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It is done. I will now soon be heading tours for grade school kids at The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, and in June will finally earn my badge as a fully pledged docent volunteer.

I gave my final presentation (a 30 minute gallery-to-gallery show & tell with introduction and conclusion) last Tuesday. The overall theme of my tour is the story - 'meeting' all those people involved in the creation of some of the most beautiful works of Asian art we'll ever see, as well as 'meeting' the entities or ideas that inspired them. The final presentation went imperfectly well, naturally. We don't expect every trainee to be perfect and know absolutely everything. I had things I and my mentors knew I needed to work on, mostly to do with dates, facts, and figures, something all of us trainees will master over time.

In the end the docents congratulated me for completing the training program proper and were proud of me, of all of us. They said that I will be excellent with the kids, primarily because of my creative way of introducing them to the objects as well as keeping them in suspense and allowing them to bring their own lives into the experience. Since we started the program last September it has been pretty challenging, with excellent lectures by curators, professors, and specialists, talks with the awesome docent veterans themselves, field practice, and those demanding researches and writing times.

And yet this is ultimately only the beginning. Ha! The six months of preparation will see me working with the grade school kids and doing the hour long tours with them, and probably assisting in some of the workshops (calligraphy, mandala making, etc.). The true challenge will be enriching them with knowledge they didn't already know before they walked into the museum. The true goal will be to successfully plant a seed in them, that they should learn one, two, or three things. The idea is to help them discover the world, their place in it, and that they have a very vital part in it all.

That's all I can do within my power for the kids. The rest, of course, is up to them. They live in this world and of this world. It's their job - our job - to know, understand, and respect it, and it's our pleasure to admire and share its beauty.