Remarks of Dr. Pat Saxon at the Alumnae Fall Dinner on October 24, 2012

Writer Barry Lopez asserts that “the stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away when they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.”

Recently, a story captured me—a story which intersects well, I think, with my own life at this time and with the life of our school. Blogger Chris Glaser tells of anthropologist and archeologist Mary Leakey’s discovery of the fossilized footprints of several human-like ancestors crossing the volcanic ash in Africa millions of years ago. At one point, according to Leakey, only the female paused and briefly turned—as if to gaze in another direction—before continuing on an otherwise forward path. Leakey concluded, “This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.” It is important that we, like generations of women before us, stop in thoughtful pause before turning to our future.

So I take this opportunity tonight to share some reflections on my journey toward wholeness and its impact on my teaching and my relationships with students.

From the earliest drafts of this speech, a deeply personal current began to emerge, and as I wrestled with this, I was drawn to the archives for some reason. Emily Embry, our wonderful archivist, pulled some documents for me, one of which was Miss Hockaday’s retirement speech to the alumnae–delivered in the fall of 1946, 33 years after the founding of the school. I heard many things there—her unceasing love for Hockaday, her pride in you—but I also found that she too struggled with voicing the personal: to speak of the devastating loss of her sister, to speak of the pain of leaving the everyday operations of the school. So I draw courage from her story.

I was anything but whole when I came to Hockaday in 1978. My teaching was massively skewed toward the intellectual. My courses were demanding—some said impossibly so. Steve Kramer and I had a reputation for being the hardest graders in the school. It was a badge of merit then. Daughters of students during that time still report their mothers remembering a B---in my class, the minus, minus, minus being a notorious way of telling someone she was hanging onto that grade by the hair of her chinny chin chin. One mother reported that when her daughter went off to Duke, she put a Post-it note on her computer so that she would see it every time she sat down to write a paper. It said: “Dr. Saxon is watching you.”

I was passionate about my teaching, my love for Shakespeare and the Romantic poets especially seeping through my pores. I was also idealistic: Who else would take on teaching George Eliot’s 900 page novel Middlemarch to seniors. And, having come from a background of activism in the 60’s and 70’s, I sometimes chafed against the sluggish pace of institutional change.

Robert Burns suggests in one of his poems that it is a gift to see ourselves as others see us, but he hadn’t endured Joyce Rainwater’s mocking caricature. She loved to “treat me” to her vision of my march down the hall in those days—my meticulously matched outfit, briefcase in hand, scholar’s glasses on my nose, head down, my Dorothy Hamill haircut bobbing as I walked. “Doctor Saxon,” she would say, was a woman on a mission. And we won’t even talk about what she did with the green sateen short shorts I wore the first day of coaching cross country. No, that would not do at all.

During those years, I thought you could shoulder your way through any hardship—and do it alone. I lived with what I now call an isolating independence—a trait all too many “strong women” shared then.

Now, years of personal growth work have taught me to treat unhealed parts of the self with grace. And given that in the late 70’s and early 80’s, women still had to be twice as good as men in academia or the workplace to be recognized—and women of color faced even greater challenges, the level of demand in my courses did not allow you sloppy thinking and asked you to reach deep inside yourself for the best of who you were intellectually. And that certainly had benefits for the world of college and work. But it wasn’t wholeness.

The most significant change began in the mountains of my beloved Taos, New Mexico, one summer about 1990 when I stumbled into a book called Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Search for Wholeness by Maureen Murdock. Murdock had taken the model of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and adapted it for the life cycle of women. It spoke to me at early mid-life—like a bell struck in the clear night’s air. I immediately bought 5 copies, sent them to friends, and began to consider what seemed like a wild possibility of shaping a course around Murdock’s schema, pairing her stages with powerful literature. “Heroine’s Journey” was born of that mountain top experience. The seismic shift was that the classroom could become a place where we talked about our lives as women, where we could write and reflect on who we are, on who our mothers and sisters and grandmothers are and have been—and that this could be a legitimate exploration for the classroom. It was to put the heart on a level playing field with the mind. Parker Palmer, in his latest book— Healing the Heart of Democracy – reminds us that the heart is not simply an organ of emotion: it is “the core of the self, the place “all our ways of learning converge,” “the place where our knowledge can become more fully human.”

The culminating project in this class was for each student to take some dimension of her own journey, to image it in a creative format, combine it with a reflective piece, and share it with the class. From the very first year, the power of this experience was staggering, far beyond anything I could have imagined. Year in and year out you spoke your truth—of your unfulfilled yearnings, your divided self, the death of your mother, the toll your eating disorder had taken on your body, your loss of faith. You summoned the courage to take your life in your hands and held it out to us, and in that trust, the classroom became a sacred space.

Since that time, projects of this nature often act as closure to my senior classes. It has changed who I am as a teacher.

Richard Rohr asserts that great love and great suffering are the two truly transformative experiences. Having lost three dearly beloved people during our time as companions, I have learned to grieve deeply and well—to resist our death denying culture. As many of you in similar times, I learned that, as painful as it is, there is indeed a “good grief.” I learned the importance of showing up, of asking for help, of the grace of friends and community--and that love is stronger than death. I learned that although at first you simply cannot imagine your life without the beloved, there comes a day when the curve of the new moon speaks of hope and laughter comes again. Life will never be as it was and it can be very, very good.

And as I learn, I teach. I step into the space with you to talk about characters in literature and their approach to loss, to hear what is helpful and not helpful for you in such times, to encourage you to honor your losses, to let your hearts break open.

Tonight I urge you to continue to share your stories—stories of transformation, and resilience and courage and hope, for the world—increasingly saturated with cynicism— desperately needs such hope.

There are times in our history when we are called to act on behalf of causes much larger than ourselves. During the terrible bombing of England during WWII, widespread concern arose about the safety of a generation of Britain’s children. As part of a national private school impetus, Miss Hockaday appealed to our community to take children into their homes, and 50 families offered refuge. Though that number was not needed, this action demonstrates a remarkable response in the face of the world’s need.

And in this time of turning to the new century, there is one story beyond our walls that I believe we must not forget. The face of that story is Malala Yousafzai, the 15 year old Pakastani girl who has become an outspoken proponent for the education of girls—even in the face of death threats. Nicolas Kristof entitled a recent column: “Her Only Crime Was Loving School.” In it he argues that the Taliban shot Malala because “girls’ education threatens everything that they stand for. The greatest risk for violent extremists in Pakistan," he asserts, "isn’t American drones. It’s educated girls.” 

And I wonder tonight if part of Hockaday’s future, if part of our second century together, might be active engagement in securing the right of education for all girls the world over.

Now that would be a story to tell.

Thank you.