in the hanging garden wedding

ANT & LEONI

This was about as actively joyful as they come. From the moment Ant and his mates sauntered in a flying v might ducks style down the aisle to the soaring refrains of Gang of Youth’s The Heart is a Muscle - a foot stomping, fist pumping ode to actively choosing love in the wake of heartache - the energy simply didn’t let up.

The refrain to the song goes something like this - The heart, the heart, the heart is a muscle, and I want to make it strong (…cue swelling horn section).

How fucking apt. None of us escape the ebbs and flows of life as imperfect beings colliding into one another over the course of the better part of a century. But, we can - if granted the chance - choose to foster the love we come across. Can choose to work on and reinforce our capacity to experience and share it.

It’s an act as much as a feeling. It’s in the way he leaves notes for her and organises her favourite meals to be delivered when she’s stressed and overworked and he can’t physically be there. It’s in the way she supports and pushes and drives him to be his best. It’s in the small things just as much as the big.

I was watching a doco recently about a therapist who says three things we all must learn to live with is pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. Of actively working on ourselves. On actively working on the love in our life. Our capacity for it. Our expression of it. Our fostering of it.

These two have clearly made that choice. To actively work on relentlessly loving one another, and to have a god damn raucous adventure in the process.

The evidence of the choices they have made and the love have fostered is clear in the way they look at each other. In the shared sense of joy and communion they exhude. In the hundred and something strong crowd that flew from literally almost every corner of the earth to a tiny city in Tasmania because they coudn’t bear the thought of not celebrating and being witness to this.

Ant & Leoni, making everyone in attendance’s hearts a little bit stronger, and then throwing a hell of a party to boot.

Enjoy

Dane

 

INSTAGRAM @THESALTYSHUTTER

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