"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.
No comments:
Post a Comment