This year commencement marks many beginnings.
Wednesday
At 9 am, we gathered with our senior majors for a final get together. We offered refreshments, well wishes, and our promise of ongoing support. Significantly, this year’s graduation marks the last cohort to graduate as Agnes Scott majors in Art and History. Next year we will celebrate the first cohort of Creative Arts Majors who have declared a concentration in our new Visual Practices curriculum. Our hearts are full as we bid our graduates farewell, knowing they are equipped with the skills and the creative confidence they need to thrive. They leave, but we remain here for support, and to witness and applaud their next moves.
At 10am we met with a small group of community members for a tour of the exhibition. We shared a lively exchange of ideas abd questions. Personal tours are meaningful–the folks who ask to visit are people interested in place and time, and looking to expand their circle. It’s difficult to measure the long term benefits and potential engagement of these easy, low profile discussions, but it’s clear that the Growing on Dana project has made us some significant new friends and has embedded Agnes Scott in the minds and hearts of some new neighbors this year. As we mark the closing days of the exhibition, we simultaneously enjoy refreshedn possibilities for future campus / regional relationships.
At noon, Katherine watered the garden.
The end of the semester brings to a close our year-long plan (and budget) for the Building on Dana project. Nurturing our graduates, upcoming majors, neighbors, and plants now depends on the same kind of service and care that we have always extended, and will continue to offer to our students (friends, neighbors, animals–growing things): one bucket of water at a time, as needed for growth.
A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.
–Liberty Hyde Bailey, botanist, taxonomist, horticulturist, and writer.
