Speaker 1 (00:00.62)
Dr. Rick Lindroth is a distinguished fellow of the Lumen Center. He's also a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Ecology Emeritus and former Associate Dean for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Lindroth's research focused on ecology, including global change of forest ecosystems. He taught courses in ecology and ecotoxicology. Associate Dean for Research, functioned as Chief Research Officer
of the UW College of Agricultural and Life Sciences with a $100 million per year research portfolio. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, the Entomological Society of America, and the American Scientific Affiliation. Yes. Dr. Lindoroth has authored or co-authored 250 scientific
articles and mentored hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. Currently, Dr. Lindra speaks and writes to public and faith-based groups about environmental stewardship, climate change, biodiversity, and science denialism and communication. He has been interviewed for numerous podcasts and news outlets and profiled in the Washington Post and most impressively, Trout Magazine. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lindra. Over the years, I've walked in the shoes of all of you.
as a student wondering what's next, as a parent happy to be done paying the bills and also wondering what's next, and as a faculty mentor sad to see a good student leaving and wondering who's next. I've had to learn to keep those different roles in their proper place, like when talking to my daughters, both of whom went to school here, and remembering to be their dad and not their professor.
But every once in a while I'd get those roles confused, like the time when my older daughter sent me some emails and she was having some issues with a grade she had received on an exam. And she sent me copies of emails she had had with the professor. So I read them over, created a lengthy response, told her that professors aren't always right, even though they think they are.
Speaker 1 (02:22.878)
and hit send. And a few hours later, I got a reply back from the professor. 10 short words saying, think you meant to send this to your daughter.
Speaker 1 (02:37.816)
So, yeah, keep those rolls straight. Nobody will remember your commencement address. Nobody's going to remember this one. But if I may, allow me to use the next 20 minutes to insert some grains of sand to kind of rattle around in your minds that over the next decades may produce a few pearls of wisdom. So here we go.
Speaker 1 (03:07.374)
It was a time when political polarization had turned American against American, family against family, church against church, and state against. It was a time when the very foundations of the democratic experiment called the United States of America were crumbling. It was a time of constitutional crisis unparalleled in the country's history.
It was a time when the Republican president signed legislation that completely upended and restructured higher education in this nation. That time was 1862. That crisis was the Civil War. That president was Abraham Lincoln. And that legislation was the Morrill Act. And we are all Ben Fisheries.
you
Speaker 1 (04:06.444)
Now, how the federal government acquired land is not a pretty chapter in American history, but the Morrill Act was a good consequence. It provided grants of land from the federal government to the states for the explicit purposes of establishing colleges. The purpose of the act was to democratize education, to make it accessible to the common person, because prior to that time, it was really for the rich.
me.
That act resulted in the establishment of roughly 100 land-grant universities of today, universities such as Cornell, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan State, the universities of Illinois, Minnesota, and of course, the University of Wisconsin. The Moral Act emphasized training in agriculture and engineering, but it also reflected the belief of our nation's leaders that an enduring
democracy requires an educated citizenry. That legislation formed the bedrock of a national system of higher education that made the United States the envy of the world. That is the heritage that you, graduates of 2025, are proud of. But not only you, all of us have benefited either directly or knows of someone who has benefited directly by the research done right here.
at the University of Wisconsin. This university has led research. has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, of cardiovascular disease, of osteoporosis and organ transplants. And that's just in the realm of medicine. Because of its commitment to the Wisconsin idea, that guiding principle that the benefits of the university should extend to the borders of the state and beyond,
Speaker 1 (06:03.692)
We've all benefited from this university's advances in science, technology, the humanities, and the arts. I consider it one of the greatest, greatest blessings of my life to have been associated for 38 years with the University of Wisconsin. Now, you've all had the privilege of being educated at one of the top land-grant universities in the nation. And in the land-grant tradition,
I hope your training leads toward productive employment. But also in that tradition, I hope your experience has made you a better person and given you the skills to continue lifelong transformation. Now students and parents all too frequently feel that the purpose of higher education is simply job training, to get a job. Now that's true, but getting the degree is only part
of the equation. The pathway toward getting that degree is also important. I'd like to challenge that perception by suggesting that the journey is equally, if not more important, than the final career goal of getting a job.
Speaker 1 (07:17.486)
simple back of the envelope calculation I've had over 50 years in higher ed as a student or as a professor or as a dean. I've seen many students go on to thriving, flourishing careers and personal lives, and I've seen some who haven't. The difference between those groups has little to do with the career that they chose and everything to do with the person that they became. Another way to say it is that higher education
In higher education, the lessons you learn along the way set you up or not for life of meaning, growth and societal contribution. So if I may, I thought about distilling life lessons down to my top list of six practices for human flourishing. Simple, but not easy. All right. Number one, never stop.
Here they are.
Speaker 1 (08:15.958)
Every person is born curious about the world. A few stay that way. These are my grandkids. It's my hope, my desire, my endeavor that they always remain curious about the world. Learning is how we explore, make sense of, and find meaning in our world. It's an essential first step in personal transformation. Learning leads to awe and wonder and discovery, which are themselves sources of joy.
And a commitment to learning keeps us humble about ourselves and about our place in the world. It protects us from pride and polarization. By the very nature of your age, graduates, you are young at heart. Do you want to stay that way? Keep learning. Number two, develop emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage your own emotions and those of others.
Now we encounter these challenges to our emotional intelligence every day. When you're gone from here, when you have a job or if you're continuing on your career, you'll encounter those challenges with the people you live with, the people you work with, people you worship with.
Here's one from my experience in the dean's office. Dear Dean, so and so, could you please address an issue that seems so trivial to some, but that is actually quite painful and gut wrenching to others. I work in the such and such building and day after day I witness so and so bringing her damn dog to work and have to listen to her matronly and wistful little analogies about how cute and smart her little doggy is.
I think she is losing her mind. So that's the type of thing we all experience, not necessarily like this, but a person with emotional intelligence will first check their own emotions and then they'll consider, how do I need to address the very powerful emotions of this person? Generally, we don't pay much attention to emotional intelligence in academia, but study after study has shown that emotional intelligence is a better predictor of personal wellbeing
Speaker 1 (10:31.724)
and professional success than is intellectual intelligence. Here's a suggestion for a set of tools that I found helped understand myself better and others better. Now these deal with things other than emotions, but certainly emotions are involved. So for example, the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram or StrengthsFinder or more recently, the six types of working genius. All of these are very powerful tools to understand who we are
and understand better the people that we work with. So for example, in the strengths finder, one of the strengths is two. I'm sorry, just gave it away, woo. Winning others over. My wife has that in spades. She could fire someone and they would walk out of her office thinking it had been one of the best days of their life. Pastor Matt, who's coming up in a few moments, has the strength of woo. We joke in my family that I have the strength of two.
turning others off.
Speaker 1 (11:34.486)
Now, these are just models. You'll find things to disagree with in all of them. But as a famous statistician from the University of Wisconsin once said, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And that's indeed true.
Number three, persevere. The third practice for human flourishing is perseverance. Intelligence and innate talent are overrated. Perseverance is not. There's a common impression of people outside of science, for example, that research generally goes very smoothly from one discovery after to the next, one after another, and nothing could be further.
In my lab, we used to say, if only there had been just four horsemen of the apocalypse, or that's why they call it re-search. We, if there is something that could go wrong, we found a way to make it happen. During the course of my career here, we suffered from droughts, from freezes, from floods inside and outside the building, from lightning strikes, tornadoes, and the ever present danger of inattentive undergraduate students.
The most successful of my many students and post-docs were not those with the highest innate intelligence. They were those with grit and determination. Those that no matter what happened, got back up into the saddle and worked the next day. So you will face adversity and you will face challenges. And sometimes they come at the most inopportune times. Perseverance can help us to move through those times and yield fruit in terms of character formation.
As the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 5, more than that, rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Amen is right. Number five, embrace soulcraft.
Speaker 1 (13:48.856)
Throughout my career, the professors I've admired the most are those who not only do great work, but are great people. And I've often asked, what is it that sets them apart?
The answer is that they attend to all aspects of human flourishing, to the mind, to the body, and the spirit. In other words, they embrace soulcraft. What is a soul? There are mixed opinions on that. I'd like to go with the one that John Ortberg uses and say that the soul is the composite of mind, body, and spirit. It's the integrated self. And people who attend to soulcraft
engage in common practices. They seek personal transformation. They sustain healthy lifestyles. They recognize that they and others are a work in progress. They invest in relationships. They embody gratitude and humility. And they pursue God. I think of these words in
melody.
Speaker 1 (14:57.314)
the Gospel of Luke when I think about what does it mean to pursue God.
Speaker 1 (15:15.128)
Well, let's talk just for a moment then about this saying that we refer to as a balanced life. Educational psychologists tell us that the key to personal wellbeing is a proper balance of work, love and play. And I fully believe that to be true. And I fully miss it. It's a challenge every day. Some days I get up and say, who am I going to disappoint today? So
After many decades of effort, I've come to believe that this is an aspirational goal, balancing work, love and play. There are moments when I think, hey, I'm getting this right. And then another minute passes. So what I'd like to encourage us all is to think of, yes, balance out work, love and play, but consider it aspirational. The challenge of life balance is never ending.
It's not a problem to solve, it's attention to man. Number five.
Speaker 1 (16:22.35)
build community. Two years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States warned that loneliness had reached epidemic proportions. One of the best-selling books of the last year has been Jonathan Heitz, The Anxious Generation. How many of you have a few hands? Okay, the rest of you should read it. These and other reports are telling us what we already know. People are living increasingly isolated, sequestered,
and lonely lives. This results in a complex of negative outcomes for mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. Building relational connections used to come very naturally in the course of our jobs, of our individual family lives. Now in this digital post-pandemic age, we need to be intentional about it. And it's not easy. Developing relationships with people means being involved with people.
And that means encountering problems. But developing those connections is vital to our growth and wellbeing. And now for a moment, let me speak directly to those students who have had a very vital spiritual experience here who would consider yourself Christ-file. As you move on from Madison, please make it a priority to find a community of like-minded believers. It's vital to sustaining Vibrant.
I've seen it happen time and time and time again. People who were just on fire in their Christian faith, who were perhaps professional, professionals in the ministry, who've done overseas missions, who've been involved with Bible studies, who for one reason or another disconnect from Christian community and 10, 15 years later say they're no longer a Christian. So find a church or find a community.
Number six, cherish the earth. I'm an ecologist by vocation, by avocation, and by... It would be professional malpractice if I were to give a talk such as this and say nothing about caring for this world that we share with each other and with all other life. The science is incontrovertible. We are on the brink
Speaker 1 (18:50.624)
of multiple irreversible environmental disasters. That's the science. The consequences will be borne mostly by you young people and by your children. Here is the point where most of you are bracing yourself for a scolding, but I'm not going to do that any more than I just did.
Why?
Oftentimes people are looking for a list of do's and don'ts. Don't do that, don't do that, do this instead. I'm not gonna give that to you. Because the problems that we are facing are not consequences of inadequate information. They're consequences of inadequate. We care for the things that we love and we love the things to which we are connected. So my invitation to you is to reconnect with the natural world. Let's mindfully
Use our senses, our emotions, our appreciation for beauty to reconnect with the natural world around us. Doing so, it's been shown that doing so for just a couple of minutes a day. doesn't, you don't have to go far. You don't have to go on a weekend getaway. You can step outside your door, look outside the window, look at the leaves on the tree, look at the blue sky. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually embrace that for a few moments and you will physically
rewire your brains to connect with the natural world. The scriptures are clear that God loves this beautiful complex living world. And they're clear that as his followers, we're called to love what he loves. So as a colleague of mine once said, go for a walk in the woods and don't come back until you've fallen.
Speaker 1 (20:39.534)
So there you have it, six practices for human flourish. Never stop learning, develop emotional intelligence, persevere, embrace soul craft, build community and cherish the earth. I'd like to close with a benediction.
work. Especially for all, well for all of us, but especially for you students.
Speaker 1 (21:09.944)
May you never cease to explore this beautiful universe that is at once both immanently knowable and infinitely
serious.
May you fund the depths of your emotional self and that of others as a pathway to life-giving relationship. May you develop and model the capacity to persevere during hard times. May you practice soulcraft that's sifting and winnowing the pursuit of that which is true and transformational. May you engage with social communities that support, challenge, and shape you
and thereby
May your care for creation flow from a wellspring of connection that is animated by love, sustained by hope, modeled for the world, and regenerative for all the earth. And finally, may you never forget the privilege of having pursued your education at this extraordinary university, in this extraordinary city, in these extraordinary.
Dr. Rick Lindroth is a distinguished fellow of the Lumen Center. He's also a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Ecology Emeritus and former Associate Dean for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Lindroth's research focused on ecology, including global change of forest ecosystems. He taught courses in ecology and ecotoxicology. Associate Dean for Research, functioned as Chief Research Officer
of the UW College of Agricultural and Life Sciences with a $100 million per year research portfolio. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, the Entomological Society of America, and the American Scientific Affiliation. Yes. Dr. Lindoroth has authored or co-authored 250 scientific
articles and mentored hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. Currently, Dr. Lindra speaks and writes to public and faith-based groups about environmental stewardship, climate change, biodiversity, and science denialism and communication. He has been interviewed for numerous podcasts and news outlets and profiled in the Washington Post and most impressively, Trout Magazine. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lindra. Over the years, I've walked in the shoes of all of you.
as a student wondering what's next, as a parent happy to be done paying the bills and also wondering what's next, and as a faculty mentor sad to see a good student leaving and wondering who's next. I've had to learn to keep those different roles in their proper place, like when talking to my daughters, both of whom went to school here, and remembering to be their dad and not their professor.
But every once in a while I'd get those roles confused, like the time when my older daughter sent me some emails and she was having some issues with a grade she had received on an exam. And she sent me copies of emails she had had with the professor. So I read them over, created a lengthy response, told her that professors aren't always right, even though they think they are.
Speaker 1 (02:22.878)
and hit send. And a few hours later, I got a reply back from the professor. 10 short words saying, think you meant to send this to your daughter.
Speaker 1 (02:37.816)
So, yeah, keep those rolls straight. Nobody will remember your commencement address. Nobody's going to remember this one. But if I may, allow me to use the next 20 minutes to insert some grains of sand to kind of rattle around in your minds that over the next decades may produce a few pearls of wisdom. So here we go.
Speaker 1 (03:07.374)
It was a time when political polarization had turned American against American, family against family, church against church, and state against. It was a time when the very foundations of the democratic experiment called the United States of America were crumbling. It was a time of constitutional crisis unparalleled in the country's history.
It was a time when the Republican president signed legislation that completely upended and restructured higher education in this nation. That time was 1862. That crisis was the Civil War. That president was Abraham Lincoln. And that legislation was the Morrill Act. And we are all Ben Fisheries.
you
Speaker 1 (04:06.444)
Now, how the federal government acquired land is not a pretty chapter in American history, but the Morrill Act was a good consequence. It provided grants of land from the federal government to the states for the explicit purposes of establishing colleges. The purpose of the act was to democratize education, to make it accessible to the common person, because prior to that time, it was really for the rich.
me.
That act resulted in the establishment of roughly 100 land-grant universities of today, universities such as Cornell, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan State, the universities of Illinois, Minnesota, and of course, the University of Wisconsin. The Moral Act emphasized training in agriculture and engineering, but it also reflected the belief of our nation's leaders that an enduring
democracy requires an educated citizenry. That legislation formed the bedrock of a national system of higher education that made the United States the envy of the world. That is the heritage that you, graduates of 2025, are proud of. But not only you, all of us have benefited either directly or knows of someone who has benefited directly by the research done right here.
at the University of Wisconsin. This university has led research. has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, of cardiovascular disease, of osteoporosis and organ transplants. And that's just in the realm of medicine. Because of its commitment to the Wisconsin idea, that guiding principle that the benefits of the university should extend to the borders of the state and beyond,
Speaker 1 (06:03.692)
We've all benefited from this university's advances in science, technology, the humanities, and the arts. I consider it one of the greatest, greatest blessings of my life to have been associated for 38 years with the University of Wisconsin. Now, you've all had the privilege of being educated at one of the top land-grant universities in the nation. And in the land-grant tradition,
I hope your training leads toward productive employment. But also in that tradition, I hope your experience has made you a better person and given you the skills to continue lifelong transformation. Now students and parents all too frequently feel that the purpose of higher education is simply job training, to get a job. Now that's true, but getting the degree is only part
of the equation. The pathway toward getting that degree is also important. I'd like to challenge that perception by suggesting that the journey is equally, if not more important, than the final career goal of getting a job.
Speaker 1 (07:17.486)
simple back of the envelope calculation I've had over 50 years in higher ed as a student or as a professor or as a dean. I've seen many students go on to thriving, flourishing careers and personal lives, and I've seen some who haven't. The difference between those groups has little to do with the career that they chose and everything to do with the person that they became. Another way to say it is that higher education
In higher education, the lessons you learn along the way set you up or not for life of meaning, growth and societal contribution. So if I may, I thought about distilling life lessons down to my top list of six practices for human flourishing. Simple, but not easy. All right. Number one, never stop.
Here they are.
Speaker 1 (08:15.958)
Every person is born curious about the world. A few stay that way. These are my grandkids. It's my hope, my desire, my endeavor that they always remain curious about the world. Learning is how we explore, make sense of, and find meaning in our world. It's an essential first step in personal transformation. Learning leads to awe and wonder and discovery, which are themselves sources of joy.
And a commitment to learning keeps us humble about ourselves and about our place in the world. It protects us from pride and polarization. By the very nature of your age, graduates, you are young at heart. Do you want to stay that way? Keep learning. Number two, develop emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage your own emotions and those of others.
Now we encounter these challenges to our emotional intelligence every day. When you're gone from here, when you have a job or if you're continuing on your career, you'll encounter those challenges with the people you live with, the people you work with, people you worship with.
Here's one from my experience in the dean's office. Dear Dean, so and so, could you please address an issue that seems so trivial to some, but that is actually quite painful and gut wrenching to others. I work in the such and such building and day after day I witness so and so bringing her damn dog to work and have to listen to her matronly and wistful little analogies about how cute and smart her little doggy is.
I think she is losing her mind. So that's the type of thing we all experience, not necessarily like this, but a person with emotional intelligence will first check their own emotions and then they'll consider, how do I need to address the very powerful emotions of this person? Generally, we don't pay much attention to emotional intelligence in academia, but study after study has shown that emotional intelligence is a better predictor of personal wellbeing
Speaker 1 (10:31.724)
and professional success than is intellectual intelligence. Here's a suggestion for a set of tools that I found helped understand myself better and others better. Now these deal with things other than emotions, but certainly emotions are involved. So for example, the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram or StrengthsFinder or more recently, the six types of working genius. All of these are very powerful tools to understand who we are
and understand better the people that we work with. So for example, in the strengths finder, one of the strengths is two. I'm sorry, just gave it away, woo. Winning others over. My wife has that in spades. She could fire someone and they would walk out of her office thinking it had been one of the best days of their life. Pastor Matt, who's coming up in a few moments, has the strength of woo. We joke in my family that I have the strength of two.
turning others off.
Speaker 1 (11:34.486)
Now, these are just models. You'll find things to disagree with in all of them. But as a famous statistician from the University of Wisconsin once said, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And that's indeed true.
Number three, persevere. The third practice for human flourishing is perseverance. Intelligence and innate talent are overrated. Perseverance is not. There's a common impression of people outside of science, for example, that research generally goes very smoothly from one discovery after to the next, one after another, and nothing could be further.
In my lab, we used to say, if only there had been just four horsemen of the apocalypse, or that's why they call it re-search. We, if there is something that could go wrong, we found a way to make it happen. During the course of my career here, we suffered from droughts, from freezes, from floods inside and outside the building, from lightning strikes, tornadoes, and the ever present danger of inattentive undergraduate students.
The most successful of my many students and post-docs were not those with the highest innate intelligence. They were those with grit and determination. Those that no matter what happened, got back up into the saddle and worked the next day. So you will face adversity and you will face challenges. And sometimes they come at the most inopportune times. Perseverance can help us to move through those times and yield fruit in terms of character formation.
As the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 5, more than that, rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Amen is right. Number five, embrace soulcraft.
Speaker 1 (13:48.856)
Throughout my career, the professors I've admired the most are those who not only do great work, but are great people. And I've often asked, what is it that sets them apart?
The answer is that they attend to all aspects of human flourishing, to the mind, to the body, and the spirit. In other words, they embrace soulcraft. What is a soul? There are mixed opinions on that. I'd like to go with the one that John Ortberg uses and say that the soul is the composite of mind, body, and spirit. It's the integrated self. And people who attend to soulcraft
engage in common practices. They seek personal transformation. They sustain healthy lifestyles. They recognize that they and others are a work in progress. They invest in relationships. They embody gratitude and humility. And they pursue God. I think of these words in
melody.
Speaker 1 (14:57.314)
the Gospel of Luke when I think about what does it mean to pursue God.
Speaker 1 (15:15.128)
Well, let's talk just for a moment then about this saying that we refer to as a balanced life. Educational psychologists tell us that the key to personal wellbeing is a proper balance of work, love and play. And I fully believe that to be true. And I fully miss it. It's a challenge every day. Some days I get up and say, who am I going to disappoint today? So
After many decades of effort, I've come to believe that this is an aspirational goal, balancing work, love and play. There are moments when I think, hey, I'm getting this right. And then another minute passes. So what I'd like to encourage us all is to think of, yes, balance out work, love and play, but consider it aspirational. The challenge of life balance is never ending.
It's not a problem to solve, it's attention to man. Number five.
Speaker 1 (16:22.35)
build community. Two years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States warned that loneliness had reached epidemic proportions. One of the best-selling books of the last year has been Jonathan Heitz, The Anxious Generation. How many of you have a few hands? Okay, the rest of you should read it. These and other reports are telling us what we already know. People are living increasingly isolated, sequestered,
and lonely lives. This results in a complex of negative outcomes for mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. Building relational connections used to come very naturally in the course of our jobs, of our individual family lives. Now in this digital post-pandemic age, we need to be intentional about it. And it's not easy. Developing relationships with people means being involved with people.
And that means encountering problems. But developing those connections is vital to our growth and wellbeing. And now for a moment, let me speak directly to those students who have had a very vital spiritual experience here who would consider yourself Christ-file. As you move on from Madison, please make it a priority to find a community of like-minded believers. It's vital to sustaining Vibrant.
I've seen it happen time and time and time again. People who were just on fire in their Christian faith, who were perhaps professional, professionals in the ministry, who've done overseas missions, who've been involved with Bible studies, who for one reason or another disconnect from Christian community and 10, 15 years later say they're no longer a Christian. So find a church or find a community.
Number six, cherish the earth. I'm an ecologist by vocation, by avocation, and by... It would be professional malpractice if I were to give a talk such as this and say nothing about caring for this world that we share with each other and with all other life. The science is incontrovertible. We are on the brink
Speaker 1 (18:50.624)
of multiple irreversible environmental disasters. That's the science. The consequences will be borne mostly by you young people and by your children. Here is the point where most of you are bracing yourself for a scolding, but I'm not going to do that any more than I just did.
Why?
Oftentimes people are looking for a list of do's and don'ts. Don't do that, don't do that, do this instead. I'm not gonna give that to you. Because the problems that we are facing are not consequences of inadequate information. They're consequences of inadequate. We care for the things that we love and we love the things to which we are connected. So my invitation to you is to reconnect with the natural world. Let's mindfully
Use our senses, our emotions, our appreciation for beauty to reconnect with the natural world around us. Doing so, it's been shown that doing so for just a couple of minutes a day. doesn't, you don't have to go far. You don't have to go on a weekend getaway. You can step outside your door, look outside the window, look at the leaves on the tree, look at the blue sky. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually embrace that for a few moments and you will physically
rewire your brains to connect with the natural world. The scriptures are clear that God loves this beautiful complex living world. And they're clear that as his followers, we're called to love what he loves. So as a colleague of mine once said, go for a walk in the woods and don't come back until you've fallen.
Speaker 1 (20:39.534)
So there you have it, six practices for human flourish. Never stop learning, develop emotional intelligence, persevere, embrace soul craft, build community and cherish the earth. I'd like to close with a benediction.
work. Especially for all, well for all of us, but especially for you students.
Speaker 1 (21:09.944)
May you never cease to explore this beautiful universe that is at once both immanently knowable and infinitely
serious.
May you fund the depths of your emotional self and that of others as a pathway to life-giving relationship. May you develop and model the capacity to persevere during hard times. May you practice soulcraft that's sifting and winnowing the pursuit of that which is true and transformational. May you engage with social communities that support, challenge, and shape you
and thereby
May your care for creation flow from a wellspring of connection that is animated by love, sustained by hope, modeled for the world, and regenerative for all the earth. And finally, may you never forget the privilege of having pursued your education at this extraordinary university, in this extraordinary city, in these extraordinary.
