To the College Class of ’21:
From C. Jenny Walbridge
Peace doesn’t come from quietude,
From standing like a tree.
Creation is its action mood,
So set the spirit free!
Your lives may well create the first experience of all humans aware of each other at the same time. Nobody knows what this will exactly mean; nobody can see it. But the future must be incredibly beautiful and emotionally moving, this creation of yours. I can hear it echo in the heart songs of all of us Earthlings today. Writer Pearl S. Buck said, “All things are possible until they are proved impossible and even the impossible may only be so, as of now” (in A Bridge for Passing).
I have some suggestions for you guys, based on my experiences as artist, mentally ill person, feminist, anthropologist, music lover, American and Earthling for 55 years. Basically, I want you to “Pump up the volume! Put the needle on the record and dance! Dance!” as artist M/A/R/R/S urged. Let Earth evolve in new ways that we can’t necessarily view right now; let these ways be directed by your creative selves becoming healthy. Art is part of Earth, right?!
My study—I got a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology degree—of other cultures has led me to some of what I think of as useful ideas—the groundwork for happy planetary sharing. I urge you to learn about the peoples of our planet as quickly as you can, helping folks younger than you to do this, too! The statements in this speech were largely stimulated by my openness to the other folks of Earth, and their ways. For example, the Asian belief in harmony of opposites makes sense to me: where “yin” equals feminine, dark and passive and “yang” stands for masculine, light and active; and everything is more or less either one or the other. In other words, harmony among opposites is different from unity, or sameness all around. I see that the “world unity” concept that the Baha’i religion believers love to champion as the prerequisite for achieving world peace may be unconsciously challenging to some people: we don’t want part of our identity to be denied, and it seems like some think that “unity,” rather than “harmony,” might hurt us.
Even in your mind there must be a balance. My mental illness started when I wasn’t able to embrace the male or yang part of the world because early on, passivity was drilled into me by an intrusive, obsessive-compulsive parent. I was not able to grow my psychological self, normally, either, because my other parent also made mistakes in raising me. Talk therapy for thirty years with the same person saved the day, but what a huge investment! I had to literally learn, as an adult, how to be a member of my society and crazy world. Resetting my yin and yang balance by learning to embrace the part of the world energy I had unconsciously rejected was necessary for my psychic recovery; this kind of phenomenon will also be a part of the recovery of the rest of the world, I think.
As a dancer and beginning martial artist—plus a fan of two movement techniques, Alexander and Feldenkrais, as well as soccer—I see that movement is extremely important. Our Western world is built around sitting—bad deal! Instead of sitting and driving all the time, then walking with a steady, boring gait, in a straight line, we could use kneeling chairs and have treadmill desks—and dance from here to there! Can alternatives to Chicago’s deadening public bus and train seats be found? What about futons, instead of seats, in airplanes? Skateboarding is a great use of your body—much better than driving; let’s think along these lines, and move from thinking into action, if we want to see scooters and electric bikes for transport, which pollute less, too. (The latest body technique I know about is Yamuna Zake’s The Foot Fix, which works from the ground up to help us be stable.)
This could be a start to restructuring the globe: each region gets its own Ministers of Movement to help people on the job take care of themselves while working—and to learn to move more joyfully. Read entertainment of real life, a great reality show for the actors and the watchers and learners (put it on video). To do these things we must be happy and inspired—possible in a peaceful world.
Learning how your body likes to interact with your environment gives meaning to life and provides fulfillment when you express yourself. Doing these movements makes you glad! Look at other cultures, who use the world in manners different from ours, yet, legitimately, effectively. China, for example, used to encourage its citizens to exercise together, doing ta’i chi, in the parks, before work. For them, the individual can have less importance than the group; is this necessarily bad, all the time, just because our nation isn’t that way? Asking questions like that is what the future needs, as the world becomes smaller and we get to know our neighbors (all other peoples).
I agree with the Baha’is when they hold that humans have been unready for world peace until today—that we’ve been in a mental stage of adolescence, and are just now becoming adult. Doesn’t it seem that one reason for this could be that now we have a lot of people living here, so we can communicate more easily? Additionally, we have technology that we lacked before. Most important, though, I think we’re mentally ready to grow up.
Natural symbolism can be learned and employed to get control of life, your own included! Your body remembers what you do with those fingers and where your toes take you. So maturing means your mental focus goes through several equations. The first is 1×1=1, the nursing experience, where you are, mentally, part of the breast, to 1+1=2 and 2+2=4, where you start to appreciate another person. Then, when it’s time to mate, you get into 2×2=4. When you grow, your two sides and your sets of five fingers and toes have a lot of experiences, and therefore become more important in your mind. The next equation you unconsciously think of is 5+5=10.
Because ten uses a one and zero, it reminds computer programmers of the ones and zeros they play with. Drumming with your hands also makes your body engage in rhythm production. There are two kinds of beats: one, like a zero, quiet, and the other, like a one, accented. We want to get out of the fascination with doubling that is stuck in our mind, so we can pass on and get out of our stuckness in the metaphorical metafourical metapausal stage in which we are looking at ourselves, not the world; we can cause our minds to mature. (We should be eager to get away from the metaphors that are ruining our lives—i. e., “food”; “healthcare”; “school;” “work.” The fact that these are comparisons, not the real things, is shocking! But we do need to figure out, as a species, what is really healthy food for us, and the same with health care, education, and productive but fun work!)
We can mature our psychological stage by using our bodies! We can do this by drumming; playing piano and other instruments, singing, skipping, jumping rope and cartwheeling; shaking hands. Many other activities can help us ascend, growing into a healthier, saner, more excellent world!
The next human stage is like a woman’s post-menopausal time of life, when she is done cycling and her period of fertility is completed. For humans as a group, I call it post-metapausal, because “meta” means “to refer to itself.” In the post-metapausal stage, the population is coming out of its cocoon and starting to fly around like butterflies. This can be pictured as the sphere of our planet with erratic lines coming out of it. 
My previous expression, of the fourth age, is a globe with arrows pointed into the center of the planet. Before that, the third age of language and writing dominance can be illustrated by the circle with arrows curved around it, pointing up and around and then down; this refers to the way language abstracts one’s mind, with rules and loss of freedom; any language except a world language would do this, I would guess. (The world language could utilize stuff from each current tongue, especially funny expressions and noises.)
Increasingly faster in our history, this abstraction is being overcome as symbols of harmony are becoming integrated in world citizens’ minds. I would say that the U. S. is the world site of mental maturing—we speak English, one of the three most-used languages in the world, in talking and writing, research, art, fashion, and advertising, which reach into the minds of many people because of our country’s vast communication resources. Plus, we are the most immature people in the world, perhaps, or, at least, the most ready to indulge in group growing up, healing from Western cultural injuries. We have a duty to help the rest of the planet so all can ascend, remembering that every person’s voice is necessary in the playing of “To get her”–the game or song that shows Earth that we understand!
The second age–one of balanced yin/yang-driven evolution–can be shown by a world with continents on it, and an animal which evolved early in the history of the world—a pterodactyl, signifying that the state of yin and yang—their interacting—their balance—has defined our past. Our recent human adjustment—so painful and ugly, in some places, some ways—has been necessary, like growing pains, but can become a better situation for all beings on the planet. This will occur naturally when humans quit acting like other people and species cannot be trusted.
And the first stage of humanity, paralleling the life of a single human female, is the birth or Big Bang. I express it as a circle with arrows pointing away from the center. In the drawing above it even has a symbol of growth in the middle, signifying life expanding.
There is a stage after the fifth, the post-metapausal or Quintessence stage. This is old age, when we return to the Second Age rhythm to stay in this balanced pattern forever. I drew this by putting the Earth with a rabbit on it (symbolizing animal life of our time) next to the planet with the pterodactyl. The crisis of human invention—the need for identities of complex technology to be defined, and people, too, to be known as yin or yang—will end, for good. This situation will never occur again, in the history of the universe. We’ll just go on rhythmically, with the humans and other species evolving, until the Sun explodes, and the music of the spheres will be soulful forever, assuming all people embrace their soulfulness today.
Be ready for radical change. By radical, I mean sudden, just, beautiful, and lovingly-oriented. You students obviously have the capacity to be inspired! There is work that needs to be done to save your planet, yet it is play, the best method of fostering creativity, that will get done what needs to be accomplished. Your mission is to manage the Earth, along with the other humans, using play. My motto, “If not fun, why done?” refers not to selfishness and greed, but to self-growth, communing and progress.
I want you to get that there are a lot of poor people in the world. But in many cases, that’s their only problem. Here in the U. S. A., we have a bunch of psychological issues too, so it’s not exactly like we’re doing that great. But I don’t want you to be planning a way to get yourself well-off at the expense of the environment and other people. (And figuring out a scheme to make sure you’re “comfortable” in a grating and numbing day is not the way to contribute to a happening world!)
Your duty is to listen, be aware of yourself—you awesome hue-min, be-ing! Other species, along with us, your olders, who have experience on this globe, will help you. My neuroscientist sister, Julia Mossbridge, has written the book The Calling to guide you. I can see that the rest, of the planet, is not far away. Your lives and mine, and our very home, are waiting, hoping you will see the light so we can admit that we now do, too.
That’s right, today we are sick. I talk to my therapist two or three times a week, and have done this practically my whole adult life; it’s extremely helpful, and I recommend that we Americans train talk, dance, art and physical therapists big time to help us recover from our lack of feminine leadership; poverty; and general malaise.
So we can take the responsibility to save ourselves, each other, and our home. We can be in charge. Or, we can leave it to our “God,” wimp out, and continue ignoring our duty to care for “His Garden.”
Why not act like we are in love with the world, our home? You can figure out celebrations for the planet. Think big! Don’t let yourself be held back by imitating the Baby Boomers’ generation’s negativity! Many people would say, you were put on this Earth for a reason; look at Greta Thunberg, the well-known 18-year-old from Sweden who speaks for climate control on a planet with a future, or our own Amanda Gorman, poet extraordinaire, telling it the way it is—with grace and power.
We older people know that there can be lovely experiences here, and we want to secure them for you and the future; we have dignity—we want to feel good about the world we bequeath to you. How about a new relationship to authority—being it? Who will act as the superheroes of your age? How about—every person alive? You right now should be asking us Generation Xers and Baby Boomers to share with you, for everyone’s benefit. Instead of chanting “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” not that I disagree with that, but it could be replaced by you singing to everyone, “We are demanding, Get up and dance!”