To: All Participants of Meeting of the Minds
Dear
Friends: We write today in the afterglow of the time we shared on
campus just two weeks ago. You are ALL to be congratulated and thanked
for taking a leap of faith with us and signing on to a completely new
venture. You each contributed to the "mindfulness" of the program with
your thoughts and ideas. You also brought great heart, great spirit,
endless humor and the sum total of your LIFE! You made the Open Space
Discussions and the Jeffersonian Dinner sparkle and sizzle. You were a
great audience with brilliant questions for our speakers. Your openness
to the dSchool process and your enthusiasm for it resonated through our
days and nights together.
The
spontaneous sharing of your personal stories was memorable and moving.
The Power Point loop of classmates' creations was awe-inspiring (soon to
be a DVD we hope). You were great sports about dorm life as we
encountered a few surprises!
We’re
hoping classmates will send contributions to further some of the
wonderful work we heard about from our speakers. (Links to all of them
are on the blog.) They came at great effort but fortunately they each
appreciated “the best questions I can remember,” “ the pleasure of
talking with an audience this smart,“ and “the fun of this
conversation” ... so we’re hoping they felt it was worth their time.
We
were all, of course, blown away by each of our speakers - their ideas
and passions, their personal examples, their achievements. The whole
event was an inspiration as well as an intellectual feast for all of us
who were lucky to be there. It seems many of us had been seeking a
different kind of gathering on campus, one with a more mentally
challenging as well as collegial focus than is typically possible. It
was exciting to see so many of you who hadn't been to reunions often, or
ever, for that matter!
Our
80+ classmates and guests used words like “life-changing”, "it made me
want to re-invent myself", and "I'm ready to commit to more active
involvement in issues important to this world".....to describe the
impact of the experience. We hope we offered a model of deep engagement
with ideas, with each other, and with the University. We hope that it
will also be valuable to those at the University who are thinking about
the future relationship of Stanford to its growing cohorts of older,
very-active alums.
Thank
you again for your patience as we threaded our way through the maze of
details and requirements for organizing an event on campus. We are proud
that we did it on our own initiative, that it was self supporting, that
it retained the personal touch and incomparable Class of '59 style
throughout!
Everyone
was a volunteer at this and all of you pitched in with great gusto.
Some people took on specific tasks and we want to single them out for
special praise.... Marion Duncan Smith; Connie King Turkington; Judy
Font; Elaine Knoernschild; Randy Fowkes; Ami Sadler; Chatty Collier;
Bonnie Pomeroy Stern; Anne MacGillivray Franke; Dave Cox; Carroll
Estes; Jane Sanders; Jim Seeley; Carole Pewthers; Bob Kahn; Clee Houser; Larry and Marilyn Wagner; Sheldon Breiner.
WITH FONDEST MEMORIES....'til we meet again....
"THE QUAD"
Kay Sprinkel Grace
Gay Hoagland
Gail Aguilar Stypula
Howard Elkus
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