Everything Is Connected

Several times a year, I used to join with a small group of instrumentalists to provide music during Sunday worship. During one rehearsal, the sound I was hearing was a grating mix of discords. It turned out that there was a misunderstanding about what song we were to play and we were literally not "on the same page" - it wasn't even the same song. We weren't connected. Yet on that spring day, the sun was shining, green buds were pushing though the newly thawed earth and the birds were singing. Unlike our music that day, nature is incredibly interwoven - life would cease to exist if that weren't so. The poet John Donne wrote "No man is an island". But humanity often devalues its ties to the earth and to others. Those ties cut across time as well. Just as we have inherited much from our ancestors, we connect with future generations by what we leave, whether materially or spiritually. That's why I would use this song to pass along to youth the need to respect our world and our neighbours. When we look to tomorrow, it is worth reminding ourselves that we're all in this together - we are connected.