Emory Nursing magazine

Spring 2008

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This column has been particularly challenging for me to write. As with the many others I've written over the past nine years, there is so much I could highlight. The school continues to be a truly remarkable place in which people make so many good things happen every day. You will see this again as you read this issue.
     The challenge for me, though, is how to say farewell. In the fall, I will become dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Washington—a choice that is exciting for me both professionally and personally. Within this happy circumstance, however, is the challenge of leaving Emory and the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. The school and the people who make it special have become a part of my heart.
     It's not an easy thing for me to say farewell to you. But I want to convey my wish for all good things for the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends and to those who will follow. I also want to express my hope that all that has been built here will serve as a platform for an even stronger future.
     But more so, I want this farewell to be something of a prayer that the future will continue to require the best of all here and that the best will be done with grace, generosity, creativity, and commitment. The values of scholarship, leadership, and social responsibility should frame the future in the ways that it has shaped the past.
     My words are not enough to say all that I'd like, so I will borrow those of Sir Frances Drake. He wrote a prayer in a ship's log more than 400 years ago. His words have comforted and challenged me for many years and now guide for me as I move forward. I hope that they might do the same for each of you as well.

"Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves
When our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little
When we arrived safely because we sailed too close to shore
Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst for the abundance of life
Having fallen in love with life
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in the efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision
Of the new heaven to dim
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery
Where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars
We ask you to push back the horizon of our hopes
And to push us in the future in strength, courage, hope and love."

My deepest thanks to all of you, for all that you do for nursing and for those we serve.
And, to each, fare thee well!

Marla E. Salmon, ScD, RN, FAAN