Salut de Paris, mes amis!

I’m here with the family celebrating Kailani’s graduation from Harvard-Westlake.

Five years ago, the Harvard-Westlake Mindfulness Club was just an idea and a deep breath.

Today it’s a community. Sound baths that rang through quiet rooms. Mindful mornings inside museums and gardens. Slow walks on the beach where the ocean set the pace. A single morsel that taught us how to taste again. Five years of parents choosing to join on Zoom, again and again, to pause.

None of it happens without our Head of School, Laura Ross, who heard the idea and said yes. Laura, thank you for believing that faculty and parents deserve a practice of their own.

And none of it happens without our teachers. Brian Shiers, Cherish Bangs, and Natalie Bell, you gave us more than meditations. You gave us a way back to ourselves. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The Well Within

Rumi writes of Two Kinds of Intelligence.

“There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.”

– Rumi, Two Kinds of Intelligence, translated by Coleman Barks

The first intelligence is acquired. It’s the kind our kids work for every day, collected from books and teachers, measured in rankings and grades.

The second is already complete inside you. A spring overflowing. “A freshness in the center of the chest.” It never stagnates, never runs dry, and no one can grade it. It flows from the inside out.

That second knowing is what we practiced here. Every breath, every chant, every silent step in the sand was a way of returning to the well that was ours all along.

Now, Ride the Bicycle

Patricia Ryan Madson says being alive is like riding a bicycle. We always feel a little off balance, a little unsure.

And yet it’s in the act of balancing that we come alive.

So don’t wait to feel steady. Steady was never the point.

Get up.
Do something.
Make mistakes.

Laugh.
Play.
Lighten up.

Take care of each other.
Be generous.
Be kind.

Enjoy the ride.
And always, always
try again.

The wobble is the aliveness.
The spring is already in your chest.

The club will continue in our hearts and I will always be here for you as a member and as a friend.

Leading it these five years has been one of the great joys of my life.

Wishing you love and light always,
Kalika