by Tami Bonner
On July 29, Dry Bones Living Academy will celebrate the current cohort as they graduate.
They will sit in a room of their own choosing, surrounded by the people they have invited to be witnesses. Family, when family is safe and present. Friends. Dry Bones staff. Volunteers who have walked alongside them through the forty-seven weeks of the program. Their work will be displayed around them: art, writing, the visible record of who they have become.
And then, one by one, every person in the room will speak.
Not toasts or speeches. Just the speaking-over of one specific human being by every other specific human being who has watched them grow. Each person names what they have seen. The growth markers. The small turning. The moment they remember when something shifted in this young woman, this young man, the person they came here to honor.
People say things like: I watched you finish something for the first time, and I saw what your face did when you realized you had done it. They say: You used to walk into the room looking at the floor, and now you look me in the eye. They say: Your demeanor changed. They say: I was here the day you told your story out loud, and I will never forget what it took for you to say those words. They say: You taught me something. You did not know you were teaching me, but you did.
And often, the graduate will say back: I kept waiting for you to give up on me. You never did.
Imagine this. A whole room of people, none of whom were obligated to be there, taking turns saying out loud the truth of what they have witnessed in another person. Not the polished version or the version that fits in a report. The real one. The one that includes the months they showed up late, and the morning they finally showed up on time, and the slow and almost invisible shift from one to the other.
When was the last time anyone did that for you?
When was the last time you did it for anyone else?
We live in a culture that has gotten very good at noticing what people are doing wrong, what they have failed to do, what they are not yet. We are quicker to comment, quicker to criticize, quicker to dismiss. We pass each other in the street and do not see each other. We sit in the same rooms for years without ever once naming out loud the specific growth we have watched in the people across from us. We assume they know. We assume someone else will say it. We assume the speaking-over is sentimental, or unnecessary, or only for special occasions like graduations.
But what if it is the whole thing?
What if the practice of looking carefully at another human being, and naming what we have seen growing in them, is the practice that makes graduation possible at all? Not just at Dry Bones, but anywhere. In a family. In a friendship. In a workplace. In a marriage. In your own relationship with yourself.
The young people who graduate from DBLA are not graduating because they learned job skills, though they did. They are graduating because for forty-seven weeks they were in a room with people who were paying attention to them. People who refused to give up on them, even on the days when they had given up on themselves. People who saw what was happening before it had a name, and who waited patiently for the day when the seeing could become saying.
The young man who said he kept waiting for us to give up was not making a polite observation at graduation. He was telling the truth about what had healed him. The not-giving-up was the healing. The continued welcome was the medicine. The seeing was the cure.
You might not be in the room at graduation on July 29. The graduates have chosen their guests, as is right. The space they create together is sacred, and it is theirs.
But you can do the thing the graduation does, anywhere, today.
You can look at the people in your life who are growing in ways most people are not noticing. You can name what you have seen. You can speak it out loud, specifically and without flourish. I have watched you do this. I see what it has cost you. I want you to know that I have noticed.
That is the practice that makes graduates of all of us, eventually. That is the practice this work has taught me, more than any other.
This kind of seeing changes the room. It changes the person being seen. And, in ways I am still discovering, it changes the one who learns how to see.
