Today's students need to see themselves in a larger sphere of responsibility, one grounded in an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the diversity, the complexity, the ambiguity of our common lives. They need to develop new understandings of citizenship, new capacities for making vital connections, new, creative responses to suffering and injustice. If a capacity for connectedness is at the heart of an ethical life, it is also the essence of a liberal education. With that in mind, I thought I would to leave you with a poem by Marge Piercy. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees, then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.