BUCKY
You've all seen moving pictures run backwards, where people undive out of the swimming pool back onto the board. I'm going to run a moving picture of you backwards. You've just had breakfast; now, I'm going to run the picture backwards... and all the food comes out of your mouth onto the plate;
and the plates go back up onto the serving tray and things go back into the stove,
back into the icebox; they come out of the icebox and into the cans, and they go back to the store; and then, from the store they go back to the wholesaler;
then they go back to the factories where they've been put together;
then they go back to the trucks and ships; and they finally get back to pineapples in Hawaii.
Then the pineapples separate out, go back into the air; the raindrops go back into the sky, and so forth.
But in the very fast accelerated reversal of a month practically everything has come together that you now have on board you, gradually becoming your hair and your skin and so forth, whereas a month ago, it was some air coming over the mountains. In other words, you get completely deployed. Think of yourselves as each one of these deployed elements. If we had some way of putting tracers on the pictures, you would see chemical elements gradually getting closer and closer together, and, finally, getting into those various vegetable places, and into roasts and, tighter and tighter, into cans, into the store, finally getting to just being you or me. Temporarily, becoming my hair, my ear, some part of my skin. And then that breaks up and goes off and gets blown around as dust.
Each of us is a very complex pattern integrity with which we were born.
A human being is a pattern integrity. I'm going to take a piece of manila rope,
and then I'm going to splice into it a piece of cotton rope. Into the other end of the cotton rope I splice a piece of nylon rope. I'm going to make the very simplest knot I know, which is to go around 360 degrees in this plane and 360 degrees in that plane. A simple overhand knot. I'm not going to pull it tight.
There's the knot. On the manila rope.
The rope has not done this,
I have done it to the rope.
At any rate, I can slide the knot along...
and now it's on the cotton rope…
and then, I slide the knot some more,
its on the nylon…
suddenly, it's gone completely off the end.
Where?
We say: "The knot was a pattern integrity."
It wasn't manila,
it wasn't cotton,
it wasn't nylon.
Cotton, nylon, and manila. Any one of them is good to let us know the knot's shape, its pattern, but the knot wasn't any one of them: it had an integrity of its own.
A human life is like that knot moving along the rope.
I took off seventy pounds recently. I was overweight.
Who was that?
It wasn't me!
I have taken on over 1,000 tons of food, air, and water since I was born, and I am not any of that poundage at all. Just as the knot was not the manila, the cotton, or nylon.
When I die, when my pattern integrity slips off the end of the rope,
I'll still be around 140 pounds.
And you can throw that away that's just yesterday's cereal.
My pattern integrity has moved on,
it's somewhere else.

read by Michelle Read on Sunday 15th October 2006.
Dublin Unitarian Church