Learn Like Trees

The following is the speech I was honored to deliver at the Gardner Edgerton Graduation ceremony for the class of 2026.

Good morning GEHS humans of the class of 2026, and good morning to your parents, friends, families, educators, and administrators. It is a joy to speak to you today and to wish you well as you embark on this great adventure that is, to quote poet Mary Oliver, “your one wild and precious life.”

The title of this speech comes from a line in a song I love titled “Angry Anymore” by Ani DiFranco. The lyrics of the song read “we can learn like trees, how to bend, how to sway,” and that’s what I hope to speak to you about this morning.

I grew up in central Kansas surrounded by farmland and wide blue skies, not unlike the worlds of Gardner and Edgerton. At seventeen, when I graduated from high school, all I wanted to do was get away from that openness. At 22, after a rocky few years and still without a college degree, I returned to that part of the world and to the people there who worked hard, laughed loudly, and understood the value of community. They were the roots I’d been missing and a large part of the reason I’d often felt so near breaking. Without them, I couldn’t bend; I couldn’t sway.

Once re-rooted, I found my strength in studying English. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree at the age of 24 and then with my Master’s at 27, but I didn’t start teaching high school until I turned 30. If you are sitting here today thinking you have no idea what you want to do next: I feel that in my bones. And it’s okay. You don’t have to be anyone other than who you are at this exact moment. That is enough. As long as you listen to your own heart and live authentically as yourself, you will find the road you’re meant to be on, and it will rise up to meet you. 

Four years ago, just as you were starting the adventure of high school, I planted a tree in my front yard. I had no idea I’d be standing in front of you today, and I certainly had no inkling of each and every one of your lovely souls. I only knew that my front yard seemed to want a tree. 

I have a thing, you see, about trees. I get distracted in cars as I watch them flash by. I am often a passenger since my husband prefers to drive, and I am forever wondering what kinds of trees we’re passing on our road trips. I even downloaded a tree identification app because I need to know who to say hello to when I pass. Hello, white birch. Hello, magnolia. Hello, majestic and magical oak.

The year my father was born, my grandparents planted an oak tree in their front yard. It grew right alongside him for many years, and I got to see it every day for the first 13 years of my life because we lived in the house next door. I watched the Kansas wind batter that tree with everything it had, but the tree never broke. I watched it bend and sway despite all the chaos that surrounded it. It may have lost a limb or two, it may have dropped some leaves – okay, a lot of leaves – but it was still standing at the end of every season, just as steady as it had been the year before. 

In my senior year of high school, my father made me a solid oak frame as a Christmas gift. He is a master carpenter and builder, and the frame is a work of beauty. It has weathered many storms with me, from dorm life to terrible apartments to great apartments to a house and now to my classroom. Oak trees are symbols of strength and stability, and I think he was trying to give me the gift of those qualities just before I left home for the first time. 

And when my husband and I bought our house in 2016, I fell in love with it – in large part – because of an oak tree: a 104 foot Pin Oak, 17 feet in diameter, the trunk wrapped in ivy from the ground to the first set of limbs. It looked like a tree out of a fantasy series that might house all manner of magical things. I wrote poems about that tree, I’ve put it in the fiction I write, and I took a thousand pictures of it from every conceivable angle. When I looked at that tree, I saw a history I hadn’t been a part of. We hadn’t planted it, but I imagined the man who did. He was the town arborist for Ottawa and was responsible for the oaks planted downtown in memory of Civil War veterans. I imagined his children swinging beneath the oak at our house, making the kinds of memories that only happen in the backyard. I also saw my future: lazy days reading on the porch beneath the shade of that tree, fairy lights strung between the branches, a chorus of birdsong trilling through the air. It was beautiful while it lasted. 

Five years after we moved in, we had to take the tree down. It turns out that Pin Oaks, as they age, suffer from summer limb drop, and the older and larger the tree is, the more dangerous it is for those limbs to fall. Having to accept that the end of something is the right thing is never easy. No, my people:  this is not just about trees.

I hope when you find yourself in the middle of something broken, something that isn’t what you need – a relationship, a job, a school you wish you hadn’t chosen to attend –  that you have the strength to sway. You have to learn, like trees, when it is time to bend in a new direction. When it is time to say goodbye to the branches and the leaves of your life that simply do not serve you any more. It is okay to make a change when you know why you’re doing it. In fact, it’s a key to survival. 

You have to be willing to move on so that you can plant new seeds and spread your own roots. You’re leaving a community behind today, but you are embarking on a new one that will carry you into all the things you do next so that your roots will reach deep into the soil of your life and ground you for all that is to come. 

In spring, as it is now, we live in a sort of daydream here in Kansas. Lawns go green even as storms roll in and lightning splits the sky like a sharp knife into fruit. The days are warm and cold and humid and hot and all of that happens before breakfast. 

The spring trees, now, are just like all of you. They are in bloom, they are beginning, and they are beautiful. They reach their fragrant arms into the air to test what is possible just as you will do as you enter the world after high school. How far will you reach? What new heights will you pursue? 

This summer, once the final flush of spring passes, the trees will be at their fullest. All glossy leaves and vibrant life – their promise fulfilled in hushed rustles as the wind hits them just right. These summer trees will bend and sway as storms come calling, knowing that their roots are enough to keep them upright. You, too, have those roots. You, too, can bend and sway.

When I started college at KU, I was terrified. The campus was larger than the city I was born in, and my dorm housed more people than attended my high school. It didn’t take long for me to start retreating – skipping classes, sleeping in, and generally hiding from the changes that I feared would break me. The thing about hiding is, even when it feels like the safest option, it is never a permanent one. If you don’t make a concrete decision, if you are not intentional about what you want and need, everything keeps right on happening to you instead of for you. It’s a lesson that took me a long time to learn.

Next month, I’ll pay off my last student loan, and then, in July, I will turn 50. I wouldn’t change my history or the broken roads I followed to get here, with you, today, but I wish I’d learned how to bend and sway a little sooner rather than letting my fear control so much of what I did. I wish I had trusted my own roots and my own strength.

This fall, as the trees erupt in a riot of color and you step into August without the demands of required education upon you for the first time since kindergarten, look at the trees. Notice how they put on their finest clothes in anticipation of winter’s arrival. They know hard times are near, but they don’t retreat. They show out. In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning lyricist Kendrick Lamar, “they got hustle, though, ambition, flow / inside their DNA.”  The trees know, deeply, what they are and where they come from. 

So do you. 

Press your feet into the ground and feel the grass rise up to meet your soles. Feel the history of all who’ve sat where you are sitting, feel the love and goodwill everyone here today has for you. These are your roots. This is your community. And you will carry it with you long after this ceremony commences. 

You will need these roots to ground you, to help you bend and sway when the wintry lessons of life appear. Like trees covered in ice, glittering in sunlight, you, too, must grow a thick and luminous skin. I’m sorry to say struggle and heartbreak and loss finds us all. I wish it did not. I wish we could live in the startling shock of spring forever, but because we have the gift of being human, every emotion and experience eventually finds us and unites us in our shared humanity. 

On those most challenging days, keep your wits about you. Bend when the pain feels too much to bear. Hold tight to your roots to keep from falling. Sway when the hard things pummel you so struggle is a dance you survive. 

The tree I planted four years ago, a flowering crabapple, is stunning today. Bright clusters of blossoms dot its branches just as you brightly fill those seats. Each time I see it bend and sway, from this day forward, I will think of all of you.