TOADTalk: Rich Mazzola on Endings

Good morning. Welcome to the homestretch.

With Big Gymkhana and that weekend’s performing arts samplers, and the final games of the athletic season, and EDT’s all behind us – and now that we’ve somehow dodged a bullet and survived a weekend which was supposed to include the end of the world – we have just two weeks remaining in this school year: a week of classes; a fun weekend featuring the Spring Sing and the Unprom; a couple review days; and then exams, end-of-year banquets, and finally, Commencement. As we always do, we’ll pack a lot into these two weeks, but all the while, we’ll know that we’re on the verge of bringing another school year to a close, and that summer vacation awaits.

There’s a certain exhilaration, relief, and sense of accomplishment tied to the thought of arriving at the end of the school year. Most of you can also find comfort and satisfaction in knowing that after this homestretch, and after a summer of recharging your batteries, you’ll come back next fall to create yet another best year yet with wonderful friends and teachers here in this place that you’ve grown to love – this home away from home.

But then, there are some of us – like the seniors and I – who will not be coming back next year. And while I can assure you that we are no less excited than any of you about crossing the year’s finish line, as we make our way down this HOMESTRETCH, we’ll be thinking a lot about the first syllable in that word, and how Thacher has, over the years, become a HOME for us – a home that will, in many ways, be hard to leave.

So, here we are together – the seniors and I – at an emotional fork in the road. Do we pour ourselves wholeheartedly into charging toward this year’s finish line and thrust out our chests to break the tape without breaking stride? Or do we embrace each step in this homestretch and even take some time to look back over our shoulders as we head for the big finish?

I’ve been torn between these two options in recent weeks – even as I was settling on a topic for this TOAD Talk. On the one hand, I thought it would be nice to talk about the powerful sense of home that most of us have found here at Thacher, and about how Casa de Piedra has found a sacred place in our lives and in our hearts. That portion of me wanted to talk to you about a concept that I first learned about during my first years of living here on campus, when I quit my corporate job and enrolled in a Masters program at UCSB to prepare for a new career in education. Along with the courses focusing on educational leadership and organization, I sprinkled in some advanced English courses, and in the midst of my Native American Literature course, there was a particularly memorable lecture by a professor visiting from UCLA, Greg Sarris, who talked about the concept of geopiety – geo, meaning earth or land; and piety meaning reverence. Sarris talked about the prominence of geopiety in Native American traditions, which develop an almost mystical, organic bond of attachment between tribes and nations and their homelands. This concept popped into my head again some seventeen years after that lecture, just this past fall when I was in Olympus grabbing mail out of my box and chatting with Ms. Sawyer-Mulligan. At the time, one of Ms. Mully’s classes was studying memoirs and writing their own narratives focusing on a variety of themes, and the upcoming theme for the course was “home ground.” I know that, because among the pieces of mail I pulled out of my box that day was a calendar, sent to me from Dartmouth College. It featured nice photos from around the college campus and included some smaller pictures of students active in educational and community service programs around the world. The cover photo was of Baker Tower, which is the most prominent architectural feature of the College; it rises above the main library in the center of campus. On that cover, floating in the sky right next to the tower, the copy read, “at home in the world.” When I first opened the envelope and pulled out the calendar, I was immediately struck by how the word HOME was prominently featured in large font, right next to Baker Tower. I couldn’t help but think that this was no mistake – that the calendar which was created courtesy of the Trustees of the College, was meant to immediately remind Dartmouth alumni, that we once had a sense of home there, and that, to a certain extent, we still do. When I turned to Ms. Mully and pointed out this clever and effective juxtaposition of the word “home” next to the iconic image of the tower, she asked to borrow the calendar for an upcoming class discussion about what creates a sense of home.

I suspect that generations of Dartmouth students would see the image of Baker Tower and immediately be drawn back through the years to when they stood on the Green, which is the expansive field in front of the library. The Green is one of those places where memories gather for many Dartmouth students. And for that reason, it has a place in their minds and hearts. In effect, it becomes, to some degree, a sacred place for them. I know that place holds an especially sacred place for me because right there, on the Green, beneath that tower was where I proposed to Ms. Mazzola.

I bring this up, of course, because many of us who are about to leave Thacher are starting to understand how this idea of geopiety applies to our beautiful campus nestled in this beautiful valley. Even if you weren’t familiar with the term, you may have begun to understand its essence – a sense of reverence and nostalgia that we’ll feel more and more as we approach the finish line, and that will probably evoke more than few tears on Commencement Day when we hear the singing of Mr. Haggard’s beautiful song entitled simply and powerfully, “This Place.”

So, that’s one of the emotional paths that we may choose during this homestretch. The other that comes to mind is one that I learned about a couple years after that Sarris lecture, during my first year as a full-timer here at Thacher when we had an amazing Artist in Residence here on campus: the venerable Losang Samten, a renowned Tibetan scholar and a former Buddhist monk who was charged by the 14th Dalai Lama to come to the United States to demonstrate the sand mandala art form. He was the first Tibetan mandala artist to display this art form in the west and moved to Philadelphia to become the founder and spiritual director of the Tibetan Buddhist Center there. In his years in The States, Losang has been commissioned to create works for numerous museums and institutions, including Columbia University, Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and, of course, most impressively, for The Thacher School, in the Reference Room of our Boswell Library.

That winter, our library became home to his beautiful sand mandala when, day by day, we watched him create intricate designs and patterns by carefully coaxing grains of colored sand out of metal tubes called chakpu. A Thacher Magazine article about Losang’s visit explained that the mandala was meant to “invoke collective compassion and energy when people come together to view the intricate pattern of lotus blossoms, dancing maidens, and symbols...The design, size and colors of the mandala are strictly dictated and have not been changed in their 2600-year tradition.” The sand mandala and the process used to create it was beautiful, and Losang worked for hours upon hours over the course of many days. But among the essential truths in Buddhist belief that mandalas are meant to display is the temporary nature of life’s material objects. So at the conclusion of the winter term, our beautiful mandala, which took so long to create, was ceremonially swept away within a matter of a few minutes by the students of Mr. Mulligan’s World Religions course.

Lobsang Samten, himself, explained in an interview years later, “Part of the process of creation of a sand mandala involves ritual, ceremony.” He said that though people want to experience the ceremonial dismantling, “and try to understand it, sometimes they get upset that such beauty is thrown away. So much work was put into making something, and then it is gone.” But he explained: “That energy was turned back to the earth and the water. It’s just like a circle. The dismantling also refers to the fact that everything comes and goes. It’s important to be able to let things go rather than holding onto them. What’s important is the meaning of something, not the thing itself.” And finally he points out that one of the essential tenets of Buddhism focuses on “the philosophy of impermanence and interdependence. Everything is moving, totally changing moment by moment: we ourselves, our minds, our souls, and things around us, our environment. So understanding our impermanence and our interdependence can arise from the dismantling. It’s a very, very important message to all of us.”

Over the course of our time here we have all, in our own ways, painstakingly poured ourselves into this beautiful place. And now, for some of us, it’s time to sweep away this mandala and go on to create another using the expertise, the compassionate sensibilities, and the tools that we’ve developed here. It’s time to move on.

So here we are, making our way down this homestretch where these two emotional roads diverge: on the one hand, that of geopiety and longing to hang on to this sacred place, on the other hand, that of the sand mandala, which teaches us to value this goodbye and embrace the beauty of impermanence and transition. I, for one, can’t choose between the two. So rather than taking the advice of my favorite American poet, Robert Frost who suggests that when you come upon two roads that diverge, if you take the one less traveled by it will make all the difference, instead I’ll try to embrace both paths and I’ll take the advice of my favorite American philosopher, Yogi Berra who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”