Verne Windham, a musician I admire, was known at KPBX as a “creative messy.” I understand that his desk was almost always piled high with papers and he was the only one who could find anything on it! I, too, have those questionable habits and recently had to “clean up my act” because of a mouse infestation in the church office.

Well, I dug in and started sorting papers from days gone by to the present. It has been a “good” clean out, as I have been able to purge many things—and, I have found all sorts of things that I had forgotten about!

In among these things was an unpublished poem from someone, somewhere that really struck me as especially apropos to my current situation. I’d like to share it with all of you. The poet took as his inspiration from a quote by William Stafford, “There’s a thread you follow, it goes among things that change, but it doesn’t change…”

Everything Falls Away by Parker Palmer

Sooner or later everything falls away
you, the work you’ve done,
your successes large and small,
your failures, too.
Those moments when you were light
alongside the times
you became one with the night.
The friends, the people you loved who loved you,
those who might have wished you ill,
none of this is forever.
All of it is soon to go, or going, or long gone.

Everything falls away
Except the thread you followed unknowing all along.
The thread that strings together all you’ve been and done,
the thread you didn’t know you were tracking,
until toward the end
you see that the thread is what stays
as everything falls away.

Follow that thread as far as you can
and you’ll find that it does not end,
but weaves into the unimaginable vastness of life.
Your life never was the solo turn it seemed to be.
It was always part of the great weave
of nature and humanity,
an immensity we come to know
only as we follow our own small threads
to the place where they merge with the boundless whole.
Each of our threads runs its course
then joins in life together
this magnificent tapestry,
this masterpiece,
in which we live forever.

Fare thee well, precious people,
Deborah Jacquemin
Your Music Director