Everything Is Waiting for You

Everything Is Waiting For You was written in celebration of the UNL Percussion program

and commissioned by Emily Salgado. The title is borrowed with gratitude from the poem of the

same name by Irish poet David Whyte.

From the first of my conversations with Emily about this project, it was meant to explore

the concept of “going home.” “Home” itself is a concept I think about with some frequency,

particularly as I’ve built my entire adult life away from those places I might have previously used

“home” to describe. My longing for far-off places is often dissonant with the people and parts of

my life in Nebraska that fill me with love and gratitude. At turns this dissonances creates guilt,

melancholy, warmth, happiness, and loneliness; and increasingly, I tend to think of “home” not

as a place, but a complex, multilayered, and quintessentially human feeling.

So what, then, does it mean to go home? The only way I can think to answer that

question is to recall the feeling of walking home from school when I was young, on some sunny

fall afternoon in Oregon. I remember thinking about the way I would feel walking in the front

door — coming back to my family, my pets, my backyard — and being filled with a love and

excitement that caused me to walk just a little faster.