
Friday, August 9, 2024
An Evening of Story & Song
Saturday, August 10, 2024
A Nexus Ceremony

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



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.





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.





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.




Pat & Christine shared a retelling of three crucial moments that forged the nexus of their timelines.
Here's what they meant...
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
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
A 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

A love story told in puzzles...
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…


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...