Year 3: Sixth Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2015 here,

and I'm just amazed that it's time to write an interlude again. I mean, this is only the fifth post since the last interlude--how does a gap of  eight weeks yield only five weekly posts? A combination of a late beginning and an early Monday, of course, but it feels like I must be missing a week or two somewhere.

Anyway.

I've been thinking about how I'm going to handle the future of this blog, what I'm going to do next year, when I'll be covering my final year as a novice. I'm thinking I'll do some version of skipping over my Absence with a series of interludes and then launching into my experiences as a candidate. It's curious that I'm thinking of this now, though, because thirteen years ago I was not thinking about the future very much, I was not thinking about how my final year as an undergrad was about to begin. I did not viscerally realize that I was on the way out, as it were, until just a few weeks before Beltane.

I'd like to think I've gotten better at thinking ahead, but I probably haven't. The other day, June said something about getting Carly in pre-school and I looked at her completely blankly. Carly is a toddler, she doesn't need to go to school. But of course, she's not going to stay a toddler forever--she's two-and-a-half now and already she's playing around with learning to write--she puts big C's, followed by squiggles, in the middle of her drawings and says that is her name. Sometimes the C's are backwards, or very crooked, but she's getting the right idea. So, yeah, it's getting time to think about pre-school, but in my head she's my baby and my baby she will be forever, I guess.

But what I couldn't see at the time I can see in retrospect and I know what the next "chapter" of my story is going to be--and the one after that.My hindsight is better than my foresight.

I said a while back that I'd have news about our community, and so I do. We have decided to continue as a group, as an entity, and not to let the closing of the school mean the end of us as a people, as a sort of tribe, if you will. To this end, we obviously need a project to bring us together and to provide some means of introducing new students to us. I'm not going to go into details, since I don't want anyone identifying us through my story (if I can find a way to protect our secrecy while going into more detail I will), but basically we're going to start a group of interrelated businesses and, through them, offer various classes and talks and events to the public. Most of our students will not know who and what we are, or even, probably, that our businesses are related. But if any guess, they will pass the entrance exam and be able to join us.

More importantly, we'll be doing a public service as a group again.

It's a rebirth, of sorts, but I wonder if it will ever feel like enough, whether those of us who remember the school and its campus will always be half hoping to somehow go home.