Each school year ends in early June with a graduation ceremony. All the families within the school are encouraged to attend. It begins with a community-wide potluck dinner. Alysia and I eat with hundreds of people ranging from toddlers who will enter Chrysalis in a few years to grandparents coming to watch their grandchild graduate from eighth grade. The eighth graders, dressed more neatly than usual, vibrate with a poignant mix of emotions new to them. Pride. Sadness that this will be their last day as an entire class to be within Chrysalis. Nervousness at the idea that this ceremony will be the transition into their unknown “high school experience”. But, mainly, an awkward awareness that they are the reason that all these people are here. They are the stars, the focus, and they want to rise to expectations of maturity – but they are inexperienced in such things and so they are endearingly awkward within the real gamut of emotions they are feeling on this, our last day together.
Alysia and I look around the gathering crowd and we feel the great blessing of our work. It’s grown beyond us, of course. This could never have happened without the help of hundreds of other people. Many of the younger families don’t even really know what our role has been within their community. But as we hold hands, we know our work mattered. We have brought into reality a vision of a healthy school environment for everyone participating. Our work has made the world a better place. All of this loving community that supports the kids and families and experiences like school-wide rafting and camping trips happened because we made a choice. We dedicated many years of our lives to creating an intentionally kind, teacher-powered community, and they and their children and the high schools our graduates go on to have benefited from that dedication.*
*One of our graduates shared that one of his ninth-grade classmates from a different school had noticed that the kids from Chrysalis answered teachers’ questions in a deeper way than the other kids.
One of our eighth graders met with her counselor to register for her ninth grade classes. The counselor said that every time the school got a student from Chrysalis, the student made the high school a better place in some way.
A high school teacher commented that a Chrysalis student was the first student he had ever had who was truly invested and delighted in the act of learning. She didn’t ask about tests or grades, only deep questions about the assignments he had given her. *
Life can be such a blessing. We have been born into this world where we are given the opportunity to participate in the ongoing creation of upward possibilities. Life can be good and when it is good, it is very good in a way that satisfies with an enoughness that embraces my future death with a grateful thank-you for this opportunity.
After the potluck, it is time for graduation. The graduates are introduced one by one onto the stage. Their kindergarten-reading buddies come up and stand with their eighth grader. A microphone is passed down the line and each eighth grader introduces their reading buddy to the community, welcoming the next “generation” into the chrysalis just before they, themselves, leave. The kindergartners go off the stage and join the other students who gather in front of the stage and sing a farewell gift of song to the graduates. After honoring some of the parent volunteers, the hour-long heart of our graduation begins. We teachers take turns introducing the graduates one at a time to the community. We talk from the heart for two or three minutes about the unique person we have seen emerging over the years. The talk is loving and personal. Great challenges overcome and victories shared. One visiting educator said she had never seen anything like it and how it demonstrated the reality of a kind, caring bond between students and teachers at this school. Younger students look forward to this time when they will stand there and hear themselves introduced to the world with lovingly accurate words uniquely true to them. Then we shake the graduate’s hand and give them their diploma that includes a picture of them on it.
After they have all been graduated, it is time for them to emerge from the chrysalis. We explain to the audience how one of the most important skills a young person needs to learn in our culture is how to shake hands. A firm handshake that is responsive to the grip of the other while looking the other person in the eyes. We ask all the adults to form a line starting at the base of the stairs off the stage. The graduates, holding their diplomas, walk down the line, practicing their handshake a few hundred times as they are welcomed as young adults into the adult community.
Then it is over. The community self-organizes to put away all the chairs and clean up and a half-hour later, I go sit somewhere in the gathering dusk to allow the overwhelming bittersweetness of it all to settle into me. I will never again see this class all together again. They will return individually or in groups over the years but our time together has passed. I must release them onto paths I will not share.
More than thirty years ago, the Farm School fields inspired me to live my life as an experiment. If I focused on nourishing possibilities in the world around me, would that world evolve possibilities that would nourish and sustain me? That experiment has led me here, sitting gratefully in the dark following graduation.
The way I feel reminds me of a time I was flying at 40,000 feet over a cloudless Atlantic Ocean. I looked out my window and within the horizon, I could see the Earth’s curve. There was no one place where the curve was visible. That was part of its amazing beauty; the curve was so smoothly perfect, so absolutely symmetrical that it could not be seen with the sharpest part of our vision. It only could be seen when I shifted my attention to the entire horizon stretching all the way across.
It brought tears to my eyes because it so beautifully expressed a paradox. The Earth was huge. Eight miles up and all I can see is its barely-perceptible curve. The planet beneath me is vast. I could roam upon it for a million lives and not experience it all. True, it’s been called a “blue dot” but everything, even a galaxy, seems tiny if far enough away. On our human scale, our planet is enormous. Here lies adventures enough for hundred of millions of years. But on the other hand, that curve, no matter how slight, is not straight; it curves upon itself to create a finite world with limits.
Vast but finite. I gazed long at that curve in the
same way I drank in the glowing dawn light at the end of my Longest Night.
Overwhelming beauty all around me. The Enoughness of being alive. Seventy
years, on our human scale, is a vast time. I am sitting in a blessed space at this
eighth-grade graduation night that I could never have imagined back at my
college graduation. So much unknown can happen. A great vast wonder but, like
the Earth’s curve, finite. Holding both simultaneously, the finite and the
wonder, the bitter and the sweet, allows them to merge together into this
precious gift of life. Thank you, rosy finch, for hopping off that ledge into
this wider world.
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