on this, which may well be the

most momentous day of your lives. i have good news and bad news about your future. first, the bad. things are going to go horribly wrong. and now the good news. things are going towrong. of course what we wish for ourselves is particularly at beginnings like, is that everything in our future goes according to plan. but if you're lucky, it' plans e

mes this is the greatest. the is to see the blessing. we sometimes need to change our perspective. one day in the peruvian amazon, i was in need of just this. and that's i found myself seven stories of a matching tree hanging not by a slender thread, by a thin enough rope, and below me in the canoe that had carried me to the fishing for piranhas. not a good place to be. might think this remind you of how you feel as you carry your newly minted degrees into s troubled world. so what i doing up that tree? i was looking for pink dolphins and pink dolphins aren't like those pink elephants used to appear to my mother after her

third or fourth martini. they really. they are real dolphins, but they live in freshwater and are sometimes gray. but sometimes they're hot or bubblegum. and i was in the amazon working a book about them. my third big book, which was called journey of the pink dolphins, and the first thing that went horribly wrong with this book was it's entire premise fel i pitched as a book in which i'd follow these little known creatures on their migration and find out where they go. they migrate. i'd heard they were migratory at a conference from the world top expert on them, dr. da silva. so i show up in brazil, in dr. da silva's office. i've got my contract i've got my

■mphrapher, me and it was then that she revealed me unsettling news. she told me. turns out they don't migrate at all. that was the entire premise. my book. so now things were looking even worse. bad enough,not existent migrati. but these dolphins, unlike marine dolphins, they don't have rsal fins. they don't spring out of the water. they're very difficult to see. they're just a low shimmering on the water's surface. so the first weeks i spent my first expedition to the amazon. first in brazil and then in peru. i could only spot fragments of the animals. i couldn't tell individuals. i couldn't even count many.

e i tried watching from a canoe. i tried swimming in the black waters, opening eyes beneath the water to try see them. but it didn't. which might have been good. because later i found that there were all kinds of piranhas electric eels in the water. couldn't see them either. so finally trying to get the ive of height and by climbing as high as i could, i hoped that i could peer down and penetrate the water surface. that's why i was up that tree. so there i was. my weight hanging in the grips of this climbing apparat was that mountain climbers used to scale cliffs with leather loops about my thighs and belly to ascend. you step into a sort of noose and you straighten the leg. you pull up with your arms sliding a knot the length of the step. and you do it again and again andnever done this before.

i shook with fear and exertion. but finally, it felt like the itself was calling me up. so i climbed into this world i did not know existed. the treetop was new universe full of life giant centipedes curled in the crevices of its bark. snails clung to the underside of leaves, a galaxy of perched on the taller branches up and up. i climbed past two or a pendulum. this two sets of parent birds wisely built their purse like alongside an enormous nest bigger a pumpkin was like having police station on your block up. i climbed this giant swollen termitesmell that it smelled lie

cedar. the insects use this to repel other insects and i climbed past vine aides who werclimbing with only slower on their hunt for light. i climbed up past one branch where there was a plant called a million perched. it's a relative of the pineapple. it's overlapped and leaves formr collects. i looked in and inside the was a mir. a tiny lake full of its own biota. there was a frog in there and wiggling mosquito larvae and snails and a beetle. and someone had laid their eggs in there, mayba salamander or some water loving insect. cataloged 500 species that can

live just in the rainwater collected in a brazilian's bowl. it's a tiny all of its own own. and then i reached the top, the rope, and i looked down and below me i saw parakeets and butterfliesluwater was still as, night. i could see no dolphins. so was climb a failure? far from it. i didn't see what expected or hoped to see. i didn't get just a view of something. i already. instead, i'd been given a glimpse. a treetop world that few of us in the u.s., this. i was given a far more exciting and profound view and unexpected

insight, a surprise gift. and that's a pretty good working definition of a blessing. and so many times in my life found myself in. a similar situation. in india, i was researching my second book called spell of the ■ztiger, and i traveled to some urban, which is this huge mangrove forest that stretches between india and bangladesh i had set up everything in advance. i had a translator, i had a speedboat, a ph.d. biologist, who spoke perfect english as well as bengali was going to go with me and every one of those things fell through. the first day i ended up in india. peace. i got stuck out in yemen in a reserve with, 500 men eating tigers. the women stay home where they're eatencrocodiles.

they really are man eaters decl. so couot and was no chance of anyone else coming who might be my translator. but you know what happened? because of this i was foedt; use own eyes and ears and my rudimentary bengali to and feel this place firsthand and to make relationships with the local. that would been if i had been with a ph.d. biologist. and i got to write this culturt no one else had ever done. and the same happened when i showed up at gobbi stream reserve in tanzania at. jane goodall's invitation for my book, jane goodall was my childhood heroine.

but she stood up at that again, although my heart was broken, it was a blessing because i ended up being able again make observations of the apes on my own that i would not have been able do if i was following jane around. same thing happened in northern thailand. i called search the golden moon bear thought i on the trail of a new species. it wasn't, but everywhere we went. it seemed like a disaster. we go to a place and find empty forests where all the animals had been. we would find parks that were overrun who were displaced and terrible tragedies. and they were killing and eating all the animals. we were findg people without

without arms who'd been blown apart by landmines. i even met an elephant who had lost a leg to a landmine while she was forced to do illegal in burma. i felt my luck had really run out and i was certain that this book was going to be so s going to have to come with a cyanide tablet in theone of our expeditions led io northern thailand and we visited a village of laguna to talk with the local hunters about the bears. and one of the interviewees happened to be a shaman. so after the interview, he'd generously offered to conduct a soul binding ceremony to keep soul from fluttering off. and they bind your wrists with thread. he suddenly exclaims, these are the luckiest wrists i've ever seen.

because the way they tell their fortune is not looking at your palm but your wrist. and i realized, the shaman was right. it was my tremendous good fortune to be exactly there. exactly. order to bring this news back to my readers. so we might help do something about these sorrows at a critical time in our history and for my book, i think dolphins to this day, i think it's of yet. i did not follow them on their non-existant, but i follow them in anotheray. more like a disciple follows a ajteacher. i follow them through stories and myths. i follow them back in time.

thanks to evolutionary biologist who took me back to the time when whales once walked on land and on offer remote slip of land in the tapachula river in brazil. i was able to recognize seven pink dolphins who had come to me as i swam the river and i could even feel sounding me with their echolocation. they even would blow bubbles beneath me, which would sizzle up over skin. and i found that in captivity they'll often do this to each massage. so on this important day, my advice to you is twofold. first, like a runner or a jockey, get in position to ready to receive blessings.

that means sometimes thing willing to literally go out on a limb for something meaningful, something you believe in something bigger than yourself and don't buy the lie that the so-called real world is allaboue and accumulating money and a bunch of stuff. because the real world, the world that we love is a green living world full of real dangers and stunning beauty and breathtaking surprises. so go, go out in the world where your heart calls you and don't be afraid. and sometimes will have to be brave. but the blessings will come. i promise you that they did to and they will to you. and the second thing i wisfo ise

blessings as such. and sometimes it's a hard but you'll know it's a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by their experience. so be ready. all you now graduate earning you are in a sense hanging. as i was by a slender rope seven storiestree. my wish for you today is that you enjoy the view. congratulate patience and thank you. thank you. president jamieson, gervase jackson, the board, the