2062: To the New Graduates

Here we are fifty years later. Time always seems to sneak up on you and all of a sudden your in a crossroads in your life. Many of you read this with a degree that used to mean a lot more than it does today. Others of you still value the larger idea of furthering your knowledge in hopes to better the world somehow and you don't care if your degree becomes useless. As I go back and read the entries that I made when I was in your shoes, I sense the hopefulness in my words. Unfortunately now, I feel my generation has let you down and moved too slowly in the fight for our planet. Although great strides have been made, I wonder if not enough "shamanic personalities" have come forth in the last fifty years to "journey into the far reaches of the cosmic mystery and [bring] back the vision and the power needed by the human community at the most elementary level" (Berry, Dreamer of the Earth). I hope that the majority of you graduating from Wofford and all of your peers across the country continue and increase the progress my generation started. We have begun to live in rhythm with the rest of the living world in some areas but this kind of connection with the planet must be more widespread. I hope that in the next fifty years you will see the explosion of creativity in the midst of a bleak time. Just as the cell evolved to live in a poisonous oxygen atmosphere, I hope your generation can continue to evolve to live in a poisonous cultural and limited natural world. Or, maybe it is time for us to become integrated back in to the stars of the universe and hope some other organism will live better than we did.

"We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources" --Thomas Berry