Thank you, Rick, and thank you Class of 2006. It is not every day that one gets to return to the school from which he graduated to report back on his findings. One discovery of which I think I was always aware, but now understand even better, is that Milton Academy is truly an amazing place.

That said, in the interest of full Disclosure, I have to confess that I got in the habit of announcing that I learned more in one year teaching in the juvenile detention camps than I learned in all my years of school. That line I realize now probably plays better to an audience in bright orange jump suits with Los Angeles County Probation Department on them, but I felt compelled to share it with you nevertheless. Just a long way of stating that if you have any issues with what you are about to hear, don't blame Milton. Blame the gang bangers.

I would like to begin my remarks to you today by saying I'm sure that you are all infinitely wiser than I was as a graduating senior. Back then my understanding of Milton's motto "Dare to be True" was limited to don't lie, don't cheat on your tests, and don't dance to Madonna's song "Like A Virgin" even if you see this girl in the sophomore class who is pogoing around in front of you like a...you know what I mean.

I didn't understand the significance of the word "dare" in the motto either. True for me at that time was really just a matter of common sense. I was keenly aware that if I lied, cheated, or danced to cheesy pop songs there would be very real consequences. Courage did not factor into the equation.

By the time I graduated I did have a vague sense that "Daring to be True" for me had something to do with writing. Thanks in no small part to the encouragements of a new English teacher at that time named Rick Hardy, I found my voice as a writer here at Milton Academy. I can still remember the day Mr. Hardy told me that he had taken the liberty of reading a scene that I had written to his wife at home the night before.

That one comment was more powerfully affirming to me than any grade I ever received. What it told me and what Milton has institutionally reinforced was that my voice was important and worthy of an audience. I left Milton with a passion and a practice. Nothing in my life compared to the joy and freedom I felt sitting down to a blank page with a pen in my hand. I wrote plays, I wrote poems, I wrote for newspapers and magazines, and I wrote for myself.

And then at the age of 24 I decided to move from New York City to LA to become a screenwriter. I sold the first screen play that I'd ever written two weeks after the 1992 Los Angeles riots and half way through my first year at film school. Now, when you suddenly have people in positions of power telling you all kinds of flattering things and giving you more money than you could ever imagine you would earn in one year, it's a heady experience. It was my first real test and, to make a long story short, I failed.

I let my relationship with my producer, my agent, and the studio come before my relationship to my deepest self, to my deepest creative voice. Rather than dare to be true, I was scared to be true. But nothing was scarier than how rootless I felt in the wake of that experience. Suddenly for the first time in my life when I sat down to write, nothing came out. If there was a whisper of inspiration left in my head, it was drowned out by the deafening roar of all that was put to death in writing from a creative process.

It was then that I stumbled upon an ad in the Writers Guild Magazine looking for volunteers to teach writing to incarcerated youth. And as soon as I saw it, I felt this stirring in my gut. That stirring may have been fear, but it was the kind of fear that kicks up when you already know you are going to do something. It moved me like nothing had moved me in months, and it scared me a hell of a lot less than staying stuck in my apartment doing superficial rewrites on a script that I no longer recognized as my own.

Shortly thereafter I found myself in the Los Angeles County juvenile detention camp. I was there to teach poetry, but in retrospect I realized I was really there to pass along two things that I learned at Milton Academy -- your voice is important and dare to be true.

Looking around nervously at my first group of students, I saw myself in every one of them, and for the first time since moving to LA, I knew I was in the right place. So I just kept going back and gradually what started as volunteer work became a calling for me.

One Sunday afternoon a couple of years later my wife Susanna and I were hosting an open- mic poetry barbecue for a group of about 60 people, half of whom were incarcerated youth. As I was looking around our back deck at this beautiful multi-cultural gathering, I suddenly realized that I was standing in the middle of the last scene of my screen play. That script buried somewhere deep, deep in studio development hell had ended like a Shakespearian comedy with all the disparate characters coming together for a barbecue in the backyard of a house in South Central LA. Somehow I unconsciously manifested an event I once only dared to imagine on the screen. My screen play had come to life after all, but not in the way I expected.

Now, some of you may be sitting there thinking that's a nice story and everything, but I'm not a writer. But this isn't about writing so much as it is about daring to be true to the stirring in your guts, to the whispering in the back of your brain, to your most fantastic vision of the future. When we sit in silence and listen for that whisper or wait for that gut feeling or conjure that vision, what we are really doing is asking ourselves "Who am I?"

It takes courage to ask that question honestly and not reach for the easy answers that others, even the most well-meaning people in your lives, may have provided for you in the past. Who are you? If you are lucky, you may have had some moments in your life, perhaps even here at Milton, when you felt a sense of peace or higher purpose. Whether it was on an athletic field, a stage, in a science lab, at a easel, writing a book, playing or listening to music, or even lying on your back on the quad in one of those beautiful first days of spring.

Remember those moments. They are all clues that will help point you toward your truth. Just be sure to begin within because if you start looking outside yourself these days, it's too easy to get disoriented. Never in the history of mankind have we be privy to so much information and so little truth.

What does "Dare to be True" mean when the number one album on the Billboard Pop Chart at the height of our engagement in Iraq was "Get Rich or Die Trying"? What does "Dare to be True" mean when one of first coherent directions we got from our President in the wake of the 9/11 disaster was to keep shopping. These are symptoms of a society in desperate need of truth. And that truth and that solution, that antidote, lies inside each one of you.

So what does "Dare to be True" mean to you now on your graduation day? In my own contemplation I found that gratitude is often a good place to start. If you're a member of the Class of 2006, close your eyes for a minute and picture the people in your life, your family, your teachers, your classmates, and friends who have helped you on your journey, the people who have supported you and challenged you and inspired you.

If you are a parent or a family member of a graduating senior, you're probably already thinking about the young man or woman who has brought you to this place today, how they challenge you, inspired you, and helped you to grow in ways perhaps you never expected. And if you are a teacher or administrator, you know better than anyone how much these young people have brought to this school community over the years, individually and collectively.

One of the great blessings of my work is that it has made me very, very grateful for the life that I have and for the opportunities that I've been given. One of which has been the great honor of speaking to you all today.

I'm going to leave you with a poem I wrote that was inspired by a young man named James Bacca. It's called "Soldier Poet," and I want to dedicate it to all of you in the Class of 2006 and all those who have faced death and chosen life. To me a soldier poet is a person who combines the wisdom to discern truth with the courage to act on it. My greatest hope for you all is that you can discover the Soldier Poet within yourselves because there is a war going on, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but in our city streets and in our self-destructive consumer culture and in our own hearts and minds. And it is a war that can only be won by those who dare to be true to the deep peace from which I believe we all originated.

This is Soldier Poet.

"Last week I strip-searched the streets for a soldier poet struggling to make life rhyme with a bullet-splintered shin and one long 25-to-life knife to the forehead.

"He's still alive blind in one eye rushed from pimp-walk to gimp-walk by a symphony of sirens heartbeat who-bangin' on his ribcage only 18-years-of-age.

"I found his homeboy dying from the same disease dry eyes screaming please release me from this two-bedroom tomb, this dope smoke-filled emergency room, this prison skin rice paper-thin, tattoos like open sores, toe-tagging in the AIDS ward, still trying to be hardcore.

"Don't call me doctor, I'm not one, I don't laugh at jokes but I got one, about a kid with no father, I taught one, his enemigos rolled up, he shot one, they fire back, he caught one, now he's looking for answers, I bought one, an empty notebook with lines, I bought one for $1.99, less than a gun.

"Last week I strip-searched the streets for a soldier poet, struggling to make life rhyme with hard time, I found him on page three right next to me, scratching his way back to the beginning, with nothing but a pencil for protection in this mad house of correction we all call body."

Thank you.

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