalefu in Patagonia, the Sambesi, or in the Rhine from Constance to Mannheim and Straßburg and Karlsruhe. Accordingly, some important decisions were taken in rivers.
On basis of this magical portion, you managed to create a new type of connection, one that connects others, too. You became a team that is backing each other up, navigating each other, showing up in moments when the other cannot be there for her/himself. Your love lives, how we become each other through connecting with others. You are showing, how love means being so connected that each part becomes something bigger. Love means to be yourself through the other person by giving them the space through yourself. And your connecting with others is very visible just here in this room, for example with Alfares, who you integrated into your heart and family since 2015 or all the other wonderful connections throughout the globe. You are mirroring how to become better versions of yourself by giving love, by better listening, proving feedback, empathy and compassion. In generally giving more than taking. And being more courageous and less fearful. But this characteristic deserves a own face of love:
Love, the fearless
I am still having the moment clearly in front of me: Hannes, you and me hiking up that mountain with a far too heavy backpack including a tent and a heavy bread, and some tired legs that brought us from the other side of the Lago Maggiore to the Vezasca valley and there to deep conversations. You worrying that the marriage might institutionalise love that old, maybe obsolete role models could take over. Hannes, you overcame your fear. And Lucia, you have accepted the unknowing and that Hannes did not directly respond to your proposal at the Murg and that he needed more time. Even if patience according to Hannes is not one of Lucias‘ strengths – you waited for him. You gave him the time needed to find the answer himself. And he found one, proposing back in Jamaica. Your both proposals are mirroring wonderfully the conversation, the exchange that love requires.
Love cannot exist where there’s fear. You both overcame it. This is why we are gathered here today. Today reflects your courage, the work you put into yourself. You both dare a step, you decide each other for you being a team in front of testimonials celebrating with you this decision. You both put something in your head that you want with all your heart and you put it into reality – that’s making all the difference.
You show how it’s looking like to be fearless, to be as you are in your deepest and to open, to jump over the ego, resolving conflicts and create situations. You let your love be dynamic, evolving so that it’s not suffocating. But this brings me to the next characteristics/face of love.
Love, the renewing
You both fell in love 11y ago and you did it again and again. Today you are not the Lucia and Hannes you were back then I’m the bus when you met each other. Back then when you exhanged music, your first kussand told your befriended grandma’s about your rising love. Times with trips to local lakes, tent nights at the Murg, roadtrips yo MunichItaly ir the Atlantic coast, from relationships through distance and sharing the everyday life but also stormier times, including the search for yourselves with rising doubts.
Through all that time you both evolved, but together. Sometimes with closer toes, sometimes with looser ones. This gave you both the room needed to grow and to let your easy youth love develop into a deep mature one. Throughout that time, you did not loose yourself but instead found yourself new, again and again. Like you are able to revive old furniture, vinyls or clothes, you were able to revive your love continuously. No matter changing, you fell in love again with the new version of yourselves. And you did so no matter knowing the flaws of the other that Hannes might be a bit unbearable without coffee in the morning, that he likes from time to time to eat a pound of pasta that his driving style is a bit bumpy and that he can be living in other dimensions or getting very sociable (possibly die to early conditioning eating half a black forest cake of his grandma with not little schnaps in). He on the other side, needs to be well in loosing (board games), accepting being built in playing settlers of Catalan but also a different time calculation and different presences doing grocery shopping. But all those challenges are nothing against the strengths you are seeing in each other. For Hannes it is your warmth, light, contentment, relaxed way of being that you Lucia mean for him. But also, your respect for each other and the capability to forgive each other. To value each other, to keep contact on difficult times and not to loose each other of sight. For Lucia it is Hannes‘ fundamental trust, spontaneity and being down to earth. Theres is a saying that goes: “love is like bread, if you wanna eat it, you need to bake it each day again.“ Your love shows that love is not just falling from the sky but that you need to actively put care into it, that your strengths are outliving the flaws and that love is living from doing not from promising. Over the last decade, I became testimony how your love developed and how you grew together, holding each other in good and not so easy times, too. And that sometimes, time is becoming relative – letting alarm clocks stand still. But this brings me to the next face of some higher, maybe magical spheres.
Love, the liberating
As much as you like traveling into past times, let us quickly travel back in history up here on the black forest motorway. Here, you found one of 8 Führer headquarters some more than 80y back. Here, the faith of Jews from Baden and the Alsace was decided. What’s the connection with your wedding and the celebration today? We are all descendants of a dictatorship which replaced love through hatred. I think celebrating love where hatred governed before is a wonderful step to bring back love. Only love can overcome the scars of the past and to break the vicious cycle of violence. It was never needed more also to overcome times of staggering declines of biodiversity or times where this current heat will be the lowest one in future years. Here we are gathered today celebrating how love can transform us to something bigger. Here, I would like to mention Platon and platonic love often misinterpret into a relationship reduced to friendship and the physical connection. But actually, Platon defines love as more. He described it as a leather starting with the physical connection but step by step leading to higher forms of connection including thriving for wisdom, truth, beauty in the foreground, and aliveness. According to Erich Fromm love enriches the other, enforces the feeling to be alive through being more alive. A mental connection that does not want to own but inspire to give. To become something bigger, liberated by the earthly, nurturing the soul. The radical: love to thrive for the eternal, the infinite.
At the end of my love approximation, I would like to share a Goethe poem that came closest for me, defining love. I came across it in Stefan Zweig’s “decisive moments in history”:
Marienbader Elegie
In the purity of our hearts there stirs
A longing
To surrender ourselves freely, out of gratitude,
To something higher, purer,
Unknown,
Unraveling ourselves toward the One
Eternally unnamed.
We call this piety. Such blessed elevation
I feel myself to share
Whenever I stand before her.
We find in the other person a part missing in ourselves. Hannes you describe Lucia as your salvation from cynicism, and the system and things we cannot change or only slowly or as your favourite Nietzsche quote goes: if you have a why almost every how becomes bearable. Lucia, you became Hannes why, his googles in a coral reef. He became your anchor, your support and lighthouse. Together you are lightening your path through seemingly unresolvable bureaucracy and keeping your hope alive for the good in this world. You are uniting your strength, becoming together something bigger, more powerful, seeing both more details but also better the big picture. In both of you, I can see what love defines and how we are all forming it. Still, citing Paulo Coelho, we shouldn’t forget that love is an untameable force. If you try to control it, it destroys us. If we try to capture it, she will capture us instead. If we try to make sense of it, it leaves us lost and puzzled. This is why despite this little trial of finding some words for the mystical, it is and remains what we do out of love, how we let this magic enter our lives, how we embrace the unknown, maybe at times scary fact that somebody else also not perfect is leading to this bigger person of oneself and stand for this day by day, saying yes again and again. Even if love seems far at times, she’s always there. You get her best to see, by taking the first step by giving, showing love and by giving the space she needs. The more important it is to get aware of her, her characteristics and what it means to care for her. In Rumi’s words, it’s not our task to look for love but to find the barriers we build around it, shedding it off. With those words, I hope this celebration today will contribute tearing down those walls, teaching us to love more. I am incredibly proud to learn through and with you what love is and what this decision means. In deep gratitude for having you both in my life, I wish you that you will never stop to redefine love, because putting it into stone won’t work.
In love, here’s to both of you, Julia
Books on the way finding those words:
- Being and Sharing – Andreas Weber
- Be not afraid of love: lessons on fear, intimacy and, connection – Mimi Zhu
- All about love – bell hooks
- The art of loving – Erich Fromm
- The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship, A Toltec Wisdom Book – Don Miguel Ruiz
- Biology of Wonder. Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science – Andreas Weber
- Love in a F*cked-Up World – Dean Spade
- On Connection – Kae Tempest
- Biology of Wonder – Andreas Weber
- The Rumi description – Melody Moezzi
