Planting the seeds of the future

The Solstice is upon us. Summer has arrived. Pennsylvania high schools held their graduations last weekend. New Jersey graduates its seniors this week and New York will send their graduates out into the world next weekend.

For those of us with graduating seniors, it is a bittersweet and proud time. As parents, we have nurtured our offspring to a successful conclusion of their lives at school. As they move forward into the next phase of their lives, we hope for them an unencumbered path to their potential and their sacred contracts with life.

High school graduation is the completion of the responsibility of a child. And we are happy for their sense of accomplishment. They enter a new world—one of the adult—where they have the choice to pursue further education, travel, enlist in the armed forces, pursue a career as a craftsman, marry and begin a family—in short, do anything their heart desires.

There are some who lament that large numbers of our young people leave this environment of the Upper Delaware River Valley to further their own experience in life. To me, who came to this valley following college graduation for the beauty and the purpose of publishing in the river valley, it seems a normal state of things.

The simple fact that graduating students might choose to pursue other life experiences beyond the river valley’s boundaries is not a criticism of the choices available to them in our area. It simply signifies the need to see and experience more.

The question, in my mind, becomes whether we, as permanent residents and parents of the valley, have provided a means and reason for their return. Have we taught them the unique beauty of the area and instilled an appreciation that they will carry in their hearts? Have we instilled a sense that everything is possible wherever they find themselves living? Are we thoughtful and determined to build a sustained healthy economy?

As our valley moves into its own next phase of existence with expanded growth, the valley’s progress mirrors the lives of our graduating seniors. And I wish for us the same as for them—an unencumbered path to our own potential.

Testing ourselves against our own sense of integrity, determination and creativity, just like our graduating seniors, is not a process of rejecting that which has come before. It is an exercise of gathering all of the pieces of our lives into a new beginning. It is a process of holding our life values close to us as we open our minds to endless possibility.

And in an ironic twist of the truth, which shows itself often to be the exact opposite of what we think, the sum of our successes has less to do with what we have acquired and accomplished, and more to do with the quality of the love that we hold inside—for ourselves, for our community and for the giant web of interconnected life.

Hello summer. Congratulations graduates. Here’s to a new day for us all.

Laurie Stuart, Editor