Our love is a love whose rings, like the ancient Douglas fir, carry the record of every fire survived, every flood endured, every season of drought where the roots held and the canopy kept reaching. This love formed deep in the groundwater of a friendship neither of us had yet named as love.

Like soil richer for the ash, born from fire and rain, seedlings once dormant cracked open and took root. We didn't fall into this love, we walked toward it carrying years of friendship and clarity born only from rebuilding yourself from the ground up.

Both of us arrived threaded with years of quiet becoming, like mycelium stirring in the darkness drawn to the surface by a flush of rain.

Like the intertwined roots of Oregon’s temperate rainforests, our lives were woven together through shared friendships, and shared interests that brought us together. The way our history shaped the topography of our hearts meant we could see what choosing this would ask of us. 

We chose this love because it was undeniable that we were both ready to do the work it takes to be in deep and honest partnership with another human, not because we needed validation or completion from the other, but because refusing it would have meant refusing ourselves.

Our love beckons us to walk a path of intention over a contrived narrative built to satisfy a system so many blindly follow. Like the salmon who crosses hundreds of miles of open ocean swimming up the Willamette River to find the exact tributary where life began, we rose against the current to feed a necessary renewal.

Our community has been a key piece of our journey, holding witness to our unfolding, both in celebration and thoughtful challenge, asking us to name all that it means to arrive here. For this reason, we believe that this love doesn't just live between us as two people. it ripples outward, asking real work of not just us, but of everyone touched by it. 

We are asking you to become co-holders of what we declare here; to be a witness as the cottonwood is to the McElmo canyon and the mycorrhizal web is to our temperate rainforests.

So when you stand with us in that canyon, you are not simply attending a celebration, you are the witness that makes the threshold real. You are the community that will hold us to this, to the love we are declaring here on this day, and to ourselves as individuals.

We are so grateful you are willing.