Mastery Year 2: Interlude 6

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

The "vanishing" of the masters I wrote about last time no longer occurs--and if it did, I would vanish with them, being a master myself, now (a thought I still sometimes find deliciously odd).  We have no need of that particular tradition, because while we again have students, we don't live with them and are not available to them except when we choose to be--so we no longer need to choose not to be.

On balance, I think it is better for the community that the students live together and that we live with them, though doing so does create boundary problems we then have to solve, such as by vanishing and by using secret stairways and so forth. But even aside from that, there were advantages to the vanishing itself.

The withdrawal of the masters at Samhain, often in the literal middle of a sentence, symbolized and made emotionally real the losses of death, without which the Day of the Dead can come to seem merely spooky or picturesque, especially for those who have never really lost anybody. It created a frustration, in some cases an anger, a helpless recognition that all conversations, if carried on long enough, end without our permission and before everything has been said.

The withdrawal also reminded us, "us" being the students, I mean, that the school community was us, that we were its heart, and that although the masters comprised its other heart, we did not exactly need them. They could go and the school remained.

Finally, the fact that the masters left meant they could return, filing into the Chapel at Brigit, candles dark until we lit them, familiar and yet exotic, elfin, eerie, with hoods drawn up and that strange, small bell ringing....

I miss that, and I miss being able to provide that, though in truth I never was able to process in at Brigit when the school still had its campus, because I did not join the Six until afterwards. But I have processed in, for variations of the ceremony, and knowing that it is not the same, I feel sad for those students who don't get what I received.

And that, too, is part of the strange magic of Samhain, because all things pass, nothing endures forever, even the excellent things that should, and yet there is an underlying reality that ever returns.

The river moves but does not move. Lives end but life continues.