In Light of the Question of What Comes Next

It’s spring 2021, and it’s graduation season at many campuses. In many parts of the world, there is a sense of emerging from a long isolation along with a shared sense of our collective fragility. Questions hang in the air and one of these is “What’s next?”

 

You have endured the waiting, wrestled with the inevitable demons that emerge in isolation, in a period of study, in axial times. You have put in long hours listening, learning, reading, practicing. You have revisited and revised: hopes, frustrations, longings, and of course, the work itself. I know of no other way to think of it than the Art of Being Here: as a person, protective of life in all forms and concerned about the mechanisms of its destruction. There is a time for the protection of the ecosystem necessary to cultivate a private practice of learning, listening, reading, hoping, longing, wondering and making. And then, it’s graduation season, and it’s warm outside, and you start to notice again what it means when the season shifts, and you realize that there are dangers to remaining in isolation, however protective and necessary it has been before. The danger is that it denies breath to the fundamental human impulse: to offer up. To say, “Here. I made this. Perhaps it can help you, too.” To remember how our making selves are the versions closest to our divine nature, and to offer these up is an act of bowing to the divine nature of others, by carrying one’s tiny flame in shaking hands, into dark spaces: to extend it to the wick of another, in the moments after the storm has blown it out. 

 

To the writers, artists, thinkers, and children who have given their light in ways that were meaningful and visible to me when I could see no other, I bow to you.