My 📝Astra Lumina Wedding Festival Officiation Speech was written and delivered for the June 2026 wedding of a 📝triad of good friends. The officiation centered on authorship, chosen family, and 📝love as the ongoing act of 📝co-creating a shared story. Knowing their authentic way of loving was non-traditional and aligned with my perspectives on relating, and because being seen by friends and family can be its own vulnerable process, I shaped the ceremony to help their community witness the relationship on its own terms through story, 📝sovereignty, and symbolism.

I went into the experience intending to hold the ceremony with warmth, authenticity, and precision aligned with each individual and the unit as a whole. The speech was designed to create a grounded ceremonial container for vows I knew—knowing them—would be multidimensionally beautiful.

The core 📝frames were 📝Relational Sovereignty and 📝Storyteller Consciousness. Together, they allowed the ceremony to speak about love not as something found, possessed, or preserved unchanged, but as something actively built, repaired, chosen, and actioned over time.

Writing the speech was a spectacularly energizing process, even as I feared my delivery might not do justice to the words I had worked to craft. Afterward, I was comforted by how many guests personally shared their appreciation, often naming specific moments that had resonated with them.

Transcript

You may be seated. Welcome, everyone. Thank you all for being here today.

Weddings are celebrations of 📝love, but they’re also celebrations of 📝community. Every person gathered here has helped shape the story that brought us to this moment.

Some through family.

Some through friendship.

All through meaningful 📝presence.

Every one of you is part of the story we celebrate today and we’re grateful you’re here.

When we first began talking about this ceremony, many of the things {{Astra Lumina}} shared 📝resonated with a frame I love called the 📝Storyteller Consciousness. Storyteller consciousness is, quite simply, the conscious awareness that the stories we tell create the reality we see.

Countries are stories.

Laws are stories.

📝Money is a story.

Words and symbols, that is all. They each have no more meaning than what we agree upon. The gift of Storyteller Consciousness is recognizing we are not merely passengers in our 📝stories.

We are their authors.

We can inherit stories and adopt stories.

We can question stories and release stories.

Most importantly of all, we can 📝co-create the more beautiful stories our hearts know is possible.

Today we are creating a story, in celebration of a story. A ceremony and celebration that becomes a chapter in the story that {{Astra Lumina}} have been 📝consciously co-creating together for more than eight years.

Even the geometry of this ceremony reflects that.

We spent a silly amount of time discussing where everyone should stand. {{Astra Lumina}} explored different orientations of hand holding. I explored different orientations with friends and props.

Models were created and thought experiments were conducted.

And 📝serendipitously, after all of that, we connected in conversation and 📝realized we'd all arrived at the same conclusion: The orientation you see before you.

Because geometry tells stories too. Most wedding ceremonies are designed for a dyad—two individuals standing apart, being united in ceremony by a third.

But that geometry doesn’t tell the story that we’re here to celebrate.

We didn’t want to place two people together and one person apart and accidentally imply hierarchy or imbalance that doesn't exist in their relating.

We didn’t want all three facing me, turning their backs to the very community that has supported their 📝becoming and gathered here to witness their union.

So... we arrived at this open triangle.

The most authentic representation of the truth we were here to honor.

Everyone can see everyone. No point is more distant or elevated.

Three individuals. One shape.

A shape that, for this moment, allows all of us to witness from the outside something beautiful they have spent years creating from within.

That shape also invites a question.

What exactly are we are here to celebrate?

For those unfamiliar, the word 📝polyamory combines the Greek word poly, meaning “many,” and the Latin word amor, meaning “love.”

But if you sit with that a moment, is raises more questions than it answers.

How many is many?

Who defines love?

The Storyteller Consciousness offers a simple answer: It's your story, you get to decide.

Every individual gets to decide what stories they inherit.

Every individual gets to decide which stories they continue.

And every individual gets to decide which stories they create.

{{Astra Lumina}} have each chosen to love themselves.

They have each chosen to love one another.

They have each chosen to love the relationship that emerges when all three of them unite.

They have each chosen, day after day, to keep writing their story—consciously and together.

In the conversations that led to this ceremony, {{N}} shared a reflection that has stayed with me.

Many people become attached to the "ship" of a 📝relation-ship. They become so focused on preserving the vessel that they forget why they boarded it in the first place.

Healthy relationships understand that ships evolve.

Planks get replaced.

Sails get repaired.

Systems adapt.

The goal is maintaining the ship’s ability to carry the crew to the destination to which they’re sailing.

Even more important than maintaining the ship is continually aligning and re-aligning on the destination. Because if a ship leaves harbor without a destination, any destination will do.

When a ship approaches an island, one person may believe that they’ve arrived while another may see only a waypoint.

What I’ve admired most about these three individuals, and this one unit, is that they began talking about the destination long before their relationship left the harbor—and they have continued talking about it ever since.

Through 📝growth.

Through uncertainty.

Through 📝change.

Even as the seas grew turbulent in storms, as the ship required repairs mid-voyage, and as the horizon disappeared into the darkness of the night...

They remained authentic to themselves.

Connected to one another.

And committed to the destination that they continued choosing together.

For me, the moment I realized they were building something truly extraordinary wasn’t when they began dating. It wasn’t when they first moved in together. It was later, when {{E}} received an opportunity that would bring her across the country, here where we've gathered today.

Circumstance offered a story:

A story of distance.

A story of separation.

A story written by convenience rather than intention.

Instead, they returned to a question they had been asking for years:

“What story are we choosing?”

In answering that question, {{N}} and {{L}} packed up the life they had built in California, loaded it into a 10,000 lb shipping container, and moved across the country to continue building a life with {{E}}.

A decision authentic to who they each knew themselves to be.

A decision authentic to how they felt about one another.

That’s what love ultimately is.

Choosing a story.

Actioning it together.

Again and again.

Day after day.

But choosing a story together doesn’t mean everyone always sees that story the same way.

Sometimes even the authors lose sight of their place within it.

At one point in their journey, {{L}} found herself questioning her own significance, something to which many can relate—especially those of us who practice any form of polyamory.

Every one of us has, at some point, told ourselves a story that we were contributing less than we were in truth. Every one of us has, at some point, become disconnected from our own significance.

What moves me isn’t that the story appeared, it’s how it was met by {{N}} and {{E}}.

They didn’t dismiss it. They didn’t argue with it.

They acknowledged how real it was for her in that moment.

And they reminded her of something she had momentarily forgotten.

She wasn’t an accessory to the story. She was one of its equal authors.

And the future she feared wasn't even one they recognized as possible.

That, is an act of love.

Helping someone remember who they are—especially in moments when they’ve forgotten.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of knowing each of them as individuals and as a unit.

{{N}} brings a steadiness that makes complexity feel navigable.

{{L}} brings a presence that makes people feel truly seen.

{{E}} brings a sense of possibility that expands what feels imaginable.

Each carries a little bit of the others within them, and together they become something remarkable.

A harmony.

A resonance.

A way of being that is greater than any one of them could create, or any two.

And perhaps the clearest evidence of what they’ve built is the way it extends beyond them. The way the warmth, care, and joy they cultivate together spill out into the lives of everyone around them.

We all know what it feels like to be seen by them.

To be accepted by them.

To be chosen by them.

To leave an interaction with them feeling a little more full-hearted than when we arrived.

And if that is what they so freely offer the people around them, imagine for a moment what it feels like when that same generosity, care, warmth, and joy circulate in a recursive loop among the three of them every… single… day.

That feeling.

That warmth in the chest.

That fullness in the heart.

That feeling of being seen, accepted, and chosen.

That is why we are here today.

Because love is not something you find, love is something you action.

And now we arrive at a beautiful challenge...

For them to somehow compress a shared history, a living present, and a consciously co-created future—along with all the love, devotion, and becoming that they harbor for one another—into a few short minutes of language. Or, put more simply, to attempt to 📝eff the ineffable.

Each of them will now share their vows.