Good morning…
As the moonlight waxing on our bathroom floor silently adds more and more and more, I revisit the words we read aloud in class.
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Excerpt from the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
A few years ago, I woke up one morning with a line running through my head: “Everything falls away. . . .” The line would not leave me alone, so I started tracking it to see where it might take me. In time it evolved into a poem where the quest for selfhood merges into the indisputable reality that we are connected to each other, to the things of this earth, to the mysteries of the cosmos.
Our own stories are tiny and transitory, but we are woven into something vast and eternal. That’s why philosopher Baruch Spinoza urged us to live sub specie aeternitatis – under the aspect of eternity – it gives us a perspective on life that is both humbling and ennobling.
Our individual threads of life are gossamer-like in the grand scheme of things. But as long as we keep tracking them, we are headed toward something of enduring truth and beauty. Keep your eye on that vision as you go, and it might well change the way you live your life today.
Everything Falls Away
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. – William Stafford
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’ve 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 else 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.
Parker J. Palmer
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As we live together “under the aspect of eternity,” what would you name the unchanging thread which weaves you into life’s vast tapestry?
I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God. Then you will have minds confident and at rest, focused on Christ, God’s great mystery. All the richest treasures of wisdom and knowledge are embedded in that mystery and nowhere else. And we’ve been shown the mystery! (Colossians 2:2-4a, MSG).
…Sue…
