The End of a Year – 2022

On June 10, we officially said goodbye to the 2021-22 school year and to the Class of 2022. Saying goodbye to a teacher, friend, school, or classmate can be difficult, sad, or perhaps even joyful with expectation for what is to come. Goodbyes can sharpen our focus on the positive as we anticipate the impending loss; an opportunity to celebrate what was, ahh… the reminiscing. Endings can be heartbreaking, relieving, scary, and transformative and, if done while fully present, a magnificent mixture of all!

To the Class of 2022,
WALKING AWAY
by Cecil Day-Lewis

 

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

 

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

 

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

 

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

In letting go,
Jodi