Spring Commencement and the Grand Design

Undergraduates and fellow travellers

Welcome to the seven hundred twentieth spring commencement Of The Iris and Aset School of Communication and Design. Ours is a young school, a school of entrepreneurs, innovators, pioneers, and transcendent thinkers. We have no graduate program by design, for the world you go into is a world in which you must travel using the knowledge you have now toward a destination you may not understand. The future, as you all know, can only be understood in the untraveled distance between the manifest projection displayed on the edge of creation and the point of balance at which you stand in the present. Time is motion, motion is magic, and the study of magic is the purpose you were brought here to celebrate.

Remember as always, that chasing a rainbow is a quest of folly. But remember also that every archmagus that ever lived began with their own folly. The fool alone leaves their comforts and journeys of their own will. Each one of you wearing the ceremonial robes today represents the remnant of many fools who left the comforts of their normal and nonmagical lives in search of this moment. Great and humble is the person who wakes each morning knowing they are a fool. Choose each day to start from that point and move forward with wisdom, grace and understanding.

Let us take a moment to celebrate those who did not make it to this moment. For some, this storied place was a simple chapter. When you go out from this place you will find them again. Be happy when you do, for as friends or foes, you will know you shared moments of challenge and fortune together. No person who has ever left the study of magic truly abandons it. Once you become aware of the pattern and the power, you can never return to ignorance and safety.

For others this place was an end to a story of tragedy and heroism. Some are still here, incorporeal, sustained by the memories of those who knew them. Others have moved on to other stories in other forms. Death, for those mortals who dare to take up the study and the art, is rarely the end.

Some, in fact, are in attendance today in our gallery of witnesses in a nonmortal material capacity. Let us recognize them now, material and nonmaterial, who have left behind the mortal coil. Undergraduates, fellow travelers, at the back of your seat are two small, sealed cups. Open one now and pour it out as we take a moment of silence for those who have passed through the immutable gate. They may still interact in the encounters of our mortal lives, but they have entered a different journey. Would you, our nonmortal corporeal brethren, stand and be recognized? For you, the corporeal transcended, departed, or conditionally altered, may our memories never depart from your reality.

Your mortal story may have ended, but you also came to this celebration to witness those who remain. As you depart from us once again, go from this place in your own ways in peace and recognition to whatever the Fates have prepared for you, having already met with a different sort of matriculation. Undergraduates, as you recognize these, your former classmates who have changed their designation of corporeal kind, and those who watch, unseen and incorporeal, know that one day you too will have to pass as they did through the immutable gate. In one way or another, through true death or change of status, let that future meeting, however it may be, be one of reconciliation and support into the next unfathomable story.

Please, pour out one of those cups in honor and drink the other in remembrance of their mortal designation. It is right and good to mourn at this moment, the mortal stories that ended before we were ready for them to be done, even if their nonmortal tales still intersect with our own.

Dear ones of the seven-hundred twentieth spring class, you came in as fools in search of a dream. During your stay with us, you became dreamers in search of a legacy. Now, for this moment, we pause to witness the vision laid before us before we leave to attend to our own necessities.

If you quest for the rainbow, you will never find the end, for a rainbow is a circle of fractured light that heralds and chases the darkest storms of our lives. Glad are the ones who choose their storms. You who sit here today have chased your storms, been caught up in others outside of your choosing, and you have taken shelter for a time in these halls from those you were not ready to weather.

For some it is a glad time. You know where you are going and what you are going to do. Your networks are secure, and you join into legacies already established. For you, remember the privilege of certainty and remember the words of Lady Aset: Every farmer who plants a crop expects bounty, but none can fully expect the course and flow of the river. If the river has been kind to you, provide for the drought-stricken and for the flooded. One day, your fields will be distant from the life-giving shores or deep in the depths of the river. Life is a mystery and a privilege. Cherish it. Never take it for granted.

For others, it is an uncertain time: what you learned was not what you expected, your safeguards are not yet in place and your horizons are dimmed by perceived trouble. For some of you, the storms of your lives outside these halls are waiting as soon as you leave through the doors. For fortune or woe, this is the end of your structured magical training, and you must now face life with the knowledge you have. Don’t let the dread anticipation of it break this aura of celebration. No matter what you face, you still made it to this moment fully equipped to handle that which would have destroyed you only a scant few years ago.

For yet others, going into graduate work in the specialized fields and research of magic, you willingly go into deeper and more tempestuous storms to test your mettle. If that is you today, continue to chase your rainbow. Remember the words of Lady Iris: know that there is a hidden half that you cannot see unless you rise above the circumstance that created it.

As for the concerns of your student lives, today, all you undergraduates have risen above. Know that. Bask in the awe and beauty of the rainbow you have sought. Nobody, not even the gods can take this moment away from you.

This seven-hundred-twentieth spring class, you came to these halls in a period of strife. Mortals globally are changing, embracing scientific and empirical advancement while forgetting to, themselves, be logical and reasonable. It is a potential golden age for us. Magic always fills the liminal space between observation and understanding. You have seen it in every platonic element, and you have faced the metaphorical and literal monsters that are bred from the chaos of unreason.

Your charge going in was the progress of ages. Your actions determined the outcomes. You stand here heroes, philosophers, innovators and architects of the ascending helix. You go out to apply what you have learned and experienced into a world that will not be comfortable with the change you bring. They may not be ready, but you have earned the means to bring such change into the light from the shadows, into the structure from the void, and into the art room from the rock quarry.

This class has faced an incursion of dragons, long thought extinct, and prevented the truly catastrophic by stopping their return. You have seen the subtle wars fought between the mortal realm and the other elemental realms made public: the cold war with the Fae realm, the information war with the djinn, the influence war with the dwarves, and the active war with the sentient creatures of the deep. Not since the high renaissance has any magical class been so poised to bring true magic into the sphere of recognition by the active consciousness of the human species. We charge you not to do as they did and choose to bend their power to the pursuit of conquest. Their echelon of the spiral is not yours to repeat.

The mortal sphere, as always, is a space for conflict, negotiation and evolution, but rarely to reign, in our temporal home, is peace and understanding. Liminality and uncertainty is a feature and not a bug in our temporal system. Strive for it anyway. Doing so is the purpose magic was granted to mortals to access. Revolution is inevitable. Its method is yours to choose and enact.

It is up to you now to bring the possibility of peace within drastic change. We of the Iris and Aset School of Communication and Design affirm that it is the purpose of a magus not to hoard but to balance, not to command but to serve, not to rule in fear and control but to connect in leadership and wisdom. Not to use magic to create comfort, but to bridge otherwise impossible chasms. We are a school of art and design, the Grand art and design. We have given you practical training. Let the experiment begin. May your mistakes teach you; your achievements support you and your presence shake the comfort from the mundane.

Whatever you do with what you have learned here, now it is time to go apply it. Make roads of deer trails and shipping lanes from explorer’s rudders. Continue the legacy that this school has instilled in you and we will meet again as friends and colleagues and most importantly, artists, designers, dyers and weavers of the tapestry of history. Go forth today in sagacity, ever seeking, ever learning, and ever moving.

To our fellow travelers accompanying the journey of these adventurous fools, our beloved support networks, at this moment we remind you that magic is something everyone can access. It is a choice to pursue it, and these, your magical companions on this journey of life, could not have made it to this moment without you. A magus cannot exist without witnesses to their study, their self-discovery and their ambitions. It is our wish that you continue alongside them as they develop in this world.

We gather here today to celebrate the end of an unrefined cycle and the beginning of a refined one. The airy idea and the passion brought you to watery support and awareness. Your fiery drives and ambitions become the obligation to the legacy and needs you refined. You spiraled up the aetheric path, more connected to the open system, the magical system, of which the scientific systems are but a shadow, their study the observance of cyclical, rather than helical, motion.

As the seven-hundred-twentieth class, much is expected of you, for your number is the number of multitudes changing the structure of the design itself. You go out into whatever capacity your magical knowledge will lead you to, into whatever careers your magic will enhance, with the destiny of the remaking of established order. Twenty, the number of diplomacies at the end of cycles, seventy-two, the number of teamwork, wisdom and responsibility, and multiplied by one hundred, the expression of new beginnings and infinite potential. Seven hundred twenty is a number divisible by twelve, the number assigned to the blueprint of the universe.

Science structures the known. Magic brings new energy into an otherwise closed system. Broad is the path; narrow is the gate. Magi, graduates, you may now take your tassels and move them to the other side of your caps. Forever let it be known that you are a certified and recognized conduit for the infinite and irrational.

With this small action, as the movement of tiny pebbles precludes the movement of mountains, we present and release these magi into the world.