Made in Cosmos

A few days ago I married the most fascinating person I know. A lot of people came to me after the ceremony and said “I’ve never seen anything like this. I never thought it is possible.”

In Poland, humanist, secular, or non-dogmatic wedding ceremonies aren’t really a thing. Most people get married in a church. Those who prefer not to, do it in front of a government official taking about rights and duties. There isn’t much in between.

I always wanted a religious wedding. But there was no religion I could wholeheartedly subscribe to, and this is way too much of a big deal to do it anything less than wholeheartedly. So I kinda had to invent my own.

It’s easy to say what you’re against.

It requires only one word. “No”. That’s it. Whatever you say after that, is about the thing you don’t want. What is it you actually want?

Half of Poland has now “LGBT-free zone” on their Facebook profiles. The other half has “Violence-free zone”. Both are trying hard to concentrate on not seeing the pink elephant, and still seeing it.

How does the world without the elephant look like? Tell me.

Once you achieve your goal and create your something-free zone, what are you going to do in it? What will you spend your time and focus on? What people will you bring inside? What are you going to do together?

How does the world of your dreams look like? Trust me, it’s much harder than it sounds.

Once you try building the world you love, you’ll realize the reality isn’t as easy to design as we thought. We reach the limits of our own understanding. We’ll need to get vulnerable, actually stand for something knowing that other people might reject and ridicule it. The more radical change you propose, the more reject and ridicule it will get.

There’s thousands of articles on the internet about why you shouldn’t marry in a church and only few about what to do instead.

None of them resonated with me at all. I even found some scripts for a wedding ceremony that included Carl Sagan quotes, but they weren’t high up in the Cosmos enough. I had no choice but to create my own.

Artur & I got engaged on our way to Automattic Grand Meetup 2 years ago. Ever since then, I was wondering how our ceremony would look like. Artur said that not having been baptised he’s already used to having no expectations about his wedding, he only said he’d love to be surrounded by trees. We had lots of trees. We even planted one together.

But then again, if I wanted a ceremony that would be none of the standard options, I’d have to make it happen somehow. This isn’t something you might accidentally get as a default option.

Even though I knew what I didn’t wanted, I never stopped to actually think about what I do want

It wasn’t easy to find out but luckily I had lots of help in the process. I signed up for the 30 Challenges to Enlightenment course by HighExistence that had a Facebook group with people cheering on each other in the challenges they took to understand themselves and the world.

For a month, I drank no alcohol, coffee, tea, etc. For another I took cold showers every day. I’d never do this kind of things on my own, but the peer support was overwhelming. I still continue to meditate and journal daily, and this year I decided to focus on blogging daily as my personal challenge. I have two incredible accountability buddies (Mayela & Mayryanna, I love you!) that I met on a HighExistence retreat. There might be another one joining soon, which I only spoke to for an hour but already feels like family.

The friends I made there help me create a little piece of the world I do want

They created a space where I could plunge really deep into my heart and ask it for the first time.

What is it that I actually do want?

What do I stand for?

What’s so precious to me that I can’t imagine myself not being it, no matter what it takes?

HighExistence doesn’t provide a prepackaged answer. You can be an atheist rationalist or a pagan witch. They don’t care. They are there to help your own personal journey unfold, however different it might be from theirs. They share the tools they themselves have found helpful through years of trial and error and practice, but they know that everyone is different. What works for one person may entirely not resonate with the other.

These are real people, who have all been through some really hard shit in their lives, who despite all that shit choose to focus on what they do want to create instead of the thing they don’t like. They don’t just criticize ideas, but always suggest something better.

Thanks to this process, I can co-create the world I love

And I can co-create our life together with my husband on our own terms, just as we’d love it to be. If something goes wrong, we talk about it in a compassionate way, and then try something different next time. We know many of the answers we have today will be replaced by better answers a few years ahead. We’re committed to figuring them out together, in the best possible way for our family.

That’s what we focused on during our wedding ceremony. We’ve decided to grow together. We will hold each other accountable, and be each other’s cheerleaders. We will love each other unconditionally, but still challenge each other and call on each other’s bullshit. We will learn new things so that will help us create the family, planet, and the Universe we want to live in.

With our feet deep in the Earth, and our hearts high in the Cosmos, we will create the best possible world we’d love to live in.

We seek friends who do the same. Together we want to make a ripple in the fabric of reality.

My husband and I, we want to go together through life, and do nothing less than our best to leave it a bit better. Because some things are not worth to take them anything less than wholeheartedly.