Isn’t it magic! Our first Hollywood timber was used for a very special celebration on the longest day in 2013, a wedding just before Xmas at Kippure estate in the Wicklow Mountains (I bet none of you guessed this).

Conor Murphy making a few finishing touches with the Alaskan mill a couple of nights before the big day.

I was delighted to hear that our first Hollywood timber was used for the marriage service and vows, and later as a small stage for the wedding band for Conor Murphy and his bride Sinead O’Brian. If you remember I wrote in early December how Conor (in the wedding photo, he’s pictured to the right of Sinead) asked me for several of the largest logs from our 2nd thinning last January. Apparently there was great interest in the the timber stage from the guests.

When I received these pictures I was reading about artful action research and how we add meaning to our places and lives. Of course artfulness is not restricted to artists. Artist, educator and Green political thinker Joseph Beuys said it when he exclaimed that ‘we are all artists’ but Tolstoy I think really nails it:

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems and novels…(but) all human life is filled with works of art of every kind – from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, to church services, building monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity.

–  Leo Tolstoy, What is art? 1946

Congratulations to Conor and Sinead and thanks to groomsman and forester Sean Hoskins (pictured second on the left) for the photos and update. A simple wedding, Sean played the wedding march on the harmonica and said they ‘all made full use of the longest day’!!

PS this also brought back memories of our wedding too – our wedding party celebrations were in Hollywood of course, with our trees looking on. Nearly ten years ago already and how the trees have grown.