Mastery Year 2: Interlude 2

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here,

Gosh, that was awful, the early days of Sarah's diagnosis. We all thought both that she had to be cured, must be cured (or proven not really sick in the first place) and that she would be. A kind of hopeless hopefulness. In time we discovered neither was true.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but it's worth saying that there's a tendency to believe that life is the plans that we make, the hopes and ideals and expectations, and that illness and accident and all of that is the interruption, stuff you deal with so you can get back to living your life. Except the interruptions never stop, and there are no interruptions, because it's all life.

That was the central lesson I was supposed to be teaching Steve, I think, but I was slow to understand it myself.

Much of the politics of the past year and a half have seemed like an interruption, an aberration I can't quite believe in, now that the first shock is over. We're ok, as long as "we" is defined narrowly. I suppose "we" are always ok, until suddenly we aren't, and the important thing is how narrowly "we" must be defined to remain ok. Greg often reminds us of this, as does Steve.

And so, we continue to act, deliberately, if we have to, as though this unbelievable turn of the nation's fortunes is real, and worth doing something about. We do this by acting on our convictions, making a safe and sacred space, and sharing it. We have a small community again, about thirty students total who have passed the entrance exam, plus about sixty or seventy more who are frequent attendees of our various public workshops and events.

We are interrupting the interruption.

Mastert Year 2: Part 2: Post 6: Onion Snow

Yesterday, it snowed, of all things.

It's not very cold. The air was never below freezing at ground level. The big, fat flakes melted on contact, and there were times when they fell more quickly than snow can, the day edging over into sleet. I don't think any of the growing plants were damaged. And yet it was all quite pretty.

I had a Dar Williams song about a blizzard in April stuck in my head all day, and while it had nothing to do with anything, except a tenuous connection to our weather (which wasn't anywhere close to being a blizzard), I can't now remember the day without thinking of that song, which rather intrusively formed my sound-track.

June and I slept late, it being Sunday, and then after she got up to go to do some work (she's begun preparing for the summer camp), I lazed about in bed reading for a while. When I finally dressed and came downstairs, the Mansion seemed all but empty, a surprise, because there's usually not all that much to do on a Sunday around here. Maybe they were all out playing in the snow?

No, not all. Steve bees was sitting in the Bird Room by the window, giving his baby a bottle. In that darkly Victorian room, against the bright spring snow, they looked like a male Madonna and Child.

"Too bad you don't have actual milk," I commented, approaching them. That kind of comment doesn't sound weird here. Men don't mind being compared to women in this place.

"Oh, but I do," said Steve. "Sarah pumps and freezes."

As he spoke, Sean finished his meal. Steve put the bottle down and then lifted the baby to his shoulder to help him burp. Baby burps often have a liquid component, and Steve had a dish towel over his shoulder, just in case. The amount of laundry associated with such tiny people is amazing. Burp accomplished, Sean drifted off to sleep and Steve laid the boy on a towel on a nearby chair. A few minutes went by.

I became aware that he was fussing with the baby and associated equipment in order to avoid talking to me.

"Well?" I said.

"Well," he answered.

"Look, you don't need to talk to me," I said, and, oddly, those words seemed to be the ones that freed him to talk.

"It's Sarah," he said, still reluctant. "She's...in the hospital." He paused, and I was about to asked what she was in the hospital for, when he clarified. "It's a mental hospital."

"Why?" She'd never seemed crazy to me.

"She's been diagnosed with schizophrenia."

"What? Wait, just diagnosed with, or does she actually have schizophrenia?"

"Who the hell knows," said Steve, shouting at a whisper so as to avoid waking the baby. "There's no consensus on what schizophrenia even is. Who gets diagnosed is a judgment call."

"What does Allen say?" I was imagining an injustice thwarted by the wisdom of alternative mental healthcare. Surely Allen would say everything was alright and he'd fix it somehow.

"Allen says exactly what I just told you, about diagnosis, but he also says she's really sick. He's the one who said she needed to go in."

"What's going to happen?" I asked. "What's her prognosis?"

"Damned if I know. Her doctors say schizophrenia is incurable and she'll need to be on drugs the rest of her life. She might never work again. Allen says none of that is true, but he doesn't have any specific advice and I don't know what to think."

I didn't know what to say.

"Why didn't you want to tell me?" I asked, after a while.

"It's not personal," he said "I don't like telling anybody. Every time I talk about it, it seems more real."

"Do you want me to tell everybody?" I asked. "On campus, I mean. So they don't have to ask you?"

He considered for a moment. While he was considering, the baby either pooped or farted, because the room filled with stink. We both ignored it.

"Do it when I'm not here," he said at last.

And the baby woke and started to cry. Steve set about changing Sean's diaper. The disruption of being unclothed and wiped down made Sean cry louder. After he was all cleaned-up and comfortably swaddled (young babies like being wrapped tightly), he calmed down and fell asleep again. A silence settled. Once again, Steve was avoiding talking to me. The Dar Williams song about the blizzard repeated itself in my mind.

"There's not anything that studying natural history with me can do about any of this, is there?" I ventured.

Steve shook his head.

"There's not anything that not studying it can do, either, is there?" I ventured further.

Steve looked up into the middle distance. This was a new one on him, clearly.

"Come with me," I said.

He settled Sean in his sling and pulled on an extra shirt over himself and his baby, and we both got our cloaks from the hanger on our way out. We walked around in silence together for a while and the snow, falling heavily just then, settled on our hair and shoulders and turned us white.

"I've heard that the last snow of the year is called the onion snow," I said. "Because it smells like onions. I don't know. What do you think? Does the snow smell like onions to you?"

And, as intended, Steve stopped mulling things over and directed his attention to something other than the inside of his own head. He sniffed the air.

"I don't smell onions," he said. "It just smells like snow."

"How exactly does snow smell?"

And he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, concentrating on his senses, and he began to weep.

I didn't try to comfort him. I figured, Steve has reason to weep, and should be allowed to do it. I also figured maybe tears were what happened whenever he relaxed enough to not resist them. So we just stood there for a while, breathing, inhaling scent, while Steve cried quietly in the falling snow.

Mastery Year 2: Part 2: Post 5: Delays

So, I've felt really conflicted about Steve. Remember, I'm supposed to be teaching him to connect with the out-of-doors, but he's not talking to me, so how can I? Something is bothering him. He's spending a lot of time off-campus, he's per-occupied, and he's barely talking to me socially, let alone making himself available to me as a student.

The reason I feel conflicted is that I don't know whether I'm supposed to reach out to him or not. I don't know if I'm supposed to insist--I'll feel remiss if I don't, since it's kind of my assignment, but at the time time, I've never been the sort of person to force others to talk to me. Maybe that's one reason people do talk to me?

I talked to some of the masters about it, but they gave me conflicting or even cryptic answers.

Charlie shrugged and said "you can't make someone learn from you, Daniel."

Allen said "what if having people who will insist is one of the advantages of being here? In most places, no one will ask if you're ok unless you're bothering someone."

Greg said "why would you feel remiss? That's the interesting part, for me."

Joy said "use your intuition. You'll know what to say and when."

And Kit, whom I spoke to last, said "I've had this idea for a divination methodology. Flip coins of several denominations, heads are yes, tails are no. Then imagine each of the presidents on the coins and why he'd say yes or no. You don't need to do what they say, but their comments would be food for thought, yes?

Well.

It's springtime, which means it's a time of transition. Kit always says this. So does Charlie. It's one of the few places where they agree. Whenever anyone complains that spring keeps coming and going, they say, each in their own way, that coming and going is spring. When warm weather is here unambiguously, that is summer. I kept this very carefully in mind late last week when we had three days of all-but-literally freezing rain. It is spring, it is spring, it is spring.

Today has been more obviously springlike, warm and sunny and perfumed by flowers. Some of the shrubs are starting to leaf out, but hardly any of the trees have broken bud, yet, except for the flowers of the maples. The forests still look largely winterlike. But I think that is about to change. Next week, or perhaps the week after, the leaf-out will begin, and once it does, it will go fast. I will wish it could slow down so I could watch it properly. So far, it has mostly seemed slow. Every year this happens--spring seems to take forever and then as soon as it springs, I forget, and I think of it as a more or less brief season, until the next year, when I am reminded that it isn't.

And Steve is missing all this. He's not paying attention. That I'm sure of.

In other new, I had lunch with Eddie the other day. As you might remember, part of his assignment is to find a dog he considers impossible to train and then train it as a therapy animal anyway. His assignment, too, seems hung up. He seemed pretty droopy about it.

"Are you still hung up with wanting to train all of the trainable ones?" I asked. He had told me about that earlier this spring, how he sees all of these great dogs in shelters and rescue places, some of whom he doubts anybody else could train, but the very fact that he knows he can bring out these dogs' potential means that he can't make the attempt right now. It sounds very hard.

But

"No, that's not it," Eddie told me. "In fact, there's this dog...."

"That's great," I told him. "So what's the problem?"

"Well," he said, "I really like this dog. And I don't want to think that I can't help him."

Mastery Year 2: Part 2: Post 4: Returning

Steve is back. Sort of. And he has Sean. But Sarah isn't here, and he won't say where she is. He won't say much of anything, which is why I said he's only sort of here. He's barely talking to any of us--though he seems to be spending a lot of time with Greg and Allen, so maybe he's talking to them.

I might wonder why he's back, except that he has classes to teach. Spring classes started up after Ostar, and Steve now has two out of the four that Greg used to teach every spring. Last year, three different allies took Greg's classes, and reportedly were somewhat uninspired, but Steve actually cares about and has expertise in his two--American History of Religion and American History of Dissent. A single ally is teaching the other two. In the almost two weeks Steve was out, Greg subbed for him. I can't help feeling sad that they're not really Greg's classes anymore, like the newer students are missing out, and I suppose they are, but he has earned his retirement. And Steve is, reportedly, very good. Another example of impermanence, I suppose.

But between teaching, caring for the baby--Steve often does both at once, delivering lectures while carrying his sleeping child strapped to his chest--and continuing to work part-time with his law firm, I don't think he's doing anything in the way of learning to deal with the anger that sent him back here. And if I'm supposed to act as his master, I suppose I'm supposed to do something about it, intervene, somehow, or at least make sure he knows what he's doing. But I don't know what to do or say....

I'll have to talk to Charlie about it.

In the meantime, I'm still teaching workshops, although attendance has dropped way down, since regular classes have started up, and I subbed for Charlie when he had his spring cold--that was planned, so I'd been kind of shadowing him, learning to teach those classes, so I'd be ready to step into them. I'm still doing that, in case he gets sick again. There's really not much he does that I can't do, now, other than, of course, being Charlie.

That's the thing about the masters--they teach classes and lead activities and make this college run, but really their primary jobs are simply to be themselves. I keep reminding myself that no matter how much Charlie trains me, he can't teach me how to be Charlie. I've got to be Daniel. And there is a version of me that is a master--and it is that version of mine I have to find. Except I really don't know what that might look like. I've obviously never seen it.

Spring continues, despite the dusting of snow we got yesterday morning. Among the trees the signs are still subtle--the red maples are flowering, but that's about it--and the native grasses are still brown as ever. Much of the greenery is exotic and is therefor off-campus. But Sarah Grimm's team is plowing the fields, the frogs and toads are breeding with gusto, the birds are arguing musically in the trees, and some of the spring wildflowers are up.

It's hard not to feel the warmth as some kind of victory.

Mastery Year 2: Part 2: Post 3: Missing

Steve is gone.

I don't mean he's died, as far as I know he's perfectly fine, he's just not here on campus and I don't, as of this writing, know why. All three of them, Steve, Sarah, and Sean are gone. They left in the middle of the night.

Everything seemed normal with them when we went to bed--though, maybe I missed something somehow. They did make some noise at night--woke me up--but nothing that sounded like them leaving. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was sex-noises, an irregular, almost rhythmic, half-voiced sound. It was clearly coming from Steve and Sarah's room, and however sex-positive we are around here, it doesn't mean I want to hear the people in the room next to mine going at it. But within a few seconds I realized it was crying. Someone was crying hard.

June was awake next to me.

"Should one of us go over?" I asked, whispering.
"No, wait until we're asked," she whispered back. "It could be private."

But however private it might be, we kept listening, ears peeled in the dark.

A voice spoke, Steve's, but we couldn't hear his words. Sarah replied, also unintelligibly. It must have been she who was crying. Her voice, as the two spoke, rose, became wild, almost panicked, but I still couldn't make out more than the occasional word, nothing I could make sense of. The crying started up again, escalated, something went THUMP. Steve spoke, soothingly, the crying abated, silence returned. It took a long time for June and I to get back to sleep.

We woke again to pounding on the door.

"What's the matter?" I half shouted. June and I were tangled up in the covers. I felt confused, muddle-headed.
"What's happening? What time is it?" asked June at the same time.
"It's almost six," the voice, I realized, was Mason's. "Steve is missing. Steve and Sarah and Sean are missing. Their door was open, I looked in, they're not there. Do you have any idea where they went?"

His panic was contagious, but I couldn't see the reason for it.

“Maybe they went for a walk, or went to the bathroom?” I suggested.

“Went for a walk before dawn with a newborn? They’re not in the bathroom, I’ve just been there.”

“You have a point.”

June and I got up. She started fumbling into her clothes and I went to the door.

“Why me?” I asked. “What do you want me to do?” I wasn’t complaining, I just didn’t see how I fit in to the situation.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “your door is right here and you’re a mastery candidate.”

I guess he figured I knew what to do. And I kind of did.

“Ok, you go to zazen, I’ll handle it.”

“Ok, thank you,” and he ran off.

I went downstairs, into the still-dark office, and found a phone list. I used it to call Waverly, who is the new security head now that Joe has retired. The security head is on call, and therefore wouldn’t mind being woken up before dawn. I heard a sleepy voice on the phone and explained the problem. A few seconds went by while she woke up more fully.

“You’re right to ask,” she assured me. “But in this case everything’s ok. They left campus last night, Allen’s with them, there’ll an announcement at breakfast.”

Ok, then.

But at breakfast, Karen’s announcement (she’s the current head of the masters’ group) was only that the Kellys had left campus temporarily because of a family emergency, that she wouldn’t give details out of privacy concerns, but that personal friends of theirs could call Steve on his cell phone and ask him. Sharon had the number.

Sounds innocuous enough, but nothing that causes the head of the masters’ group to make an announcement at breakfast is ever good. And I can’t get Steve to answer. His phone is going straight to voicemail.

Sounds trivial, and it’s honestly not my primary concern, but I can’t help thinking that he’s supposed to be my student, and he isn’t here, so how am I supposed to learn to be his teacher?