The faculty speaker, a Turkish theater director, started with a concept she finds English lacks - muditā, a Sanskrit word for bliss at the joy of another - and ended by describing a ritual for parting which she recently learned about from Papua New Guinea. A bowl of water is set out when guests are leaving to absorb their complicated emotions. It's kept for three days after their departure and then sprinkled over nearby trees. She told us she'd put a bowl in our college cafe after the last day of classes and would be sprinkling it on some tulips at the school entrance tomorrow. Lovely!
Back at school I found the bowl.
But I have to admit that in another way it was like years past - for me as well as for many other faculty I asked. We recognized hardly any of the students processing by! Who are all these beautiful young people, and what thirty-two courses did they take if none were mine or those of my colleagues in history, literature, chemistry, politics? I felt the absence of students I have known who are not graduating, or not graduating here, with no bowl of water to capture the complicated feelings.
