Mastery Year 2: Part 7: Post 4: Feeling Gray

I don't feel like doing anything today.

The weather is gray and rainy, and the lovely snow we got two days ago--our first major snowfall of the year--has turned to gray, dirty slush. There are times, in weather like this, that I feel cozy, even contemplative, but today I just feel blah. I'd like to melt into slush myself, and perhaps I will.

It would probably help if I had something definite to do today, but instead I have nothing scheduled, no deadlines, and a long list of things I ought to do sooner or later and no idea which to do first.

We've just had Thanksgiving, usually a happy time, and I guess I enjoyed it, but my memory of the evening is somewhat marred for me because of the tremendous argument June and I had afterwards. We usually don't fight, so I suppose we don't have much practice fighting well.

We had a good time, so far as I can tell, helping to cook the meal a my parent's house, playing with our nephews and niece, and mildly stuffing our faces with good food. Then, as has become traditional, Allen and Kit--and this time, Lo--came over for dessert and coffee and a small dance-party erupted. Allen, I should say, is not a skilled dancer, but he makes his attempts with such unabashed joy that he might as well be. Kit spent much of her time dancing with Ruthie, my niece, not only having a good time but also showing her some moves.

The problem was that on the ride home--back to campus, I mean, June went oddly silent. Her few responses to me, and even the others, seemed distracted, clipped. I think the others noticed--Allen and Lo are both psychologists, after all--and they dropped us off with a rather perfunctory good-night. Allen gave me a significant look, which I didn't understand until later.

For the rest of the evening, as we put away our share of the left-overs and gradually got ready for bed, June kept picking on me. I know I should write out the whole scene (showing, not telling, as a good writer should), and probably would if I felt better, but suffice it to say I couldn't do anything right, and when I finally got tired of it and demanded she tell me what's going on, she said something that didn't make any sense:

"We always go to your parents' for the holidays!"

Which is, first, not literally true, and second, hardly my fault. Her parents live much farther away, and June's new job pretty much ensures that we can't take off enough time to go visit them very often.

I argued back, but that wasn't right, either, and we ended up shouting at each other and I still don't really know why.

"You're blaming me for things I didn't even do!" I shouted, finally.

"I know!" she yelled back, as if this, too, were my fault.

We went to bed soon after, unable to resolve anything, and slept on opposite edges of our narrow bed.

Sometime in the middle of the night, though, without saying anything, she rolled over and wrapped her long, warm arms and legs, and her cold feet around me. In the morning, we enjoyed each other, and then I slept again. When I woke next, she had already left for work and the rain had started.

Mastery Year 2: Part 7: Post 3: Instructions from Ollie

I went running with Ollie this morning after breakfast. It's that time of year, now, when running before breakfast would mean starting in the dark. The leaves are off the trees and some mornings the grass is frozen and the puddles in the roads on campus are white with ice. But it wasn't that cold today, and though the day dawned cloudy, the sky turned brilliant blue and gold later on.

We ran without speaking much, but afterwards, as we were stretching in the Green Room, I told him about my conversation with Charlie and my new assignment to list what I need to learn and do before I earn my green ring.

"I don't understand," I said. "I have no idea what I have to do, why should I? I've never been a master."

"I haven't either," Ollie pointed out.

"Yeah, but you're getting your ring this Brigid. You're further along in the process."

"Ok, try this; why do you think this coming year should be your last? Are you eager to be gone?"

"No," I said. "I want my ring because I want to stay. It just feels like it's getting to be time."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do. This is not the first feeling like this you've had. How does it feel? Where does the feeling come from? Think! Reflect!"

He had a point. I've been learning how to answer such questions for years, now.

"I'm different that I was when I started the process. I'm on the other side of something, now. And I'm getting restless with what I'm doing, so maybe it's time to do something else. Also, my workshops are well-attended, I get good reviews, and I offer workshops in subjects nobody else does--I have something unique to give, now. And Steve Bees is making progress. I'm able to help him. I feel like I fit in better with the masters than with the students, so maybe I'm close to being one of them."

"Ok, so, why aren't you getting your green ring with me at Brigid?"

"No one's suggesting I should," I said.

"I just did. Boom, magic spell, you're getting your ring this year. What's your reaction?"

"No!"

"Why?"

"I--"

"Daniel!"

"I don't feel ready. I feel scared thinking about it. I worry that there's something missing, something I don't know about, yet."

"Well, there you go."

"Yes, here I am. Here I am not knowing what I need to do to get my green ring."

"Exactly. Rephrase that. What's the one thing you don't know yet about being a master?"

"How to make another master."

"Now, why was that so hard?"

"It wasn't, but that leaves me back where I started, in need of information only the masters can give me."

"I'm not so sure," said Ollie. "You're a part of this community, you know what it needs in terms of leadership. Would you hire yourself right now? If not, why not?"

I thought about this. It's an odd paradox that as self-conscious as I am most of the time, I'm still not very good at thinking about myself from the outside. How would I rate a prospective school employee with skills such as mine? I was tempted to tell Ollie I'd get back to him, but that's what I'd told Charlie, and I was ostensibly having this conversation with Ollie in order to come with an answer I could get back to Charlie with. I stared at my sock, mid-hurdler's stretch, for a while trying to put off coming up with something.

"What about you?" I asked. Yes, I was stalling. "How did you know you're ready?"

Ollie laughed at me and released the stretch he'd been holding.

"I'm different," he said. "My real reason for coming back was to become a better therapist, to integrate love into my professional practice in a way that isn't exactly encouraged in secular training--and isn't limited to Biblical framing, either. I know when I'm loving and when I'm not, so I know I'e met my goal. My clients say I'm helping them. Allen says he's taught me what he can, so that means it's time to move on. But you, you want to teach here. That's a whole other kettle of wax."

Yes, he said kettle of wax.

"You don't?"

"Come on, I'm a Baptist preacher. There's no way there's a place among the Six for me."

"How do you expect to get your ring, then?" I asked. Remember, to become a master, you have to pass a job interview. You won't be hired if there isn't an opening, which obviously there usually isn't, but you have to be, in principle, qualified to teach here. So if Ollie was sure he couldn't,...?

"That's what I have to figure out between now and Brigid."

"I need to know more about how this community works," I decided. "How it actually runs. I need to identify one or more areas of mastery where I can accept mastery candidates and outline a basic teaching approach--not that I won't have to alter my plans every single time! I need to develop teaching plans for one or more of the required courses. I need to get a sense of what my role in non-academic areas might be." Hearing myself talk this way, about actually being a master, made my insides go all fluttery. "And I need to talk to the other members of the candidates groups and with the novices who know me to find out if anybody thinks I'm missing something in terms of skill or character."

"Sounds like you've got it," said Ollie, clapped me on the shoulder, and went into the Great Hall and up the stairs, on his way to shower. He left me standing in the Green room by myself.

Mastery Year 2: Part 7: Post 2: Instructions from Charlie

"Did you enjoy spying on the sprouts?" asked Charlie the other day.

I jumped. He'd come up behind me in the Great Hall. I was just coming down the stairs, and I think he must have come out of the Meditation Room, but I'm really not sure. All I know is that suddenly he was behind me, speaking.

"I wish you'd stop doing that," I said, and turned to face him.

"If that were true, you wouldn't be learning how to do it, would you?"

"No, I suppose not," I admitted.

He smiled a little and then raised his eyebrows, a question.

"I liked it," I admitted. "Does that make me a voyeur?"

"Depends. Did you get off on your power? Do you enjoy seeing what others would have you not see?"

"No," I told him, after a self-reflective moment. "Did you?"

He chuckled. I should explain, in case you've lost track, that he was referring to my watching the sprouts Samhain--and that while I did tell Kit that I'd done so, and several others heard our conversation, Charlie was on the other side of the fire and talking to someone else at the time. He shouldn't have known about my snooping--unless someone told him, or unless he was conducting his own snooping.

"No, as it happens," he explained. "I wasn't watching, I deduced where you had been and why when you arrived at the campfire late. I do not, generally, get a kick out of spying--but enjoying violation is not necessarily evil. You're a human being, and you have the ability, sometimes the responsibility, to choose based on something other than liking. Anyway, I don't watch when I can't be seen. If you had half the situational awareness all the time that you now have now, I wouldn't be able to sneak up on you and I wouldn't be able to spy. What leads you to believe the inside of the Mansion is not a good place to have your naturalist hat on?"

My head spun. Charlie doesn't usually talk about "evil," not named so directly, anyway, and then to pivot into criticizing my situational awareness?

"When do you daydream?" I asked. I think I sounded a little resentful. I rubbed my head, as if it really had spun, somehow.

"Hardly ever," he answered. "Why should I? Real life is fantastic enough. I don't need an escape. Creative, unstructured thought is another matter, though."

"I don't understand."

"You will," he told me, "when you get there. Now, you wanted to know about next year?"

"This is you finding me, then?" I asked, since he'd said on Samhain he'd find me so we could talk.

"I'm here, aren't I? And so are you. So, I found you. What do you want to know?"

"Well, how do I do this? If next year is to be my last one as a student, what must I do this winter to make that happen?"

"Do you think this will be your last one?"

"Yes, I guess, yes?"

"You guess?"

"Yes. I mean, it feels like it should be, but nobody's said anything to me."

"And nobody will. Mastery is a role you apply for when you're ready. You have to decide when you're ready."

I looked at him. He looked back at me.

"How do I know?" I cried, a little desperate. "Or do I have to just know that, too?"

After years of being pushed around, manipulated--with my active permission, but manipulated nonetheless--by Charlie and the others telling me to do things and never telling me why, and now all of a sudden they weren't going to tell me anything at all?

Charlie half-smiled at me, a knowing look, and I had a flash of weird compassion for the man. I could see, equally and wholly, my own position as a frustrated and somewhat confused student, and his position, a teacher trying to push and guide another through a difficult, sometimes painful process, without ever being sure he was saying or doing the right thing. Being able to appreciate his perspective did nothing to illuminate mine.

And when we started the conversation, I thought my question was going to have a straight-forward answer.

"You know more than you think you do," he told me. "You're Steve Bees' master now in all but name. You know how to do this. If you were your own master, what would you tell yourself?"

"Is this how it's going to be, now?" I asked. "I just have to figure out everything myself?"

"No," he told me. "You just have to take yourself as far as you can. Then I'll help you when you get stuck. Write yourself a plan for the next year, your last one. Give it to me, and if I see anything you need to add or subtract, I'll let you know." And he clapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way.

"How do I do that? Tell Sharon?"

"You got it."

And the wood stove, which we had just lit for the first time this morning, ticked slowly as it cooled.  In the forest, the corner of it I could see out the window, through a screen of dirty-looking cold rain, the last of the season's falling leaves loomed a dull, almost transparent orange.

Mastery Year 2: Part 7: Samhain

Nothing is certain but death and taxes, they say, and even death, it seems, is variable.

This year, they've added marigolds to the Samhain decorations.

Marigolds are those orange and yellow flowers that do well in late fall--they're also a big part of Dia del Muerte, which yearlings often think we celebrate around here, but we don't.

The issue is that Dia del Muerte is the Mexican Day of the Dead, not the neopagan one, and the difference matters for questions of cultural ownership. Like most things, this didn't make sense to me at first, but Steve Bees has explained it several times and I might be beginning to understand. It's not that we can't do anything that wasn't done by our own ancestors, it's that we can't take anything that wasn't given to us--and Dia del Muerte hasn't been given to us. We wouldn't know how to do it right.

It hasn't been given to us because nobody of Mexican cultural heritage has come here to give it. No one? I don't know if that's literally true, that NO ONE from that culture has ever been a student here. It seems hard to believe. I mean, the United States has a sizable Mexican-American population. But it's true that very few of them come here. It's odd, and it's another thing I didn't used to think about--if we're as welcoming and open-minded as we like to think we are around here, why are we so consistently white?

In any case, no, we don't celebrate Dia del Muerte. We celebrate our own Day of the Dead. And yet this year we had marigolds.

Marigolds in little pots on the tables of the Dining Hall, marigolds decorating the displays and alters of the Great Hall, and finally marigold petals sprinkled over the little wooden bowls lining the walkways of campus on Samhain Night, each bowl filled with water and a little floating candle, and the whole campus lit up like stars.

Another year over, a few more lives done. Hats off to dead folks, as we sing every year in the candle-lit Chapel, smelling of bees' wax and autumn leaves.

At the end of a ceremony, as I've said, the masters leave, abruptly, if necessary in the middle of a sentence, and while they all attend the reception out by the bonfire with us, they do not appear as masters again until Brigid. At least not officially. I caught Charlie in that gap, after they came down off the stage but before they vanished, and asked him whether next year was likely to be my last as a candidate and whether I needed to do anything over the winter about it.

"Cutting it a little tight, aren't you Daniel?" he asked me, with a half-smile.

"I'm not used to having this question," I admitted.

"We'll talk later," he told me. "I'll find you." And then the bells rang and he left.

But before they rang, Allen found me. He was evidently looking for me, and on finding me he grasped my shoulder and fixed me with a knowing look. Then he smiled and turned away, off to find somebody else at the last moment, perhaps.

Then we all streamed out, on our way to the bonfire, and I dropped back a little, stepped off to the side, and vanished. I can't quite go invisible as well as Allen can, but I'm working on it. If I'm outdoors, especially in poor light, I can generally place myself where others do not look, and I decided I wanted to watch the sprouts in their annual abduction--they take an adult, usually one of the masters, though anybody but a yearling will do, and hold the unfortunate for ransom, paid in candy and expanded privileges. Here trick-or-treat is rather more like trick-and-treat. They took me once, but it was kind of hard to figure out what was going on as the victim of the procedure.

So I stepped off to the side, and with my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see bodies, large and small, moving along, outlined by flickers of light from the distant bonfire and the occasional flare of a flashlight. As the crowd pouring from Chapel Hall stretched out, I saw the smallest bodies move in and cluster. I expected to see somebody go down in the middle of the cluster. I didn't.

Instead I heard a whisper, though I could not make out the words and decided to move nearer. I learned later that the whispering voice said "Mr. Greg, don't talk, we've caught you."

After the rest of the crowd had walked on by, the children spread out something on the ground and asked Greg to sit down on it.

"You bandits are seldom so considerate. To what do I owe this unaccustomed courtesy?" Greg asked, almost whispering himself.

"It's 'cause you're old, now," said a very young sprout. "We don't want to break you by accident."

"Little ghoul, I've been old since before you were born," he said, sounding both stern and amused.

"Yeah, but now you're older," said one of the others. "Please, no more talking. We've kidnapped you."

And they tied his hands and feet, laid him down, and did something else to him that I couldn't see. When one of them ran off to negotiate, I worked my way around back to the fire.

"Oh, Daniel, I thought they'd taken you," said Kit, quietly. "You haven't escaped, have you?"

Escaping would be bad form.

"They didn't take me, I spied on them," I explained.

"Ah. What did you see?"

"I won't tell, spy on them yourself next time," I said.

And then the sprout appeared, costumed as some sort of animal, and announced they'd taken Greg, so we all did our part begging and pleading for his return and then finally negotiated and agreed to pay the ransom. When they carried Greg out I saw they had not only carried him in an old hammock, because they had bound his feet, they'd also wrapped him in an old blanket and tied him in there. They had drawn all sorts of things on that blanket with a red marker, making their victim look ridiculous, as they normally do, and added a few leaves for decoration. We had to un-tie him.

"Why the blanket?" asked Charlie.

"They didn't want me to get cold," said Greg. "Didn't June complain of being cold last year?"

"Well aren't you getting special treatment?"

"It's because they think I'm old."

"You are old."

"They are intelligent children."

So we had fun eating and drinking around the fire for the rest of the evening, a big group of us, nearly two hundred strong, counting everybody on campus and several visitors and allies who had come in for the occasion.

Towards the end, Allen found me again.

"Did you appreciate my goodbye?" He asked. I had. Very much.

"I thought that's what you might be doing," I said.

"Given that we're talking now," he said, "what of me did you say goodbye to? Are you sure you're ready to be only my friend and not also my student?"

And, you know, he's right.