A word to the class of 2007: You are standing at the cliff’s edge, looking out, arms spread, lifting your head and leaning, but not falling; wrapping yourself in the winds that lift all about you, bouncing on the tips of your toes, and you do—leap!

But it is not so much a leap as a soft drift downward, where your toes meet the unfamiliar ground, once sea now land, safely converted by the strength of your conviction, your commitment to the fall.

And welcome to the fall semester at Macalester.

If I were to replace my first sixty words with a short clip of visual media, I would select the scene from City of Angels where Nicolas Cage chooses to fall from heavenly grace (he actually leaps from a skyscraper) and does arise battered and bruised, but more alive than ever before.

College is like that.

The more you commit to the fall, the immaterial plunge away from the life that has been carefully constructed for you, the less distant you become.

But friends and family try to grasp at your flailing limbs, through financial concerns and personal qualms. It is the way of things.

They are afraid to see you walk on your own, lest you choose to walk away, to forget.

But someone who has discovered their legs has thereby found their internal source of self-propulsion, based on their self-expulsion from a world too comfortable for real growth.

And a person who has found her legs is less distant, by virtue of her newfound motive power, and family and friends do remain close, tucked around the next corner.

Life is cyclical, I’m told.

Never believe the things you are told.

A ‘told’ is a one-way tell, imparted with directed force, like a picture whose eyes always follow you, saying, “pay attention to me, but do not look too long.”

If you do look, then the told unravels, for a told leaves no room for talking to.

And truth is a friend with which you are allowed to freely converse.

So believe more the echoes, especially those that resound within your mind. And don’t be afraid to face and deface the tolds with an imperturbable smile, and a piercing echo whistle.

If I were to choose a sound clip to replace all my jabber-words, I would choose two. One the echo I send out, one the return granted courtesy of my friends.

Mine is Cat Stevens:

“If you want to sing out, sing out,

and if you want to be free, be free,

‘cause there’s a million ways to be,

you know that there are.”

And my friends give me Bob Dylan:

“How does it feel, to be on your own,

with no direction home, like a complete unknown,

like a rolling stone?”

Mine is the whisper before the cliff’s edge, theirs is the wind whistling past as you fall. Both are ultimately Macalester.

But stop.

Do not rush.

“Do not understand too quickly,” says Macalester Professor Chuck Green.

The most important thing to remember is that in falling a few times, we learn to gain our motive legs, our master balance, and the skills and strength to overpass the chasms of future choice and responsibility that are indeed feats to overcome.

But it all begins by moving your feets, into social circles, civic service, and even ivory towers.

Lie in the warm beds of close friends even if everyone else blows it out of proportion. Slide blindly in grasses soaked with heavy rain. Cover yourself in paint and sawdust, building at-cost homes through Habitat for Humanity. Feed your unrefined rants into the microphones at WMCN, Macalester Radio 91.7 FM, when you nail your coveted 2-4 am slot. Let the swings feel the comfort of your toasty bum.

Do every damn thing that flits in your mind while you still have the energy and spontaneity to carry through with your impulsive visions. For creativity is a muscle that must be worked or it will gradually atrophy and wither.

Do you wonder what courses have to do with this thirst and zeal?

You may wonder for a long time, until you meet with a professor a dozen times, only on the odd thirteenth to recognize them as fellow explorers of the delicate folds of thick reality wrapped about us.

And most often the friends we do not recognize are disguised by our perceptions of them.

And so in the circles we run at Macalester, we are to learn many things, to lift ourselves past the cliff’s edge, and to see that professors are not professors, students are not students, and parents are not parents.

The construction workers wear soft eyes that soak up the morning sun, and the janitors have attentive ears that listen to the jostle of walking mobs.

And administrators are professors too, with classes unscheduled, unrehearsed, tutoring available at all times, and very agreeable office hours.

And the professors together wait, for the time that they recognize the spark and flame of a mind lit by the power of shared insights, not given by a professor alone, but by the critical mass of college culture, the intoxicating fumes of growth and inspiration that keep them coming back for more, year after year after year after year.

To respectfully contradict Brian Rosenberg, we are not so much passing through a factory, as we are “comin’ round the mountain.”

If a light is on within our heads it is because we see, that we are not so much cliques of culture as we are a circle of friends, waiting to be.