make the world real
“your charge is not to fit into the ‘real world’
but rather to make the world real,”
that’s my best paraphrase of a grandmother’s charge
to the 36 graduating 18 year olds today:
some who have been within our school the bulk of their lives,
some finding, or refinding, us in high school,
as I look upon the faces and selves before me,
each peg of their being seems a different shape,
and those who would warn of the world awaiting them
would caution them to grow up and reshape themselves
to fit the holes the inertia of the culture demands to be filled,
what my heart believes, and what I hear in the grandmother’s charge,
is that each peg, true to self and to others,
will help the larger world find the right place
for the graduate to not just fit in
but rather to shape what the world needs,
even if it doesn’t seem to know it,
within all of us we know how to be real,
to be true to the best of who we are,
but we can lose our way
when we forget that which is most real within our best selves
and lose the will to help the world realize
what will be best for all.
by Henry H. Walker
June 10, ’12
3 comments:
that's beautiful, Henry, I love it.
That's some fine writing. Thank you. I'm going to pass "graduates" on to my son, Nick, a rising senior.
It occurs to me that it might make for an interesting evening if all the poets involved in CFS were to gather together, no? Maybe the school would loan us a meeting hall. We could even invite writers and other scribblers. It could begin silent-meeting style, although no doubt it would quickly turn into a conversation, or at least a bit of crowd surfing.
Jeff Shear
Henry,
Thank you so much for voicing this so well. When my children were very young, I sat in a circle of homeschooling parents and we wondered around the room whether the unconventional children we were allowing to find their own shapes and ways of being would find enough unconventional "slots" out there in the world. How many artists and free thinkers, how many questers and questioners, how many self-directed, heart-feeling builders of community can the world realistically accommodate? How many square pegs could the round holes of the world adjust to? And what would be lost in the adjustment process? And as the moment to speak came around to me, I suddenly realized almost exactly what you've expressed.....it was the world that was going to have to change! Heck, this was in fact a revolution we were participating in!
My family and I have found such a full sense of home at CFS and graduation itself and your poem help me understand big aspects of why! We've very, very lucky.
Happy summer and thanks,
Libby
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