Congrats to the Class of 2026! Commencement speaker Elizabeth Rush ’06 encouraged graduating students to, above all, keep tending to the people and places they love.
By Cara Nixon
May 21, 2026
“Let’s take a deep breath together. Inhale . . . hold it . . . exhale.”
Elizabeth Rush ’06 called it hippie grace—it’s the way one of her good friends, a fellow Reedie, starts meals, and how Elizabeth began her parting words to the graduating class of 2026.
Beginning with a ritual was no coincidence. After all, Elizabeth said, Reedies know all about rituals: Hum 110, the fight for the Doyle owl, Renn Fayre. Elizabeth, as a writer, takes rituals seriously—both “big R” and “little r” rituals, as she referred to them, and encouraged Reedies to hold them with a similar reverence.
A little r ritual—using the time between sleep and wakefulness early in the morning to hone her craft—has been what’s breathed life into her writing, after all. Such a habit she began in her days at Reed; a small thing that ultimately led her to improve her work drastically over a short period. Her advice to Reedies: “Take a moment, think about acts of habit that have allowed you to make cool things, ask tough questions, contribute to this community while you have been at Reed. Which of those habits do you want to carry forward? Which ones might keep you grounded when the going gets tough?”
And it would, in fact, get tough, she warned the class of 2026. There would be questioning and loneliness, and a feeling that was once conveyed to her as “falling down a well without a bottom.” It happened to Elizabeth when she graduated 20 years ago. The thing that scared her most? Losing touch with the community she’d built and maintained at Reed.
That didn’t happen, though. In fact, Elizabeth said she only grew closer to those she’d met at Reed, and continued fortifying those key relationships. “I’d like to say very explicitly the good news,” Elizabeth went on, “even though you are leaving this physical place behind, you get to keep the rituals and the relationships that have made it what it is.”
Keeping those beautiful friendships takes work. Often, it’s maintenance work—not always romantic or simple, but practical and repetitive. However: “If you tend to what you care about,” Elizabeth said, “it will sustain you.”
Thus she ended her speech the way it began: “Close your eyes. Hold the hands of the people next to you. Take a deep breath in.”
“This is what made you,” Elizabeth finished, “and to this you can always return.”
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Elizabeth Rush ’06 is the award-winning author of The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a wide range of publications, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, and National Geographic, among others. Today she lives with her family in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.
Selected by the senior class, Elizabeth delivered the keynote address for Reed College’s 112th Commencement ceremony on May 18, 2026. She joins a long line of other accomplished Reedies who have provided parting words to Reed’s graduating students.