I am not married, so I’ve given some to thought about what one of my favorite poets would think on this occasion.
William Blake’s English is simple to read, but mystical in nature, and challenging to penetrate. For example, consider this stanza:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Libby and Shiva are scientists — So I think we’re already be in trouble. You can’t hold an infinite amount of anything in the palm of your hand. In fact, when they see an infinity symbol, they panic because it means they messed up their derivation and have to redo the last two pages of equations.
…Eternity in an hour What if I was to rephrase it like this: Humans sometimes experience time in intensely, profoundly, non-linear ways. Or perhaps: certain people can make us lose track of time. I think we can all relate to that
Blake’s works are saturated with what he called, contraries: Heaven & Hell, Innocence & Experience, Reason & Imagination, Angels and Demons
He juxtaposed these things for more than aesthetic reasons. He believed that only by grappling with these opposing forces within us, we can become our true selves. All of them are essential - including the ones we might not like. He wrote: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
This is an intimidating process. For Blake, there was a special force that could help us with this task.
Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair
If evolving is impossible without exploring contrary forces, it is in loving and being loved that we find courage to explore. Love gives us permission to misstep and stumble. It lets us delve to the core of our beings. In loving, we help each other evolve. Blake would call this Transformation and believed they brought us closer to the Divine.
I would like to end with a favorite stanza of mine. It’s called Eternity and I think it’s Blake’s little secret for us on how to love well:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
In a finite amount of time, everyone here, today, will fade away. But in that finite time between now and then, I hope you all - Libby and Shiva in particular - will experience many moments where an hour lasts an eternity.