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Every May, I find myself having the perennial conversation about commencement with a class of graduating seniors. The year always flies by faster than they, or I, thought it would. The decisions about college have been made, one way or another. The senioritis is in full swing. They plead, beg, and bribe for classes outside. They relish one more day spent with friends before embarking on a new quest.

I love this energy, and so I channel T. S. Eliot: “In this end is your beginning….” I tune up on Tennyson: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I plug into Wordsworth: “I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts.” And I fall back on the old Seuss standby: “Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!” We wax philosophical, we write in our journals with abandon, we soak in the literature—the poetry and the prose—that helps us marshal a defense against the inevitable closure we need to bring to another year, and perhaps helps us work through it. We deal with the death and the loss and the pain that comes with leave-taking, sometimes without putting it into that bigger context of what it means to live and love and be fully human.

As I write this article, I am not in the place that I am writing about. I am just emerging from the cold frozen shell of a New Hampshire winter. Snow still covers the ground. There is not a crocus in sight. I long to see the ground. I want to be in the season of planting and tending and life-springing. But I am still frozen in the tundra. In another month the senioritis will begin to set in, the energy will start to bubble up as we move through the last weeks of the year. It will again be the season of commencement when we begin the beginning again.

Commencements are bittersweet. A few years ago, I realized that my spring teaching itself was functioning as my own self-defense mechanism against the loss of yet another great group of students. The literature we would read, the pithy quotes I would turn to, the pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream eaten on the baseball field during class time (an end-of-semester ritual which would occur when I finally broke down and let them have class outside), all of these were my own way of dealing with the loss I was feeling. As a teacher, I am painfully aware of the places where I have not lived up to my role in the classroom, the times when I have fallen short. And yet, as a chaplain, I also believe that some of the seeds take root, no matter how flawed the one who scatters them. It’s the hope that keeps me going.

Commencements are bittersweet. A New Hampshire friend has just died and I am dealing with another form of closure and beginning.

Joe was my next door neighbor at our summer home. He was your stereotypical rugged New Hampshire man, 75 years old with bright eyes and weathered skin. He heated his house by wood only, cooked over a wood-burning potbelly stove, and managed all the chores on the farm. Joe was a pig-farmer with four healthy sows and one big boar named Billy Bob who together generated a healthy number of piglets every few months. Joe never named them; he just called them “freezer pets.” We have one waiting for us up in Joe’s freezer even as I speak.

Joe was one of the wisest people I have ever known. Whenever I went to New Hampshire I always took time to walk down to the farm and sit with Joe, who very quickly put things into perspective. He himself led a wonderful life: a former hospital nurse from a time when men rarely went into nursing, a former square dance instructor, Boy Scout leader, and father of three. Talking with Joe was like touching the hearthstone—it was like going back to the center.

Joe had inoperable cancer spreading through his body, and he knew that he didn’t have much time left. But the realization liberated him. Every day was a gift. Every day was an opportunity to be thankful. He was moving towards the final healing and a commencement of a wholly different order.

When I first started gardening in New Hampshire, I asked Joe what the best fertilizer would be. The next day, he drove his tractor up to my garden plot and dumped a large tractor bucket of pig manure on the soil. I looked at the load of well-seasoned pile and said, “Thanks, Joe.” He smiled and said, “Pig manure is the best. If you really want something to grow, you need to deal with the manure of life.”

From where I sit writing, there is a garden out there under the snow. There are crocuses waiting to emerge again. From where you sit reading, the crocuses have come and gone and will come again. At the end of another school year we can scatter the seeds, we can wax philosophical, we can lean into the literature and the wisdom that helps us make sense out of the manure of life, but ultimately, we need to turn over the soil, get a little dirty. Here’s to that old pig farmer on the other side.