top of page

BEHOLD!CHRISTINE & PATRICK'SMETAPHOREST WEDDINGRENASSIANCE FESTIVAL

AUGUST 9-11, 2024archives

Friday, August 9, 2024
An Evening of Story & Song

LEVEL UP

Our community contains multitudes.

We are Healers, Creators, Fighters, Tricksters, and Explorers.

There are many ways of being and each is powerful in the quests and adventures we face.

 

Our wedding weekend offered many ways to celebrate these many multitudes and level up in new skills and experiences from bushcrafting to treasure hunts to riverside massages among the forest.

So many ways, in fact, that there's much you may have missed... "dragon eggs" if you will.

It was a lot of work, SO HERE'S AN ABRIDGED ARCHIVAL RECAP!

 And with each new experience and each merit badge earned, you helped weave a tighter connection between the threads that guided us to our nexus moment and helped us generate enough XP to best the final boss: 

THE HORROR OF A PUBLIC DISPLAY OF AFFECTION

AND THE INDEFINITE INTIMACY OF MARRIAGE.

The Bestie-ary

The Battle

Pat and Christine Wedding 120.jpg
IMG_3837.jpeg
Pat and Christine Wedding 196.jpg

These checks honor  attention to detail, awareness, and mental persistence

SURVIVAL CHECKS

Build skills in friction fire and an appreciation for the attention required to generate a spark, a coal, or a flame. Try and make new things from your environment: wood, needle, clay, pigment, and more. Learn new tools or how to use old ones in new ways.

Screen Shot 2024-10-04 at 4.09.11 PM.png

NATURE CHECKS

Open your eyes to new awareness,  perspective, and language for the plants and animals around us. They orient and connect us to the sky and earth. 

Screen Shot 2024-10-04 at 4.09.11 PM.png

MIND CHECKS

Attend to patterns and persist in solving puzzles and riddles. Move yourself to build on a shared story and bring the magic out of all of us.​​​

STORY& SONG

Pat & Christine shared a retelling of three crucial moments that forged the nexus of their timelines.

Here's what they meant...

BOB

Salut D’Amour

Referenced The Duet from The Adventure Zone and Pat & Christine's continued love of TTRPGs, music, and each other

The Nearness of You Referenced the song Riker always plays on his ‘bone and that Pat & Christine performed for Jonathan Frakes at a 2013 Star Trek Convention

Meditation from Thais

Referenced when Pat & Christine saw Anne-Sophie Mutter play Meditation in March 2013 and saw each other cry for the first time, kicking off a lot of … complicated feelings for each other

What followed were the debuts of two plays gifted to one another: 

 

THE TRUE LIGHT OF THE SUN SWORD

theatrical adaptation of Patrick Hogan’s 6 year old novela performed by Chicago friends + family.

THE TRUE LIGHT OF THE SUN SWORD 2: THE SEEDS OF REBIRTH

Patrick's long-awaited sequel gifted to Christine in the form of a table read

Pat and Christine Wedding 12.jpg


A love story told in puzzles...

THETREASUREHUNT

Many strands of time had unwoven and meandered into the four corners of The BeWilds. Without their tether, the timelines of Patrick and Christine would not find their nexus.

Puzzles are Christine’s love language, and in case you missed it, here is the story they told…

Lost Treasure #1

TraveLey Lines

The first locked chest was emblazoned with a poem referencing photographs from our travels that hung in the Pristine Cat Museum.

 

The challenge: Identify the photos and find their location on the map...

Screen Shot 2024-09-27 at 3.32.29 PM.png
Pat and Christine Wedding 12.jpg
Pat and Christine 14.jpg
T1 Ley Lines

Lost Treasure #2

Transposition

This locked chest was covered in key signatures and transposition charts with a scroll attached. The scroll contained a note in red pencil to Transpose to C Major” (a not so subtle nod to Christine being oh so basic and major) and a list of four songs: My Friend the Brachiosaurus, I’ll Never Tell, Aerith’s Theme, and Romeo Bids Juliet Farewell.

 

Each song carries meaningful weight for Patrick and Christine as a couple, but the next challenge would be finding these songs in music books among the Pristine Cat Museum displays...

IMG_4442.jpeg
IMG_4441.jpeg
T2 Transposition

Lost Treasure #3

Evolutionary Orders of Operations

This locked chest celebrates the many branches in the diversity of life throughout time and requiring the solver to learn the evolutionary relationship between common animals of the PNW on a mostly empty phylogenetic tree. The species involved hung on prayer flags above the entrance to the Pristine Cat Museum. 

Solvers would need to know or learn that Frogs and other amphibians were least related to the remaining Amniotes; Turtles and Birds are more closely related to each other than they are to Snakes; Rabbits are the only Boreoeutherians that aren’t Carnivorans; and Felines branched before Canines, which branched before Bears, which branched before the split between Raccoons and Otters (members of the Weasel family).

IMG_4446.jpeg
Pat and Christine 21.jpg
T3 Evolution

Lost Treasure #4

Alchemy

The final treasure chest blurred the lines of fantasy and reality. The found chest was covered in strange runes with a very real Periodic Table of Elements plastered beneath it...

 

This locked chest corresponded to a table of green potion bottles, each with a unique icon attached to it... underneath a chart of Alchemical Symbols that look mysteriously similar to the Periodic Table...

IMG_4438.jpeg
IMG_4439.jpeg
Pat and Christine 89.jpg
81QBPJUet5L.jpg
T4 Alchemy
Pat and Christine Wedding 361.jpg
Pat and Christine Wedding 243.jpg

Infinite potential timelines might have been, but here we are. The one where protons and neutrons formed the atomic nucleus, where our exact DNA combinations evolved in our cells, and the one where we found each other. 

And when we come together, we create magic.

 

This year we come together at the center of overlapping cycles: a solar eclipse gracing our narrow window of sky, a solar storm igniting it with aurora, two magicicada broods meeting for the first time in 221 years, and our 12-year reunion.

​And just as ancestral leaf litter and fallen nurse logs feed new growth, and salmon return home at last to be reborn in the soil, water, and future generations...

 

When we come together, we create something new.

and forever change the flow of things to come.​​​​

And while we may try to fight it, in these twisted threads of time and space, all trails lead us here. To a nexus moment in this mixed metaphorest where we can conjure enough magic to step through a portal into something new and agree to be forever changed. 

Dressed with the wisdom and patience of our old growth healers, creators, fighters, tricksters, and explorers.

Thank you to all for meeting us here. 

 

And in what is to come...

NOW BOOGIE DOWN TO OUR PLAYLISTS!

©2020 by The Bewilds. 

bottom of page