Press Release

Graduation Welcome Remarks
May 13, 2006
Thomas B. Coburn

It is always a great pleasure for me to welcome you all to one of the great annual events in Boulder—the Naropa graduation ceremony! Over the years I have been to a great many graduations and, to my mind, there is only one that comes close to Naropa’s in its joy and open-heartedness, its poignancy, and its effectiveness in moving those of you who are currently students across the threshold to become alumni. In a moment I will say a word about that other graduation, but first let me complete my welcomes:

First, to today’s graduates. You have done remarkable work with us, and just as you have grown over your years with us, so have you helped us grow, as individual faculty and staff members, and as an institution. Thank you for this collaboration in learning. And let me—along with the others here who are not students—be the first to offer my congratulations.

My second welcome goes to the parents, spouses, partners, children, other family members, and friends of today’s graduates. Thank you for the countless ways you have supported today’s graduates. Each of you knows best how you are implicated in their accomplishments. So please pause now to appreciate for yourself how you, too, share in those accomplishments, sometimes vicariously and sometimes much more directly. Today is truly a celebration of the collaborative work done by today’s graduates and their loved ones and friends. Graduates, please join me in thanking your collaborators.

Finally, a welcome to Naropa’s faculty and staff. You are the agents of the growth that has become manifest in today’s graduates. You are the ones that today’s graduates will remember in the weeks and years that lie ahead. Sometimes those memories will occur in obvious ways, with recollections of particular episodes in their learning. But often those memories will emerge more gradually, occasioned by the ripening of seeds you have planted, often without your students knowing it, seeds that will take 15 or 20 years to come to fruition. Something will then blossom, as that mysterious link that forever binds teacher and student comes freshly into view. When you, today’s students, have such memories, please smile and drop your teacher a note or an email. It’s a precious way of reanimating the bonds that already exist between you. Those communications mean far more to us than you can ever imagine. And right now, graduates, please join me in thanking this remarkable faculty and staff.

Let me now say a word about the one graduation ceremony that, in my experience, rivals Naropa’s in capturing the essence of the institution and in celebrating the glorious transition that happens when its students graduate. The institution I have in mind is not far away, a few miles north of here, near the intersection of 19 th and Iris. Its mission is actually quite similar to Naropa’s, for it was founded by the same extraordinary individual, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The institution I have in mind is the Alaya Preschool, which each June graduates about two dozen five year-olds, many of whom have attended for three years. The ceremony is held in the shadow of a tall shade tree, with the well scrubbed graduates seated in a semicircle. There are dozens of parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles in attendance at this, the first of what will likely be several graduations over the course of the little ones’ lifetimes. The graduation begins with a procession and with a bow. The ceremony includes songs by the children, which last year were “Breathing In, Breathing Out” by Thich Nhat Hanh and “Baby Beluga” by Raffi. It includes a brief talk by an Alaya graduate who tells the children how the Alaya experience looks from the perspective of being a ripe old teenager. And, at the end, in the ceremony’s most poignant moment, each child stands and the teachers read a poem they have composed to capture the spirit of the individual child, as it has become manifest in school life. Here are two poems for last year’s graduates:

For Doug: “Dashing through the classroom with a smile/ you are eager to share friendship and love./ Overflowing with infectious laughter, you remind us of the joy of living./ Patient engineer of airplanes and tornadoes, architect of adventure./ You create worlds of fun with your own sweet blend of silliness and strength.”

For Claire: “Princess Claire, a kitty, a queen, inspired creator of the baby jaguar game./ Kind, generous friend, happy to share glittering crowns and sparkling jewels./ You are a patient maker of boats and a lover of art table conversation./ With your feet never leaving the ground, you can fly up toward clouds and stars—a burst of beauty and grace, leaving a trail of sparkles.”

Now why, you may ask, would I tell this story about Alaya’s pre-school graduation here at Naropa University’s graduation where, for our students, preschool is a distant memory? The short answer is that I’d like each of us to think of what we might say by way of a poem to those graduates whose lives have been most intertwined with ours during their years at Naropa: what is our equivalent, for those we know, of what the Alaya teachers said about Doug, Claire, and the others? But there is another answer that lies in my own deepest concerns and my own deepening understanding of Naropa’s unique mission.

Three and a half years ago, the presidential search that brought me to Naropa was well under way. During the days of interviews on campus, the most surprising question I received was the first one in an open forum with staff members. It came from someone I’ll call Margaret. It was: “Tell us, Tom, what lies at the core of who you are? What do you live for?” This, I quickly saw, was not going to be your conventional job interview! I paused for several moments and then told a story from my recent sabbatical in India. Toward the end of our trip, my wife, Leigh, and I had found ourselves with an open evening in Delhi. It was a Thursday, and for years I had heard of the extraordinary Sufi singing that took place on Thursdays at the Nizamuddin tomb of a famous saint. So we decided to attend. We took a rickshaw to the Muslim quarter and threaded our way through the increasingly narrow lanes that eventually opened out into a larger courtyard. The crowds were dense, for it was Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting from dawn to dusk, and, after the evening prayer was over, there would be joyous feasting throughout the neighborhood. Leigh had discretely covered her head with her shawl, and we were the only apparent Westerners present. We were offered and accepted food, and then proceeded to sit quietly against the mosque’s wall, where we could see and hear the Sufi chanting group and savor the rich intermingling of sacred and secular.

After just a few minutes, small children—about the age of Alaya graduates—came up to us, sometimes accompanied by an older sister. They came very close, curious, open, loving. They would smile, and they would tentatively try out their English: “What is your name?” We would tell them and then cross the bridge of openness that they proffered back in the other direction, asking in our Hindi: Apka nam kya hai? Throughout these exchanges the plaintiff, passionate, poignant singing of the Sufis continued in the background.

My reply to Margaret, the staff member who put the challenging question to me, was this: I live to promote and nurture the loving openness that those young Muslim boys and girls showed toward Leigh and me. I wondered what it is that we do that keeps children, as they grow, from being able to sustain that love and willingness to embrace all others without judgment, courageously and without hesitation. Where does our suspiciousness of others come from? Of course, I reflected for Margaret, we don’t utterly extinguish from human experience the qualities of childlike innocence and openness, for they occasionally come bubbling up in situations like the Sufi chanting and in other ceremonial settings, very often in ceremonies from the world’s wisdom traditions. What I live for, I told Margaret, is to maximize the openness and love between human beings that those young children, in Delhi’s Muslim quarter and at the Alaya School, manifest so naturally. I want, not just to keep that quality from atrophying, but to help it flourish.

In my years at Naropa since responding to Margaret, I have seen that Naropa graduations themselves are one of those wonderful liminal occasions, occasions of openness to each other, to what we have accomplished, and to who we are. In crossing this threshold together, we can recapture our truest, most essential selves, building on what we were when we were in preschool, now filtered through the wisdom of our additional years, and through the experience of our years here at Naropa. During my years at Naropa, I have come to see that, just as there are certain occasions, certain ceremonies that are transformative and give us glimmers of our truest selves, so there are certain institutions that also work this magic. Naropa, I now know at first hand, is one of them.

The great Indian poet and educator, Rabindranath Tagore, once said that the reason he so enjoyed the company of small children is that the amount of energy they invest in any activity is inversely proportional to its utility. What a wonderful way to connect the insights of young children with one of the core teachings of the wisdom traditions that undergird Naropa: cultivating awareness of the present moment through intellectual, artistic and meditation disciplines.

So welcome to this very special moment in this very special place. May we engage in this afternoon’s graduation ceremony with the open hearts and wide-eyed enthusiasm of young people everywhere—and may each of us then go on to share that openness, joy, and compassion with a world that so sorely needs those healing, loving qualities.

Welcome to Naropa graduation 2006!

Contact:

Jane Rubinstein
Director, Marketing & Communications
Naropa University
PH 303-245-4643
FAX 303-245-4676
Jrubinstein@naropa.edu
www.naropa.edu