BLESSED MOTION

by ANNIE ZYLSTRA

I was taught this song by my friends Carlin Quinn and Justine Epstein. You can hear the original with all parts here. I found it a little too high for my voice, so moved it down a key. Here are Annie Zylstra’s words about the song:

“Blessed Motion is a 4-part acknowledgement of the nature of Life as an unpredictable, ever-changing movement toward itself. The melody came squatting on a rock next to a fast moving fork in the Trinity River, where salmon were in their first week of journeying to their spawning sites in northern California. Martín Prechtel said after surviving the Guatemala earthquake of 1976, during which he witnessed the ground beneath him rising up and swallowing people and villages whole, that solid ground is a myth believed by people who live on the earth rather than in it.”

I believed in solid ground

until I saw the earth in motion,

in the winds of steady change

and in the ever-rolling ocean

​

All moves on in perfect, perfect motion

All is change and ever-rolling ocean

Solo:

All is moving, all is change, though I once believed that there

might somehow be something firm beneath my feet, but

All is motion, and all is well for solid ground is just a myth

for those who never swim in it.

All is moving in blessed change, o the world we know

will come and go and everything will rearrange, so

be the ground beneath that sky,

tumbling round the by and by.

All is change, so am I.

lye lye lye, lye lye lye.