Mastery Year 2: 4th Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here, feeling...wistful.

I woke up thinking about Charlie last night and could not get back to sleep. I can't really tell you the contents of those thoughts, we're not there yet in the story, but the night has left me both sleep-deprived and melancholy. Perhaps my thoughts landed thus because we're preparing for Lammas and I've been calling a lot of people I don't normally talk to, gathering the tribe, so to speak, and so I think of the past.

But you know Charlie through my words, and can appreciate my thoughts without knowing exactly what they were. So let me tell a brief Charlie story, one of my favorites, though it doesn't fit in to my history any place--for one thing, I don't remember precisely when it happened, though I was wearing brown at the time, so I must have been a candidate.

I was walking along beside the row of trees that separated the farm from the rest of campus, and I saw Charlie on the path that leads through the row and into the farm. He probably knew I was there, he knew most such things, but I can't be sure because he did not react to my presence at all. He's been hunting woodchucks and carried his game bag and his bow, but his bow was unstrung. He was done hunting for the day. And this rabbit approached him. I mean it hopped right up to him and looked at him. He looked at it--he may have spoken to it, I was too far away to hear--and then walked on, but the rabbit followed. This time man approached rabbit, maybe to test how close he could get, and the rabbit hopped away. So Charlie continued on his way, but was followed by the rabbit.

Now, Charlie did just hunt woodchucks and deer, he also hunted rabbits, and sometimes squirrels. Anything likely to interfere with our farming could find itself harvested if it entered our fields while Charlie had his bow strung. I've eaten rabbits he has killed. But when he found himself once again being followed by this abnormally friendly rabbit, he turned and spoke to it kindly. I still couldn't hear his words, but I could see his face and it shone with a kind of fond amusement.

The rabbit looked up at him and then picked up a small it of stick in its mouth and threw the stick some feet with a jerk of its head. Charlie looked at the rabbit for a few seconds, considering, and then he fetched and returned the stick. The rabbit threw it again, and again Charlie fetched it. And so on for some minutes, until a dog barked and the rabbit ran away.

I later learned that a wild rabbit someone had raised as a pet had been released on our property, and of course that must have been the rabbit I saw. A few other people saw it, too, and then after a few weeks it disappeared, probably eaten by something, but not by any off us. And what sticks in my mind is that image of the man and the rabbit playing fetch together early one summer morning before breakfast. 

I can't stay in this mood long, I've got to get to work so I can get certain tasks out of the way in time to take the holiday off. And as usual, I'm slightly unprepared, since I should have written the interlude post last week so that I could write the Lammas post this week. Everything is disorganized. Time has a way of running out. Maybe I'll write a second post this week, for the holiday?

.... .... ....  .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

And now I've been interrupted again--it's almost four and I need to pick my daughter up from her friend's house and I'd better send this off before anything else gets out of wack. Use the time you have, I guess I'm saying.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Part 4: Post 6: I Think He Likes Me

Eddie turned up on campus today with his hand bandaged.

I asked him what was wrong, and he peeled back the gauze and showed me a couple of paired puncture wounds, one of them deep, a hole in his hand, like a tiny, red, manhole without its cover. It looked even worse than it was, being filled with a clear, unnatural-looking gooey substance that I belatedly realized must be antibiotic ointment. His hand shook slightly, and I noticed he tried not to move his fingers. He wrapped up his hand again.

"Joy's work," he explained, with some humor.

"Joy doesn't have teeth like that," I said. He rolled his eyes.

"The teeth belong to Elmo," he said. "Joy bandaged my hand. She said I'm almost as sweet and loyal as a dog, so she guessed she could work on me. And we don't want the bite reported. He's had all his shots and I've had mine, but still...."

"I thought you said Elmo is getting better?"

"He is. Believe it or not, I think this is improvement."

I should explain that Elmo is the dog Eddie has been trying to train for the last two months or so. His assignment, the thing he has to do to earn his mastery, is to train a dog as a therapy animal whom even Eddie thinks cannot be trained. The first hard part was finding a dog he honestly considered untrainable, when lots of dogs who would merely be difficult to train beckoned at the shelters. And then there was the philosophical problem of being assigned to train an untrainable dog.

"If I succeed, and end up with a trained therapy dog," Eddie had said to me, "does that mean I have to start over with a new dog? Or, if I fail with the dog, does that mean I've failed my assignment and I have to start over with a new dog? Or just not earn my ring?"

None of us have ever heard of a candidate who wanted to earn the green ring and couldn't do it, but there's always the fear one of us could be the first. The masters like to assign impossible tasks, after all, like training an untrainable dog.

"Are they trying to teach me to handle failure, or trying to teach me not to give up on long-shot dogs?"

But all such philosophizing and worrying went out the window in mid-April when Eddie found, and more or less fell in love with Elmo, an unsocialized and deeply traumatized animal whom three rescue organizations had each independently examined, despaired of, and left at the kill shelter. Eddie took him, moved him in to one of the barns on campus, and hasn't looked back.

It took until almost June to get Elmo moved in and settled then treated for various physical ailments so he could concentrate on his training. And then Eddie started working and, his optimistic assertions to the contrary, made no progress at all.

"He's scared," Eddie admitted. "He's scared of me, he's scared of strange noises, he's scared of the other dogs....He won't make eye contact with me, won't take treats, won't let us take his food bowl when he's done with it...." I'd seen the inside of Elmo's barn just once since he moved in, and there were 14 empty dog bowls inside, plus the one he was eating from. That was the morning of his eighth day. Since then, I'd learned, they had build a dividing wall of straw bales down the middle of the barn, with a kind of door in it for Elmo, so they could clean one half while he was in the other.

So, now this bite.

"How do you figure getting bitten is progress?" I asked.

"He was so scared after he did it," Eddie answered. "He thought I was going to kill him--and there are people who would have. But I didn't. And I won't. And afterwards, while I was huddling in the corner trying to get my head clear of the pain so I could do something, he came up to me. He seemed sympathetic. He's never approached me before. I think he likes me."

Mastery Year 2: Part 4: Post 5: The Zen of Achoo!

Aaaand, now I'm sick.

I didn't expect to be sick, I certainly didn't plan to be sick, but now, here I am. Sneezing seems to be my main occupation at the moment. It's just a cold, no big deal, but I don't really seem able to focus on anything.

So, I'm sitting here doing nothing except watching the world go by from my balcony. And sneezing. Don't forget the sneezing.

Eventually, I will have a lot of work to catch up on, but right now? It's not so bad.

Earlier, it was hot as all get-out. It's been hot, way too hot, for days, weeks. But now...an hour or so ago, the sky grew dark, the air grew soupy, and the clouds just let loose, wind, rain, lightning, the whole bit, the works. It's just easing off now, and there's some clearing in the west.

If I lean way out and crane my head, I can see the sunset from here.

Mastery Year 2: Part 4: post 4: Who Offers Thanks

The heat is on, now, full, fierce summer, the kind of weather that is delicious and lazy if the livin is easy and you have nothing particular to do, but it's miserable otherwise. Fortunately, the days are long, as though the sun, too, wants to get up early while it's still cool and linger in the evening when the air grows soft again.

I've been introducing Steve and his baby to the art of walking around just after dawn, and the equally alluring art of doing nothing at all in the shade in the afternoon. The other day, we were engaged in the nothing at all part under an elm tree near the Mansion. Charlie, Joy, and Apple Blossom and Joy sat nearby, although we hadn't said anything since we all sat down, so I am unable to say whether we were sitting together in the social sense or not. Perhaps we were all simply enjoying the same shade.

A group of young day-campers ran by, ignoring us, playing some kind of imaginative game in the sunshine. The one running in front (being chased?) turned toward the others and sang out "ooooooooooo!" while slapping at his open mouth with one hand. One of the following children said "Pow! Pow!" shooting an invisible gun. The other must have had a Star Wars blaster, because she said "Pew! Pew! Pew!" instead.

"Why don't we have any Indians here?" asked Apple Blossom.

"We have at least three," said Charlie, rattling off the names of three yearlings with ancestry on the Indian Subcontinent.

"No, I mean like them," Apple clarified, pointing to the children.

"Them? Well, there they are."

Apple sighed and rolled her eyes. Charlie smiled, fractionally.

"How do kids learn stereotypes like that?" complained Steve.

"They're six years old," I said. "Maybe they just like making that noise."

"While pretending to be Indians," Steve added.

"Seriously, though," said Apple,"why no Native Americans?"

"I don't know that we don't," I pointed out. "I don't know everybody's ethnic background. I don't know yours."

"Mostly German," said Apple.

"I don't think they need this place," said Joy.

Charlie rolled his eyes.

"And they are an extremely small portion of the population," he put in. "Statistically, you'd expect them to be rare."

"But not non-existent," said Apple. "We're not that small a school."

"We're mostly white, here" acknowledged Steve. "When nothing changes, nothing changes."

"What do you mean, they don't need this place?" asked Apple of Joy. "I would think it would be the perfect place for them."

"Exactly. What we have to give, they already have. Like showing gratitude to the natural world."

"You can't make generalizations like that!" protested Steve, "you're totally romanticizing a culture you don't understand."

Joy looked surprised to be thus taken to task by a student, but then she shrugged her shoulders. She didn't contradict Steve, though.

Charlie reacted more forcefully.

"What, walking around giving coins to plants?" he said. I should explain that a lot of people on campus make a practice of leaving a small gift, usually a coin, sometimes a small crystal or some other offering, as thanks whenever they harvest a wild plant for any reason. Charlie has never thought well of it. "Of what possible use could a coin be to a plant? Is it going to buy itself ten cents' worth of fertilizer. Meanwhile, you get to feel all noble and shit for leaving religiously inspired trash."

"And what do you do, when you harvest a plant or an animal?" Joy asked, knowing the answer.

Charlie did not respond, Just looked at each other, but I knew the answer. And I knew that Charlie offers thanks.

Mastery Year 2: Part 4: Post 3: 4th of July

This post is for the 4^th of July. Odd circumstances prevented my posting it as scheduled.-D.

Today, Greg read the Declaration of Independence aloud. No big surprise there, he usually does a historical talk on the Fourth. Then he asked whether we believed the birthday of the country deserves to be celebrated. Instant intellectual pandemonium.

It’s not that everyone began talking at once, they didn’t, it’s that the answers came quickly, were many, varied, and in most cases assumed to be self-evident by their advocates.

“Of course it does, this is the greatest country on Earth.”

“Of course it doesn’t, the whole thing was a lie from the get-go. Thomas Jefferson owned people.”

“Adams and Franklin didn’t. They wrote the Declaration, too.”

“Whatever. Slavery was legal. Women couldn’t vote.”

“But signing the Declaration created the harmonic potential that manifested in universal adult franchise.”

“That doesn’t begin to pay off the karmic debt of owning people.”

“Or annihilating Native American groups.”

“Native Americans are still here.”

“Not all of them.”

“Or re-enslaving black people through the prison system.”

“Or discriminating against women or LGBT people.”

“Nobody has ever been denied the right to vote for being gay.”

“You can’t vote if you can’t live.”

“That’s a different issue.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Right or wrong, the founding of our country was still a Big Deal. It deserves to be observed.”

“Yeah, but as what, though? The country we pretend to be, or the one we actually are?”

“The country we pretend to be is also the country we are. Both are true.”

“That’s completely illogical.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“When it was founded, this country was the free-est in the world. You have to look at it in historical context.”

“No, it wasn’t. The Iroquois Confederacy was.”

“It’s still the free-est country in the world. We have our faults, but so does everybody else.”

“Some countries have fewer faults than we do.”

“Have you ever lived in any of these supposedly free-er countries? They’re socialist.”

“Have you ever lived in them?”

“Wasn’t the United States founded mostly by Freemasons? How many other countries can say that? George Washington himself was a weather witch.”

“He was not.”

“He had to have been.”

“He owned slaves, too.”

While all of these ideas were flurrying about, Greg stood still and upright, his hands behind his back, his iron-grey hair clumped to his scalp by sweat because he still wore his long-sleeved full uniform while standing in the sun. Steve sat off to the side, equally attentive, looking less like a recalcitrant student and more like the teacher he can be.

When the flurry simmered down, Greg looked at Steve, and Steve spoke up.

“The tradition of patriotic, principled resistance that the Founders enshrined is what we still use to fight against the wrongs they took for granted,” he said.

My nephew, Paul, who had wandered over from one of the camp activities to stand by me, tugged on my shirt.

“Why do we have fireworks in July?” he asked. “The days are so long, it takes forever to get dark.”

“Sometimes they have fireworks in December, too,” I reminded him. “For New Year’s Eve.”

“That is a much better idea,” he said.