Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 2: New Years

When I think of New Years' and school, I always think of that giant parade we had in the snow, it seems so inherently like us to do something like that. But it's only happened once, that I know of. This year, I won't even be on campus for New Years--I wasn't for Christmas. I was with June's family, missing my family and school, because the alternative would have been for her to miss hers, and she did that already at Thanksgiving.


June's family doesn't quite celebrate Christmas, which sometimes makes me wonder why we can't spend Christmas with my family (who do) instead, but I can see why she doesn't want to miss her non-Christmas, either. It's this low-key, unofficial, non-religious day with a big, yummy breakfast and everyone getting and giving little stocking-stuffer type things with everyone else. It's lovely. It's family time. And I seem to be welcome. I could see learning to miss this myself, if one year I couldn't go.

Is this what growing older is just like? The more people and places you connect with, the more you wish you were somewhere else no matter where you are?

June's family was similarly low-key about New Years last year--we all just stayed up to toast at midnight with Champagne  in nice glasses, then we went to bed--but I hear they're planning a party this year. I'm looking forward to it.

And I'm thinking about things on campus, about the party they're gearing up for, and about which of my friends will be on campus then and which will not.

I'm thinking about something Allen said to me the other day.

June and I were on campus for Yule, of course, before leaving for a week and a half with her parents (including travel time--it's a long way), and in the evening, before the masters withdrew again to wherever it is they go outside of the school year, I asked Allen something about whether he was going to Charlie's for Christmas. And, I guess, there was an edge to it when I said it. I didn't mean there to be.

The thing is that I've always wanted to be part of what these people have, and there's a sense in which I always feel excluded. There are things students aren't allowed to join, there is Charlie being prickly and growling to keep others--sometimes me--and there is the fact I'm just not as close to them as they are to each other. I'm not really being excluded or rejected, but somehow it just feels like I am. Allen would say I'm being emotionally needy. And sometimes it shows.

And Allen can always tell.

I said whatever I said and he grinned at me fondly.

"I'm always amused," he said, "That you yearn so deeply for that which you already have."

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 1: Yule

Merry belated Yule!

Last year the weather was awful, to the point that we couldn't go up the mountain to watch the sunrise. This year, the weather made up for it (not that Charlie would appreciate such anthropocentrism) and our trip up the mountain was gorgeous--clear and cold under fading stars, and just enough cloud at the horizon to turn red and gorgeous. The was after, of course, we stayed up all night partying in the Great Hall.

And, as per tradition, when we got back after seeing the sun up, we found the Great Hall transformed by the Sprouts, who had appeared from seemingly out of nowhere (they'd been up in the master's dorm all night having a separate party with the masters), putting out gift bags for everyone for us to run around and find and all the fixings for a lovely breakfast. Then we sat around for most of the rest of the day eating, drinking hot cocoa, and playing with our new toys--yes, toys. Mostly stocking-stuffer type things--Rubix cubes, playing cards, novelty socks, candy, slide whistles, and so on. They weren't random, each of us got things we actually liked. Among other things, I got a new mini tape measure, because my old one I use for plant ID has started to lose its paint. June got a second-hand deck of Goddess cards.

Also, we sat around taking naps. I think most of us crashed out on the floor for at least a few hours. A few people went upstairs to bed. Greg zonked out sitting up on the sofa with a cheap Santa Clause hat pulled down over his eyes. I sat with him for a while, him sleeping, me sitting there staring into a mug of hot cocoa, wondering if I'd be asleep soon, too. I was sitting there when Greg woke up.

He gave a start, though I can't think why--there was no particular noise to wake him or anything like that--pulled the hat off his eyes, and looked around in a rather confused way for a few seconds, then realized where he was, I guess, and smiled.

"Um, good morning, Daniel," he said. "What time is it?"

"Around 11:30, I think?"

He nodded, still putting himself together.

"It feels later," he said.

"Greg? People don't nap this much after Litha, do they? I never really thought about it before." Litha, you may remember, is the summer solstice, another occasion we mark with an all-night party. Greg shrugged.

"I don't think as many people stay up," he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose behind his glasses. "The summer dance is spread out across the campus, so it's harder to notice if someone drops out to sleep. And we don't really spend the next day together in the same way, so again who is doing what is less obvious."

"I'm sorry, Greg. I shouldn't be questioning you, you're asleep."

"No, no, it's OK. You can question me while I'm asleep." And he sat back on the couch again and closed his eyes. I thought he was indeed asleep again until he opened one eye quite suddenly and looked at me. "I don't promise to answer, though," he said. And then the eye closed and I think he was indeed asleep again soon.

I got up again and wandered around with my hot cocoa until I found June at the Yule tree looking intently at one of the glass bird ornaments.

"They really should put a warning on the hot pepper candies," she said, without looking up at me.

"Fire and sweetness," I said, "the themes of the holiday. The day itself is a warning."

"My mouth sympathizes with Icarus." Icarus flew too close to the sun, remember.

"Want me to kiss it better?" I offered.

"No, and you don't want to, either. Your mouth would end up hurting. You can find me some alcohol to cut the heat, though."

"I actually can," I said, and went off to beg a shot from a novice who had brought a flask. Later, June and I sat at a little table looking out together.

"What are we going to do next year?" I asked.

"Anything we want to," June hazarded.

"I mean about Yule. You remember celebrating it with me before I got back here? No, you don't, because we didn't. Because I always forgot, every single year I was away from this place. And I missed it so much. I missed Yule. It's just hard to do without the community."

"We could visit campus for Yule," she pointed out.

"That's not really my point. Anyway, if we don't come here for Yule, we'll be able to visit your family for Christmas. And if we do come here for Yule, how will we remember to prepare for it and set aside time for it if we're not on campus in the run-up to it? It's like...neither of us celebrated Yule before we came here, and I didn't celebrate it when I left. How do we take what we learned here and bring it with us? I want to stay involved with the community, I don't want to be dependent on it. I don't want to feel institutionalized." I have no idea where any of this was coming from. My feelings about getting my green ring, something I've been thinking a lot about lately, are complex.

"Coming here wasn't my first time celebrating Yule," June said, still looking outside through the big window.

"Oh?"

"It was the first time I'd done a big production of it, but there was this time--I was in grad school, the year before you got there, and I was just seriously overworked, exhausted all the time, and a bunch of self-doubt started coming up, and it was just bad. So I did a couple of therapy sessions, you know, with the psych students?" Our grad school also had a psychology department and lots of student therapists looking for practice. "Well, this one day, everything was just going wrong. My car broke down, but I had to get to campus because I was supposed to have a meeting with my study group from some class, so I biked it, but it was raining, one of those long, slow, cold rains, you know? and I get there soaked to the skin and freezing, except my study group isn't there because I'd written down the date wrong or something, and then I try to go to the store to pick up some things, except I discover I'd lost my wallet, so I went back to campus to look for my wallet, maybe it fell out of my bag when I was looking for my notes on the meeting, and I spent so long looking for my damn wallet that by the time I remembered I had therapy that day my session was half-over, which was just awful, because I really needed some therapy, and--"

And I had no idea where this long and grammatically inconsistent tale of woe was going or what it had to do with Yule, but June usually does have a point when she talks, so I waited and listened and tried to keep track of all the twists and turns of the plot.

"So I finally get into therapy, find my therapist still waiting for me, hasn't cancelled or anything, and I just fall into her arms blathering and sobbing about everything that's going wrong. And after listening to me go on for a while and letting me calm down, she said 'There's a reason why today is the worst day of the year.' And I say 'what's that?' and she said 'Because it's the shortest.' And so we talked about what that meant for a few minutes and she takes me through this little ritual thing and I start to feel a little better. She offered to give me and my bike a ride home. I accepted--I was still cold and wet--and on our way out I found the rain had turned to snow."

I said nothing. I understood her, but I couldn't think of anything that needed saying. I took her hand and thought about things. I wasn't worried as much anymore.

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 7

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

I sometimes struggle with what to write in these interludes because I have no particular news to report, but this time I have the opposite problem--I have news, BIG news, only I'm not going to tell you what it is, not yet. I will tell you eventually, probably in February.

I do have a major housekeeping note; this will be my last interlude as such. It's been planned that way for a while now, but the actual fact of it has crept up on my and I've only just now realized that's what this is. Bittersweet, isn't it?

My story proper ends on Brigit, this coming Brigid, so I won't do a pre-Brigid interlude. But Brigid will not be my last post--I'm going to do an epilogue because I want to tell the story of what happened in our community between my earning my ring and the beginning of this blog, plus there's this news I've been alluding to. Because I was not in constant contact with the school during those years, the journalistic format I've been using won't make sense. Instead, I'll simply take several posts--probably three or four--to tell you what happened. And that will wrap up the blog.

It will not wrap up the entire project. The blog will remain where it is so anyone may read it, in whole or in part, and links will still be posted to social media so new people will find out about the story and come read.

I am also seriously considering reformatting the entire thing as a book, in which case I'll use this blog to help publicize the book once it approaches publication. We'll see.

So, it's been a long, strange trip, and it's not over yet. Thank you for taking it with me.

-best, Daniel

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 6: Kris Kringle

The winter holiday season is in full swing, now. The Great Hall, as always, looks lovely.

By “winter holiday” of course I mostly mean Yule, that being the focus around here, but Christmas—or at least its penumbra (or would that be “corona,” given that Christmas is bright?)--is unavoidable, and then there’s Hanukkah and New Years and Orthodox Christmas and at least a nod to Kwanzaa (though I’ve never known anyone who actually celebrates it) and Zappadan (in honor of Frank Zappa) and so on and on. It all becomes a big, sparkly muddle of good food and music.

There are a couple of major events here on campus that characterize the holiday season, and two of them have happened already.

One is the first and last year party, for yearlings and graduating students and whichever of the masters who want to show up. It’s usually held sometime in November, though occasionally it’s earlier. It’s semi-secret in that nobody but the first- and last-year students (and the masters) seem to know about it—nobody ever says it’s secret, but nobody talks about it, either, and it seems to happen when nobody else is looking. Both years I was a novice but not invited it happened without my knowing at all, and even as a candidate I proved oblivious to it once.

This past year I spent time asking questions about how and why the school runs as it does, and I finally learned that the reason for the secrecy is pretty prosaic; the organizers simply try to keep the party out of the way of those who are not invited, and to avoid drawing attention to a party not everyone can attend. As to the how, Sharon quietly taps a graduating student who is good at organizing things. Of course, the party is a good deal better hidden than that, but people do have to be mysterious around here….

Now that I know how it works, I found it curiously easy to see the party. I didn’t attend (I don’t remember candidates attending either year I went), but it was just as obvious as any other large event one’s housemates might throw.

The other event is decorating the Great Hall.

The Great Hall is always decorated for the nearest holiday, except for Brigid, when the lack of special ornament is itself a decoration, but usually the transitions are gradual and accomplished with no special drama by the landscaping group and the janitorial group. Yule is an exception in that the transition from Samhain to Yule decoration is accomplished in a single night while all but a group of volunteers (who are never yearlings) sleep. Everybody else wakes up to find the place decked with holy and whatever else as if by elves.

I was such an elf three out of my four years as a novice, and loved it. For the past two years, though, I’ve been more or less preoccupied with my wife. I’m not complaining—her first year, my job was to distract her so her observant nature would not spoil the surprise, and I distracted her quite well. Last year, she wanted to continue the tradition. This year, I wanted to be an elf, though, and I wasn’t sure how to ask without seeming, well, unappreciative. Finally I just had bite the bullet and said it; can we please help decorate the Great Hall instead of going to bed this year? June found my awkwardness amusing, as she always does, and when she stopped laughing at me she said sure.

And so we were elves. With Charlie and Karen and a dozen or so students we wove and hung garlands and wreaths of cut evergreens interspersed with sprigs of winterberry holly. We filled the room with candles in ornate silver holders and little cut-crystal bowls of candy and fruit. And we put up the tree and decorated it with strings of white lights, tiny silver mirrors and little prisms, long ribbons of cream-colored satin edged in gold, strings of bright-red cranberries, glass balls of red, orange, and gold, and a flock of tiny, blown-glass birds in fantastic shapes and colors. On the top we placed a fairy doll with long, golden hair, a red, green, and silver-blue dress, and large, dragonfly-like wings.

The next morning, the novices were all suitably amazed. The morning sunlight glittered in the tree and the candle sticks and the candy bowls, and the dark evergreen foliage lent the whole place a mysterious, woodsy feel. With breakfast we had hot cocoa and complicated coffee drinks with cream and sugar and all sorts of flavorings and we sat around and admired the place. And then we all went about our day.

That night, after everyone else had retreated to their dorms or wherever else they went, June and I, Steve Bees and his wife, Sarah, and the two Joes collected in the Great Hall to admire the tree—the room was dark except for the tree lights.

I haven’t talked about the Joes in a long time. They’re a male couple, both named Joe. The shorter of the two, Security Joe, used to be the head of our security team around here before he retired. Cuppa Joe is like Sarah in that he was never a student here but lives on campus as the spouse of a community member. Security Joe is very stern, very gruff, very much on his professional dignity, but every so often he makes an exception, and he made one now by sitting curled up in his husband’s lap.

“You know who we don’t talk about enough?” he announced after a few minutes of silence. “Kris Kringle.”

“You mean Santa Clause?” asked Cuppa Joe.

“Maybe. I mean from Miracle on 34^th Street.”

“You mean the one who’s a little older than his teeth?” said Steve.

“I love that movie!” exclaimed Sarah.

“Isn’t everybody older than their teeth?” asked June.

“Not if they’ve always been toothless,” I said. “Like an anteater. Don’t anteaters not have teeth?”

“Only you would wonder about that,” said Steve, though I don’t think he’s right.

“Why do you want to talk about Kris Kringle?” asked Cuppa Joe.

“Because he’s so thoroughly magical! Like the kind of magic we do around here. Where does he ever, in the movie, do anything that can’t really be done? He doesn’t. When does he even give anyone a physical gift? He doesn’t. He’s an old guy living in a nursing home, he doesn’t have any money, he can’t buy a whole bunch of stuff. All the Christmas gifts happen in that movie are other people giving each other stuff because he somehow manipulates them into it—and not in a bad way. People just get more generous when he’s around. He's in exactly the right place at the right time to make a difference. And that's what we do, here."

The thing is, he's right.

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 5: Thanksgiving

Happy (Belated) Thanksgiving.

As per our usual, we went to my parents' house. We'll go to June's parents for Christmas and New Years, she got enough time off for that. I've always kind of wanted to stay on campus for Thanksgiving, just to see what it's like (I understand that, as with Christmas, there's nothing formal planned, but sometimes there are informal gatherings), but it appears that won't happen. Every year when I have the choice, I choose to do something else.

My brother and his wife and kids came too, and all the various aunts and uncles, and all in all it was a fairly mundane good time. Nobody comments on my weird school anymore--in fact, I'm not sure my aunts and uncles know I'm still a student, since I'm not in a degree program anymore. When they ask what I'm up to, I explain I'm working part-time for a landscaping company while teaching a few courses as an adjunct at my old school. It's not un-true, and while it's not the whole and complete truth, it gives them a more accurate picture than the complete truth would. I've gotten much better, more graceful at explaining myself, just as Allen said I would. My immediate family knows the whole picture, and they've gotten pretty graceful about it, too.

So we ate and played and cooked and cleaned (not in that order), and not much that's specifically memorable happened.

Except.

Towards the end of the evening, after the aunts and uncles left (I mean the older aunts and uncles; June and I and Cecilly were all still present) and before the dishes and such started, the kids talked us all into playing hide and seek. Not that I needed much persuasion; I always liked hide and seek as a kid, and the only reason I don't enjoy it more now is that I've gotten so tall that it's hard to fit myself into any decent hiding space.

Anyway, I ended up seeking the first round, so I didn't need to hide anywhere. I expected to find my brother first, because he's bigger than I am and has the same problem but worse. Instead, I found him next-to-last. Where was he?

He was standing in a corner on a bucket facing the wall. I'd walked right by him dozens of times.

I've gotten fairly used to feeling stupid over my obliviousness at school, but I hadn't thought it would follow me home. I thought I was on vacation from that particular kind of mortification. I'd thought wrong.

Curiously, one of my nephews tried a very similar trick, standing still in a corner behind a bookshelf. He hadn't known where his dad was hiding, so I guess maybe it's genetic? But I found the kid instantly upon walking into the room where he was.

What was the man doing that the boy wasn't?

Answer; my brother wasn't behind anything. He was in a place where it was literally impossible to hide, and so I hadn't bothered to look there. That is, he was using Charlie's trick of being where nobody was looking, but he was doing it in a circumstance-specific way. Had I not been looking for anyone, and therefore focused narrowly on the kinds of places where it is possible to hide, I would have seen my brother.

Hmmmm.

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 4: Observation

I'm getting pretty good at seeing Charlie's absence.

As you may recall, I am somewhat belatedly attempting to meet Charlie's challenge--to learn how to see him even when he's made himself hard to see, and to make myself hard enough to see that I can sneak up on him and surprise him.

A tall order. Charlie's version of invisibility depends on quietly occupying space where people don't look. I've learned to do it myself, to some extent, and I know the technique can be defeated simply by being more aware--looking in the places where others don't. The problem is that Charlie is already aware of pretty much everything that happens around him. He doesn't have any obliviousness to take advantage of--and he's got to be watching for me especially, since he knows I'll be trying to sneak up on him.

I've divided the project into several stages.

First, learning to see Charlie even when he's hiding--which I've been practicing for about two weeks, now. I'm practicing by looking around for him every few minutes, even when I'm in places where he has no reason to be. I'm just getting myself in the habit of noticing whether he's around. I'm also making a point of noticing other things, glancing around rooms to see if anyone else is in it, whether anything has changed since I last was in there, and so forth. It's easier, I find, to be observant in quick bursts than expecting myself to be Sherlock Holmes Jr all the time. I've made progress here, as I explained last time.

Now, I've also started trying to learn more about Charlie. Does he really have no areas of obliviousness? Suppose his pattern of attention is just different--he looks in different, maybe more, places than other people, but does it follow that he looks everywhere? So where does he look? I've begun watching him.

Finally, I've decided I'm unlikely to be able to sneak up to him in plain view, as he has, until recently, been able to do with me. Instead, I'm going to have be somewhere, probably actually hidden, before he arrives and then emerge. I will have to emerge gradually--he says he never watches people when he isn't in principle visible to them, so part of the game is a kind of fair play; he has to be able to see me, and yet fail to see me, at least briefly before I say BOO.

So, I'm watching, trying to learn not only where Charlie looks and does not look, but also where he goes and when. And I don't want him to know I'm doing any of this, so I have to have plausible excuses for everything I'm doing. I have to seem normal. I have to not only seem to be paying attention to something other than Charlie, I have to actually be doing so, because he'd notice the subterfuge otherwise.

I'm thinking about all those stories where the student tries to fool the master and just can't. There's a scene like that in Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and there's a Zen story from somewhere about a teacher who hits the student every day with a stick until one day the student decides he's had enough and hits his teacher--and the teacher blocks him expertly. Then the real lessons begin. Am I about to be humiliated?

I think not. Because what those stories have in common is that the student has made a fatal error--assuming the teacher is as unskilled and oblivious as the student, or even more so. I know perfectly well Charlie is still miles beyond me. I'm treating him as an adversary of far greater skill who can only be defeated (maybe) if I apply all my skill and care and then some.

I may fail, but I will not be humiliated. I have no hubris to puncture here.

And so here I sit in the cooling dark of the Formal Garden, waiting to see whether Charlie will go in by the secret door, watching the last vestiges of the orange sunset in the extreme west. It was a very pretty sunset. I can hear him coming now, but I will not turn around.

It smells like snow.

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 3: Invisibility

I realized something the other day.

I've completed my list of things to do to earn my ring, and I have Charlie's vote, but there is one thing he ashed me to do that I haven't gotten around to doing--learn how to see him when he's invisible and make myself so invisible that I can sneak up on him. I'd put that rather daunting project off for later and then I'd forgotten about it. And apparently Charlie is fine with me finishing without getting that part done, but I've realized I'm not.

And now is really a better time to do it, since Charlie is invisible far more often at this time of year.

I should point out that Charlie is never literally invisible. He doesn't even get hard to see the way Allen does. Rather, he occupies places where they eye simply does not look. He takes advantage of other people's obliviousness in order to find his privacy. That's why he's "invisible" more at this time of year--he's not available to students, and while he continues living on campus, he tries not to attract the notice of the students who spend the winter here, too.

I already know how to perform the trick myself. I seldom do it deliberately, but I often notice other people when I'm outside being quite and watching things, and they seldom notice me. I've learned to know when I'm hard to see and when I'm not, so that even when invisibility is not my goal (more like a side-effect) I can feel it come over me and know I'll have to de-cloak if I want to be seen--and de-cloak carefully so that I don't startle or frighten anybody.

But I doubt that my version of invisibility will work on Charlie, yet, since the whole point is to take advantage of other people's obliviousness and he doesn't have any, none I've never noticed, anyway.

He says that an advantage of becoming a hunter is that one learns how to think like prey, and prey cannot afford to ever be oblivious.

So I've put that part of it off for a while, and I'm focusing on how to see Charlie, not on how not to be seen by him--and strangely enough, I've done it twice this past week.

I'd asked him, back when he gave me the assignment, how I was supposed to be able to tell the difference between not seeing him because I haven't defeated his invisibility and not seeing him because he's simply not there. He said that if I learn how to tell if he is there, I will also learn how to tell if he's not. Wise words, I've decided.

So I've adopted a practice of, every few minutes, checking to see if Charlie is around. I look for an absence of Charlie, and I do this even in places where he could not possibly be, like in my bedroom or the shower. I'm just getting used to looking for him regularly, noticing whether he is there or not, rather than waiting passively for him to impinge upon my consciousness.

And twice, while I was checking for an absence of Charlie, I spotted his presence instead.

Once, I'm fairly sure he wasn't trying to be invisible at all, he was just walking down the road on campus and I happened to come out of the Meditation Hall and look left and there he was. But the second time he may indeed have been hiding, though not especially from me. He was crouched down behind a shrub at the back of the Mansion, looking at the ground and not moving. That he was wearing his brown school uniform--as he usually does--helped, since the ground was covered by mostly brown fallen leaves, but the main thing is he was where nobody would expect him to be.

I stopped to look at him and he, probably hearing my footsteps on the gravel and hearing my footprints stop, he looked up. We made I contact and I glanced at the ground he'd been watching and then looked at him, curiously. But he held up his finger for silence so I nodded and walked away.

Maybe when I see him next he'll tell me what he was looking at.

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 2: Puppy

Happy Veteran's Day, I suppose.

We don't do anything for Veteran's Day, here, because the school year is over, the masters have retreated away from the school community, and the campus is quiet--as a school, we're not doing anything about anything until Yule. And there's the issue that patriotism itself isn't really much of a thing, here. A lot of the community members are pacifists of one kind or another, and many, whether they believe in violence or not, have little interest in mundane entities such as the United States of America.

But there are community members who have served--there are some serving now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was a non-teaching master named Aurora in the first few years of the school who had retired after a career in the military. I think she did something or other in Korea, not combat, obviously, but something. And of course, Charlie's brother was a veteran. They should be acknowledged, somehow.

I think if Veteran's Day fell inside the school year and not outside it, Greg would do something, give some kind of talk.

Campus is particularly quiet, this year. Pretty much everybody except the yearlings and a few of the candidates are gone already. Chapel Hall is closed for the year, as is the Dining Hall, so the few of us who are left eat in the Great Hall and spend most of our time reading, hiking, or working on whatever catch-up projects we need to for this or that assignment while looking out the windows at the pale gray-brown and often-frozen world. The quiet is both metaphoric and literal.

And yet Eddie has a puppy.

Eddie, you may remember, doesn't have his master's vote to finish yet, despite his intention to receive his ring this coming Brigid. He hasn't asked for the vote because he feels he's not ready--he still hasn't recovered from the death of his dog, Elmo.

Maybe recovery isn't the right word. Integrated? Processed? Because Elmo didn't just die, he was shot by Joy after trying to kill Eddie--a crisis deliberately instigated by the masters, who assigned Eddie the task of training a dog he himself considered untrainable. He was set up to fail, in order to learn whatever he could from failure. And he hasn't learned it yet, so he says. He's stuck, not in grief, but in failure.

I'm unclear whether the masters couldn't offer useful help to Eddie, or of Eddie just didn't ask because he's so stuck, but either way, the school year ended without Eddie having any clear idea how to prepare himself to get his ring when he wants to. Steve asked him about it, and he reportedly shrugged.

"That's that," he said.

That's when Steve called a meeting of the candidate's group. Over the summer we pulled together to figure out how to get Steve and his wife and son out to visit a dying relative--that was the first time we acted as a problem-solving group. This was the second. We discussed how to get Eddie ready to receive his ring.

The thing is, besides Steve, there are four others who plan to finish on Brigid, and we all have our votes. That mean in theory, we should have everything it takes to be masters, including the ability to coach one of our own towards his ring.

Not that any of us had any idea what we are doing, but as Raven said, the actual masters didn't have any idea what they were doing when they started, either. So we gave it a shot.

We sat in a circle in the Great Hall, the eight of us, and talked and listened and threw around ideas, until Raven suggested the thing that clicked for all of us:

Eddie is stuck in the past, therefore he needs something to pull his attention into the present--and he's stuck in pain and therefore needs something to pull him towards joy. A puppy will accomplish both.

So now Eddie is fostering a puppy for one of the rescue centers he's worked with in the past. The pup has some medical needs and won't be up for adoption for a couple of months, so we're hoping Eddie can fall in love with the animal and then let her go on a happy note, and maybe that will help.

Maybe it won't. I'd never really appreciated before how uncertain, how vulnerable, this helping people is. But as Raven said, the actual masters are in the same boat, and what they do usually works out, so we're trying it.

And now Eddie has a puppy.

Mastery Year 3: Part: 7: Samhain

Happy (belated) Samhain.

I always get a case of "the lasts" at this time of year--I get obsessed with the idea that I'm doing or experiencing things for the last time. It's seasonally appropriate, I suppose, and the feeling always eases up a bit after the holiday. I guess I get over my obsession and just get on with the year actually ending. But this year, of course, it was especially bad. If all goes well--and I expect it to--my candidacy is basically over.

I was sitting in the audience, breathing in that old, familiar scent of beeswax, wool, and autumn leaves, thinking about how I'd never be a student sitting in this audience again, because at Brigid I'll be on the stage as a newly-minted master, when I suddenly realized I didn't know the actual procedure. What has to happen between now and February to ensure I am sitting on that stage?

So after the ceremony I found Charlie.

"How does the next few months go?" I asked him. "When do I interview? How will I know? Is there something weird happening before then that I need to be on campus for? I forgot to ask!" I was hurried and breathless because I didn't know exactly when they'd ring the bell, and there's never any guarantee of being able to ask questions like that after the bell rings.

Charlie looked confused for a few seconds and then smiled at me, clearly amused.

"Nothing weird, unless you make it weird yourself. Mind-games are for novices, remember? You'll interview the last week before Brigid--they'll be a schedule, we'll reach out to one of you and let you know.  Then there's a short ceremony earlier on Brigid day. None of it's secret."

"Oh."

"No, it's good you asked. You should have."

"Thanks."

"You're welcs. But Daniel?"

"Yes?"

"You have the votes of everybody on your committee, right?"

"Charlie, I don't know who everyone on my committee is. But...yes."

That earned me a smile.

"Don't take those votes for granted. That interview is not a formality."

"Way to make me anxious, Charlie."

"Hmph. I can't make you feel anything, Daniel. I expect you'll be fine, but you know what expectations are. Complacency teaches you nothing."

Great.

Anyway, the ceremony itself went very well, and since I haven't described it in any detail in a few years, I'd better do it now--meaning this whole post is somewhat inside-out. Ah, well.

Samhain (pronounced "Sah-wen") is a Day or the Dead, related to, but distinct from, both Halloween and Dia Del Muerte. There are many people who celebrate it, and the way we celebrate it on campus is probably a little different than what most people do--though honestly, I wouldn't know. We prepare for it by decorating campus with shocks of corn stalks, bales of straw, pumpkins, squash, and gourds, and, indoors, cut vines of bittersweet and grape, candles, and baskets of apples. And, in a new twist they added last year, pots of marigolds both indoors and out. Anyone who wants to is also welcome to make a poster to memorialize a dead person. Those go up on display in the Chapel several days before the event.

Usually, the 31st, the evening of which is Samhain Eve (these things begin the sunset before, like Jewish holidays) is our last day of classes, but this year it fell on a Saturday. Most of us treated it like a regular Saturday, while the janitorial team set up for the ceremony. Instead of dinner, we all dressed in our uniforms and moseyed on over to Chapel Hall across already frosty ground lit with constellations of candles, each floating in a small bowl of water.

We all found seats in the Chapel, which was lit by dozens and dozens of beeswax candles so that the whole room was dim and honey-colored and warm from the candles and the ceiling was lost in the gloom and might have been a million miles up. My stomach started to grumble; it knows what time dinner normally is and I'd skipped it.

A small bell rang from somewhere and rang again and again and the masters processed in, each carrying a lit candle. Charlie, the current Head of the masters' group, led the procession, though with his hood up I wouldn't have recognized him if I didn't know him as well as I do--the way he walks and the breadth of his shoulders are distinctive.

They climbed onto the stage, which was empty except for the tall candle-holders, deposited their candles, and then all of them except Charlie left the stage and sat in the audience with us. As Head, Charlie was master of ceremonies. He put his hood down and made a kind of semi-formal opening speech, and then he read the names. Some years they get someone other than the Head to do it, but Charlie read them himself, a long list of people who had died and were being honored. Most of the names belonged to people I never met, and while most were community members of one kind or another, but some were simply famous people we like to honor. I noticed Steve's grandfather had joined the list.

They put the list together every year, so if nobody writes a name down it just isn't on there--that's how the list does not get impossibly long with favorite cousins of former students and that sort of thing, but some people go on the list every year, and it is gradually getting longer. This year I noticed Charlie did not read the list of exist species. It appears to have been cut for space.

Then Charlie invited anyone who wanted to to eulogize community members who had died over the past year. There was only one, a former student I never met, and two people stood up at the same time. There was a bit of awkward negotiation with gestures before one sat down and the other said a few words.

Finally, we sang "Hats Off to Dead Folks," our goofy memorial song where anyone who wants to can contribute a verse. I'd expected Kit to lead it, she usually does, but Charlie never introduced her. Instead, he started off by singing a verse about his brother, which surprised me twice--once since he'd obviously, publicly, and apparently pointlessly snubbed Kit (she routinely does so to him, but he tends to act as though he's above whatever goes on between them) and another time because Mario has been dead a couple of years, now, and Charlie has not sung for him publicly before.

The song is goofy and light-hearted, but Eddie's voice still broke when he sang a verse for his dog. I sat a few rows behind him and saw hands reach up to him, almost literally supporting him as he sang. Steve sung a verse for his grandfather--and Sarah, Steve's wife, surprised us all by singing her own different verse for the same man. I suppose that's allowed--we allowed it, anyway--but I've never seen it done before. I didn't know any of the other people who got verses and I didn't sing one myself.

Then we all milled around for a while, leaving the ritual seemingly unfinished, until the bells rung and the masters suddenly absented themselves, some of thm leaving mid-sense, as they do. There is, after all, a sharpness, a suddenness to loss, however expected, that cannot be made goofy and must be acknowledged.

We all streamed out of the Chapel and out towards the fire pit where food and drink awaited us. And we old hands dropped towards the rear of the crowd, unobtrusively forcing the yearlings to the front so they wouldn't try to stop the abduction of one community member by a pack of masked miscreants--the sprouts and their friends, of course. Yearlings never know about the tradition until they see it done.

It was Alexis, Allen's youngest, who came to demand ransom for the prisoner--Ebony, as it turned out.

Predictably, everyone made a big show of weeping and wailing and pleading for her return, but Alexis, whom we were not supposed to recognize under her costume, held firm. Finally, Kit regretfully asked what the hostage-takers wanted. Normally some haggling follows over how much candy and so forth the kids will get, but I stood up and said NO in a loud voice.

"What?" said kit, momentarily startled.

"No," I repeated. "We can't give in to terrorists! Come on, I can't believe you people are even considering it! You know how this works--if we pay one ransom, none of us will be safe!"

A short pause, then, as the others came up to speed, a vociferous argument broke out, some of us in favor of paying, others joining my side of it. Alexis stood there, obviously unsure of what to do. Gradually, more and more people came over to my side until, with a nervous glance at each other at our temerity, we made a united front ant told the bandits they could do their worst--we wouldn't pay.

"NO!" cried another voice, this time June's.

We turned to look at her and found her standing, gun-shaped stick in hand, covering us all with a kind of unhinged nervousness.

"No," she said again. "We're paying, I don't care.I'll pay myself, if I have to. I'll, I'll, I'll shoot anyone who gets in my way."

"June," I cried, aghast, staring down the barrel of my wife's imaginary gun, "why?"

"Because, because--I'm in love with her!" She said this with enough melodrama for three day-time-TV stars, and someone sang "dun-dun-dun!" in approximation of suitable music.

Of course, June's elaboration blew our negotiating power to hell, and the sprouts ended up with more candy and other goodies than I think they've ever gotten before. Ebony was returned unharmed, and I was pleased to see they'd blindfolded her just like they would have any other abductee.  She doesn't like special treatment.

"I'd always wondered what being abducted felt like," she said, quite merrily, once we'd gotten her freed from her restraints. She disappeared into a knot of well-wishers bearing warm drinks.

"Well," said Kit to me in mock anger, once the others were too far away, up near the fire, to pay attention. "I hope you're satisfied. Next year they'll expect twice as much."

"What?" I replied, all innocence. "If I'm going to be a master soon, I figured I'd better start acting it and try changing something.

Mastery Year 3: Sixth Interlude

Hello, Daniel-of-2019, here.

It's been a warm, mostly dry fall--climate change becoming ever more obvious, more ominous--except the day-to-day realities of our lives here are going well. After months of relapse and hit-or-miss treatment, Sarah Kelly's mental health seems that have stabilized again, a great relief. It's as though everyone can finally breathe again. We've also gotten some very good news that I'm not going to tell you about quite yet, but I will tell you.

My story is drawing to a close; we've entered the realm of Lasts, last Samhain post, last Yule post, and so on. I will take my narrative up to the point where I received my green ring, and then there will be a few more posts to catch you up on some of the things that have happened since. Then I will fall silent--except that I may set about recasting my story in book form.

I'm kind of sad--I've been working on this blog for the better part of a decade, now, and it's been an important decade for me. My daughter's birth, for one. The re-emergence of the school as a community, for another. But all things end.

All things end. That is the message of Samhain, I suppose, for while endings are followed by, and to some extent cause or allow, beginnings, there is a point in time where the bereft doesn't want to hear that, where hope and comfort and it's-all-for-the-best just sound like meaningless platitudes. My Dad would say Good Friday must have its due, before you can get to Easter. Charlie would say be here now.

I'm going to keep this note short. I'm preoccupied with endings and losses today, and yet I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of autumn, which has finally peaked this past week. "We are the flowers' threnody," a line of poetry I remember from somewhere, based on the mistaken notion that flowers die upon being visited by bees (the truth is more complicated), and evoking the idea that the bees are simultaneously the cause of and the beautiful mourning for the death of the flowers, as though beauty could in fact be both. The yellow and orange leaves are the year's threnody.

Be here now.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 6: Post 4: Trust

So, I finally asked Charlie--for his vote to graduate, I mean.

Putting it off wasn't entirely emotional, I should explain. Yes, I was dragging  my feet because I don't want to face my studenthood actually being over, but I had a few things to wrap up, too. There was the poetry book, for one thing. Charlie and I finally finalized the content--which poems, and which versions of the poems to include--about two months ago. It's 365 Elizabethan sonnets, all about a single spot in the woods near campus, roughly organized to depict a full year (although I actually wrote them over the course of more than two years), plus eight pen and ink illustrations and a full-color cover illustration that I also did. I've spent the last two months in a publication process, of sorts, and I've just this week finished.

Charlie and I had discussed my options, whether I ought to seek a traditional publisher, self-publish, or what. Finally Charlie advised me to not only self-publish, but to format and bind the book myself, and not put a lot of energy into selling it. Reason being, he says poetry is difficult to sell, and since the point of the project was art, not business, I could get more out of learning formatting and binding than by struggling through trying to sell my book to a publisher. I can always attempt formal publication later.

So, now I've made eight hand-bound copies, one for each of the Six, one for the school library, and one for me. I've always kind of wondered how the masters get such nice stuff--their furniture, I remember from my days on the janitorial team, is a collection of artwork--and I guess this is part of why; people, mostly students, give them things. I have no immediate plans to have it professionally printed, but I have started posting poems on social media and sharing the poems at local poetry readings off-campus. And I plan to submit individual poems to literary journals and see how that goes.

Then there's my project studying the school itself, find out how it runs, who does what, and what the school looks like to people who aren't here. I just finished the last of the interviews I wanted to do last week and I'm in the process of formatting my report . When I'm done, I'll print and bind a copy for the school library of that too. It's been a fascinating project--no big surprises, but a lot of little ones. Turns out, the school requires the labor of at least three times as many people as I'd thought it did, most of them allies working for free part-time. The whole thing is also a lot more prosaic and ad-hoc than I'd thought. This place is not run by mysteriously well-organized elves but by human beings who are mostly barely organized at all--that it works, and has worked consistently now for almost thirty years, is magic, but not the same kind as I'd expected.

And finally there's the issue of how all this fits into some kind of...I guess you could call it a ministry, if I don't get hired by the school, which logic suggests I probably won't, given that there aren't any anticipated openings and there about 75 qualified applicants in line ahead of me anyway. This one was hard. I mean, on some level, I've bee feeling and thinking and acting as though I will be hired, and so has everyone else. But what if I'm not?

I have several sources of income lined up, but they're not thematically related--they don't form a whole. They don't even form a career.

Finally, I admitted that my ministry is here. My mastery is here. Whatever magic I possess consists of my willingness and ability to serve a community--this community--in whatever capacity they need me.

So, this morning I said all this to Charlie. I got a bit long-winded, I think, and I started repeating myself. Finally, Charlie interrupted me.

"Daniel, I believe you have a question for me?"

And so I said it.

"Charlie, do I have your approval to get my green ring?"

"Yes," he said. "Because you have yours. I have come to trust you, Daniel."

And I felt like weeping, I really did.

Mastery Year 3: Part 6: Post 3: Magic

"Why do you focus so much on science?" asked Albion, one of the yearlings. I should explain that while Albion is young--mid-twenties--he is well-informed and fiercely intelligent. He already has a bachelor's degree in English literature and half an MBA. He also has a very large number of intricate blue tattoos, lots of "tribal" jewelry, and the hungry look of a devotee. I've heard he is a high priest of something or other.

All this, and he spoke to me with that strange mix of deference and challenge that people around here usually address to the masters when they're being confusing. He didn't address me as "Professor Kretzman," but he might as well.

I considered. If he were going to treat me as a master, I might as well act like one.

"What should I focus on?" I asked.

"Magic, of course," Albion answered. "This is a school for magic."

I mentally grumbled something like don't take my classes if you don't like them, you little twit, but what I said was the deliberately intriguing, and not entirely true, "I don't see how there's a difference."

"What?"

"Well, what's magic?" I asked.

"Causing change in accordance with the will," he replied. It's a standard definition in some circles.

"Like this?" I asked, and picked up a small stick and broke it in half.

"No!"

"Why not?"

"Because everybody knows how to break a stick with their hands," he retorted, though a moment's thought should reveal that's not quite true. I let that point go.

"So you want to cause change by means that not everybody knows about?"

"Yes."

"So, it follows that you want to understand how the universe really works, not just how most people think it works."

"Yes...."

"Congratulations; you want to be a scientist."

"But I want to do things, not just study them!"

"Then you want to be an engineer."

"No, but I...."

"So you don't want to understand the secrets of the universe and cause change using the things you know?"

"Dammit, I don't want to be some intellectual bean-counter, the world is full of wonder! I want to key into that!"

I chuckled.

"If you think scientists aren't aware of wonder, you don't know very much about science," I told him. "Maybe you should take some of my classes?"

And I walked away and left him gaping.

Is this really me? I find myself having these conversations, and to an extent some of them feel artificial, but more and more I'm thinking yes, this really is me.

It's sort of magical.

Mastery Year 3: Part 6: Post 2: Falling

"Are you going to honor Elmo at Samhain?" I asked Eddie. We were taking a walk the other day, between things, roughly following the periphery of the campus. The sugar maples in the avenue along the main entrance are turning, and the trees blazed orange above our heads.

Elmo, you remember, was his dog.

"I don't know," he said, after a bit. "I guess so. I've never heard anyone memorialize an animal, except you with Sanchez."

"You remember!"

Sanchez was the kitten I had when I was a little boy.

"I have a good memory."

"Well, it can't possibly be wrong, even if it's rare, or someone would have said something about it."

"I suppose," Eddie acknowledged. "I guess I will. It just hurts to think about."

"I'm sorry?"

"No, I think about it even when you don't bring it up. It just...it wouldn't be so bad if he were just dead, it's that I can't stop thinking maybe it was my fault."

"Eddie, he would have been put down months earlier at the shelter, if it wasn't for you. You did everything you could."

"Maybe I should have been able to do better."

"You're going to make yourself crazy," I told him.

"I'm already crazy," he said.

We were quiet for a bit.

"I guess it's coming up, though," he said.

"What?"

"Samhain. Whatever I'm going to do, I'd better get ready to do it."

It's true. We're three weeks out, but already the campus is more than half decorated for the holiday, mostly harvest-themed stuff, pumpkins, weirdly-shaped squashes, and decorative gourds, dried shocks of corn stalks....And then there's the Halloween paraphernalia, the bats and witches and arch-backed cats, which have almost nothing to do with Samhain but which a lot of the students, mostly yearlings, enjoy as a kind of camp--it's all through our dorms, even if not elsewhere on campus. In a week or two, Charlie and his team will put up the grape and bittersweet vines in the Mansion, and people will start making the memorial alters.

But....

"I can't believe it's this close," I said.

"Do you have your votes yet?"

"No, not all of them. But I will."

"Who don't you have?"

"Charlie," I admitted.

"Charlie! But he's the main one you need! What's your hold-up?"

I should explain; mastery candidates technically only need the vote of their own master--Charlie, in my case--to finish. It's not like the novices who need the votes of all the masters. But the other requirement for earning the green ring is we have to pass a job interview with a committee made up of some of the masters, and none of us know who our committee will be. So we've all decided it's smart to get the approval of all of the masters, just in case.

"Well, I haven't asked him yet."

"Daniel!"

"I know, I know. I will. I just...can't."

We were quiet for a bit.

"Do you have your votes?" I asked.

"No. I haven't asked. I'm not ready. I think I'll be ready by Brigid, I have three months. If I'm not, well, what's another year?"

"There are times I'm afraid I'll never get out of here," I admitted. "I'll be stuck as a student here forever...institutionalized. And then sometimes I'm afraid I won't be able to stay."

"I know. Me, too."

We were quiet again for a bit. Late-season crickets sang in the grass. The air was cool, the sun getting ready to set. A car sped by on the main road nearby and startled both of us--it seemed like it was from another world.

"So, what's you're hold-up?" I asked.

He shrugged.

"I'm just not happy," he said. "I'm Ed, I'm supposed to be happy." The name, Ed, which in his case is not short for Edward or Edgar, or anything like that, means happy. "But I think I lost something when I lost my dog, and I don't think I'll get it back."

And just at that moment, I kid you not, one of those flame orange leaves fell and it settled in his hair.

Oops

So, the week before last, I posted the wrong post.

The issue is that I often work offline in a Word document, then cut-and-paste into Blogger and delete the document. But since I'm in the habit of deleting after I finish, if for some reason I don't finish, I often don't delete. Two weeks ago I accidentally typed the beginning of the Mabon post into an abandoned draft of the Lammas post. Later, when I went back to finish, I found what looked like a finished post already, and I was in a hurry, so I went ahead and posted it without reading it through.

I skipped posting entirely last week because I kept hoping to come up with some way to avoid posting this apology, but I never did think of anything. So here I am.

Sorry.

Here is the missing Mabon post.

-D.

Happy Mabon!

I don’t feel very celebratory at the moment, but of course that’s no reason not to wish everyone a happy holiday. And maybe it’s appropriate that Mabon feel like a mixed bag, since it is the equinox. No, nothing bad has happened, I’m just feeling glum.

It is Fall, now, though I have to admit it doesn’t yet look like it. The forest is still green, the air is still warm—even hot, some days, though not nearly as hot as a month or two ago. But under the green is a yellow cast, a hint of change, and the birds are heading south—some are staging to migrate, others have already left. As with spring, which is present from the first hint of growth, Fall is present from the first hint of preparation for the cold. I didn’t used to understand this. I see things more deeply now, I suppose.

Every year (except one) that I've been here, the question at Mabon has always been whether to do the Gratitude Circle or the Thankyou Doll build, these being two of the many optional activities of the day that happen to occur at the same time, at least most years. The reason, I've always guessed, is that Kit co-leads the Gratitude Circle and Charlie co-leads the Thankyou Doll build, and Charlie and Kit have a mutual allergy. Something has to be scheduled in conflict, since there are too many events to have them all sequentially, and since Charlie wouldn't attend Kit's event anyway, and Kit wouldn't attend Charlie's scheduling them opposite each other is at least less frustrating for them than if either had to give up attending something they really wanted.

And frankly, I think Kit probably likes the idea of forcing students to pick between her and Charlie.

This year, I chose the Thankyou Doll build. Partly I wanted to hand out with Charlie, and partly it's that I really don't know a lot of the novices anymore, and it seemed like it might be weird to stand in the Gratitude Circle with a bunch of near strangers. Of course, you could argue that's exactly why I should have gone....Maybe it's something Allen said to me a while back, I'm amphibious--I'm mid-way, emotionally and mentally, between being a student and being a master, and while I no longer feel comfortable treating the novices like peers, I don't really know how else to treat them, yet. I feel like a fraud when I act too much like a master, and I don't know what the intermediate thing really is. So I don't talk to a lot of them at all, outside of class. I don't want to stand in the Gratitude Circle with them.

The Thankyou Doll--it's been a while since I explained this. The Doll is made out of produce from our campus farm, and sometimes a few wild plants make an appearance, too. Once assembled, the Doll is taken to the center of the farm and woken up in a simple ceremony; everyone stands around saying wake up! wake up! and such, and then the youngest person present leans down to listen and hear the Doll whisper that it is awake. When it does, the young person says so. I've always wondered what, if anything, these young people hear, but I've never asked any of them.

Then the Doll is taken on a tour of the farm, and all the places where its parts grew are pointed out to it. The Doll later attends the Paleolithic Dinner that night, and everyone in attendance gives the Doll a small something from their own plate. The Doll, and its plate of offerings, sits in state in the Great Hall for some weeks until Charlie and whoever else wants to return it to the center of the farm and bury it with proper ceremony.

It's a fun activity, and a good choice for children, so most of the sprouts usually attend.

This year was no different. We had my nephews and niece and all the sprouts younger than them, including Sean--he's still too young to wander around by himself, but Steve Bees wanted to hang out with Charlie, too.

Sarah brought a huge box full of ingredients and a box of toothpicks and spread everything out on an old sheet on the ground. We built the Doll out of potatoes and turnips and carrots and other items and sat it on a silver tray, all of us working together, sharing ideas, and solving design problems--like what to do when the Doll kept falling over, or how to make facial features that wouldn't fall off or look creepy.

And when we woke the Doll, Sean did the honors. He listened for a long time, and then when his dad asked him "Can you hear the Doll say it's awake?" he nodded. He's at the age where he can talk, but not in front of strangers.

After the tour, when everyone was dispersing, Charlie took me aside and casually asked me what sort of event I might like to run on Mabon.

Of course, Charlie never actually says anything casual. He always has a reason for speaking, because if he doesn't have a good reason, he'd rather listen to birds or wind, or possibly someone reciting poetry. I knew what he was up to--either spurring me to take another step towards thinking like a master, or checking to see whether I had taken the step on my own already. Most of the masters, and some allies, either lead or co-lead something on this day, after all. But not all of them do.

"None," I replied, without hesitation. I'd thought about it already.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Because Mabon isn't missing anything. I could take over an existing event if someone had to, and I'd put my own stamp on it whether I meant to or not, but I don't need to start anything new because nothing new needs to be started. It's complete."

And Charlie grunted and appreciative acknowledgment. He didn't need to say anything else. Neither did I. I learned that by watching him.

Mastery Year 3: Part 6: Mabon

Mabon—the Autumnal Equinox—isn’t for a few more days, but I like to post before the holiday, rather than after, to build anticipation. -D.

Happy Mabon!

I don’t feel very celebratory at the moment, but of course that’s no reason not to wish everyone a happy holiday. And maybe it’s appropriate that Mabon feel like a mixed bag, since it is the equinox. No, nothing bad has happened, I’m just feeling glum.

It is Fall, now, though I have to admit it doesn’t yet look like it. The forest is still green, the air is still warm—even hot, some days, though not nearly as hot as a month or two ago. But under the green is a yellow cast, a hint of change, and the birds are heading south—some are staging to migrate, others have already left. As with spring, which is present from the first hint of growth, Fall is present from the first hint of preparation for the cold. I didn’t used to understand this. I see things more deeply now, I suppose.

The performance art element of our holiday celebration is back, it always has a competitive talent-show aspect to it, and last year, besides the food (there is always some sort of comparative tasting event, plus a fantastic buffet showcasing the campus farm’s produce), the show was all about athletics. This year it’s reverted to art again. I suppose art suits us better, though art can include athletics, and Karen and some of her students did perform several sequences of martial arts forms.

There was also a pie-baking contest—twenty-some pies competed, each one presented along with a small tub of extra filling, for people who wanted to take a little taste of all of them for comparison.

The pies raised an old question—how are things like this contest organized? I hadn’t known there would be a pie contest, there was no announcement, no call for contestants, so how did the actual contestants know to enter? There are always parts of this place I just don’t see, even as there are aspects I do see that hardly anyone else does. I’ve been noticing that for years, and in years past the realization made me feel, first, pleasantly mystified (as when someone does a magic trick I can't figure out) and later awkward, foolish, and excluded. But this year I felt none of those things. I simply asked Sadie, the cook, how the pie-making contest had been organized and how the competitors had known about it.

"They knew about it because they organized it," she explained. "A group of them came to me a week ago and asked if they could use the kitchen and our supplies to make a buncha pies for the feast today. I said yes, and wrote it into the schedules. The staff saw my notes, and half of them wanted in." She shrugged.

I stared at her.

"Is that how it always works?" I asked. "I'm not missing announcements, there just aren't any for these kinds of things, because they're organized by groups of participants from the beginning?"

"Not always, sometimes you are just oblivious," Sadie told me and grinned.

"I'd almost rather be oblivious--the other is so prosaic," I admitted.

"Some magics are," she told me. "And then there's pie. Pie is delicious even if you do know the recipe."

"I suppose." Actually, I agree with her about the pie, I was just lost in thought. I was looking around the event tent at all the people milling around and eating and talking, and I was thinking about how they all knew things I didn't, and how I'd vainly thought I could crack the code if I asked the right person, but now it seemed there was no code to crack. The people who seemed more involved that I got that way, not because they were tapped and I wasn't, and not because they answered some call that I didn't hear, but simply because they took the initiative and I hadn't. I felt left out all over again, and left out by my own fault.

"I think you're closer to solving your problem than you think you are," Sadie told me.

"Huh? What?"

"Your problem. You want to know how this place works, right?" Of course, I had asked her that very question when I interviewed her over the summer. The fact that I've been interviewing people, actively researching how to school works is common knowledge.

"Yes," I said, cautiously.

"So there's a missing piece--these pies, the other contests, things that happen and you can't figure out how, right? So there's a question you're not asking. You already have the answer, you just have to ask the right question."

"Um," I tried to think. "You're gonna have to give me a hint."

"Alright. You know how the pies got made, but have you wondered why there was space on the table for them?"

And all at once I saw why that was, indeed, a puzzle, and in seeing that I solved the puzzle.

"Why was there room? Why is there ever room for all of these ostensibly unscheduled events? How does it all get coordinated?" Because I know in other organizations, too, there are small groups of people having ideas, but those ideas don't become projects central to the functioning of the whole without some kind of process. In any other school, the pie contest would have had to be proposed to and approved by the event director, who would then insist that a general call for submissions go out...here, there was no director and no approval. Things just happen, bubbling up as they will. And it all fits into a coherent pattern. The school works.

"The school works because each of you" I meant the masters "can see a different aspect of the whole, just like I can see some aspects and, I don't know, Eddie, can see other aspects. And you ask each other questions."

"Bingo," said Sadie. "That's what Friday night dinners are for. We get together and share what we know and think and want, and we keep each other on the same page that way. More or less. If there's a conflict, we can deal with it."

"I still feel really dumb," I admitted. "I could have been making all kinds of stuff happen around here, but I just assumed I needed an invitation or something."

"What would you have made happen?"

"I don't know."

"Well, there you go. You have other skills, and you have been using them."

"Speaking of which, don't you have to go to the Mansion, now?" I'd noticed, out of the corner of my eye, as Allen slipped away. Kit and Greg and both Joes had already vanished. Charlie was gathering his things. I knew the masters did something secret in the Mansion on Mabon and that students weren't even supposed to know that the secret existed, let alone what it was. I tipped my hand to Sadie on impulse, just to prove--to her? to myself?--that I wasn't the idiot I felt like. Her eyes widened.

"You're right. I'd better get a move on," she said. But if she farewelled me and got up, other eyes might notice and follow her. I knew that.

"I'm going to get myself some pie," I told her. "You can wander away while I go--eyes will follow me because I'll move first."

"You've been hanging out with Allen," she accused. I shrugged.

"You want some pie?" I said, standing up.

"No, thank you."

I nodded in acknowledgement and walked over to the tables, tripping over a chair as I went, though I didn't fall over or anything dramatic like that. A few people glanced at me. Sadie was gone by the time I turned around, pie in hand.

I wandered around with my pie (which was very good) and ended up settling near Hawk and Eddie. I'd mentioned Eddie earlier because he'd been involved with the Beltane celebrations for several years, without my ever finding out how he'd gotten involved. He must simply have volunteered. His being thus on my mind was part of the reason I moved towards him. The other reason was that Hawk had her hawk with her. She has to bring the animal out among people periodically, or she won't stay completely tame.

I approached and the others acknowledged me, but they were deep in their own conversation and the hawk seemed nervous about my being too close, so I sat some feet away and ate my pie.

"I wish Elmo was here," Eddie was saying. "I was never able to do this with him. He was never as far along as I thought he was." Elmo was the dog Eddie was training, until the animal made a serious attempt to kill him and Joy had to intervene with a gun. Eddie held out his hands and looked at the more accessible of his many scars.

"Do you think you would do anything differently?" asked Hawk, "If you had to do it over again?"

But Eddie just shrugged.

"I would probably get less involved emotionally," he said, after a bit. "But I doubt that would lead to a better outcome. It's just what I would do."

"You've lost a certain innocence," Hawk said.

"Yes. I shouldn't have. It's not like I didn't know some dogs are dangerous."

"But it hadn't happened to you."

"No."

"Before I came out," said Hawk, "there were people I thought loved me unconditionally. Had my back, you know? And they didn't. Now I wonder who else doesn't. Who else will leave me if they find out I'm not the person they thought I was."

"Aren't you?" I suppose Eddie was wondering if Hawk had still more closets to climb out of.

"How they hell should I know? I don't know what other people think. It's having no control that bothers me."

"Thinking I should have control bothers me," said Eddie. I knew Elmo was impossible. I thought I could train him anyway. Isn't that how the story goes?"

And they both shook their heads sadly.

"I don't think either of us are as good at loving as we used to be," said Hawk. "Sometimes I'm trying to teach my bird here to trust and I feel like a total hypocrite. She's sitting here calmly and I bate at every little thing. I have armor, not feathers, anymore." To bate, for a falconer, means to panic and bolt. When a hawk on a short leash does it, the bird ends up hanging upside-down from the leash and flapping helplessly. Panic accomplishes nothing, not even escape. Hawk has explained all this to me.

"Do you suppose we'll ever get better again?" asked Eddie. "Or is this....hardening permanent?"

"I don't know," replied Hawk. "I think if we can forget to protect ourselves, it's possible."

"Tall order," said Eddie.

"I don't know," suggested Hawk, "you were supposed to tame an impossible animal for work in therapy. Ever think you're the animal?"

Mastery Year 3: Fifth Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

Sorry my posting schedule has gone all to hell. The reasons are complex and I'm not going to get into them right now.

I'm also, frankly, struggling with the organization of the whole piece. I mean, I know what happened, but telling a story is never as simple as just saying what happened. In this case, the problem is that my final few months as a student were a weird combination of not much happening and too much happening to write about.

I, personally, continued talking to people, teaching workshops and courses, and generally learning about how the school worked. I achieved no sudden, dramatic breakthroughs. I didn't need any. I was just cleaning up loose ends in my education, and the result was a gradual but thorough deepening in my understanding and confidence, a kind of shift from perceiving the school as something that held me to seeing it as something I could hold. Important to me personally, but it doesn't make a good story.

Steve showed more and more evidence of having internalized being outside as a source of peace and strength, and he developed a better sense of what would come next in his process--work that he would do directly under Greg's supervision, not mine. He gradually graduated from me, which is an important thing for a student to do, but it doesn't make a good story, either.

Ebony was doing a lot of difficult emotional work--the cultural clash she had run into in Absence had been particularly intense and had beaten her up pretty badly, and so she was working on ways to be herself out in the "real world" without letting it get her down. Unfortunately, I spoke with her very rarely that year, and so had only a general and intermittent idea of her progress.

Eddie, having suffered the quite deliberately painful test of being set up to lose one of his dogs, was putting himself back together with the help of the masters, and was starting to see his way to working again, sadder but wiser, as they say. Maybe that would make a good story, but I can't tell it well, because Eddie preferred not to talk to me about his work for those months. He seemed to use me as an opportunity for an emotional break, and he spent our time together mostly telling me about which women he hoped to go to bed with next and why. Eddie never kissed and told, but he had no qualms whatever about discussing anticipation.

Raven G. and I spoke often and developed a friendship we'd never had before, mostly organized around trying to figure out what certain things Charlie said or did meant. He was her teacher, too, and we studied him like a shared religious text--not, you understand, that he was an object of veneration. He was a finger pointing at the moon.

See what I mean? How do I put all this in a meaningful story in blog format? I've been hoping something occurs to me, it usually does, but this time it hasn't.

In other news, we of the present-tense are getting ready to celebrate Mabon in a week and a half and also coordinating our participation in the Climate Strike on the 20th. Maybe I'll see you there.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 6: Labor Day

You know, I've never done a post on Labor Day before. I mean, about Labor Day, I'm aware it isn't Labor Day now.

Of course, there is a good reason; we seldom do much of anything about it. We've never had the day off, for example, though some of the masters usually take the day and leave their classes with substitutes. Joy, for example, does, so she can spend the day with her daughter. A few students who live nearby take the day to visit family, though I never have. There have been years when the Sprouts came on campus for the day, though this year they did not.

And of course usually Greg does one of his history talks. I've never attended it--until this year.

I went because Steve had been seriously considering leading it--he's already teaching History of American Labor Movement, along with all his other history classes, and Greg has been toying with the idea of turning over some of his talks to Steve, too. As Greg explained a while back (though he was actually talking about something else at the time), he wants to get things in order for his eventual full retirement because "it would be amusingly ironic if the campus Buddhist forgot he was going to die eventually."

But be that as it may, Greg decided to keep the talk for himself this year, and after hearing Steve talk about whether he could do the talk and how he could do the talk and whether he even wanted to do the talk, and so on, for the better part of a week, my curiosity was snagged--I had to see this famous talk.

It was interesting, though not surprisingly so in any way. I learned a few new things, but it wasn't mind-blowing for me. I guess you get used to well-delivered history lectures, after a while. We had it outside, on the Central Field, because the weather was nice, not so hot as it was last week--it doesn't look like Fall, yet, but Fall is coming. There weren't even a lot of mosquitoes as it's been pretty dry, lately.

But afterwards, as everyone was getting their things and heading off to do other things, one of the yearlings spoke up, more to herself than to anyone else, but we all heard her:

"Well, at least we did something for Labor Day."

"What more would you rather we have done?" asked Greg.

She turned to him, blushing a little, I think--I guess she was embarrassed that she'd said it aloud? Her words could have been interpreted as critical of Greg and the other masters. After a minute, she got her words together.

"Well, it's Labor Day," she said. "We're supposed to have the day off. To celebrate the American worker."

"And how much did you learn about the labor movement on your days off?" Greg asked.

So I guess we do something for the holiday after all.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 5: Birthdays

My birthday is coming up. I don't have any plans, yet. I suppose I'll let June and some of my friends here take me out to dinner.

I suppose I could make plans myself, ask people to do something, but I don't really want to. For one thing, I'm feeling ambivalent; I generally like parties and so forth, but after having been away from campus for a while and on that damn bus for another three days, I want to rest, socially and spiritually, dig my roots down in the soil and escape to my spot in the woods.

But there's something else, too.

I joined Charlie for lunch the other day, just like when I was a novice. He let me sit with him without comment and I made no comment, either, for a while. Then I spoke.

"Charlie, what do you do on your birthday?"

He shrugged.

"Same thing I do every day, take a walk in the woods."

"Your birthday isn't special?"

He looked up at me. He was sitting on the steps of the Mansion porch, I was half-sitting on the stone railing around the porch.

"Every day is special," he said, "If I walk in the woods." He frowned, looked away, and grumped a bit. "I suppose I'll let friends take me to dinner or something." He sounded extremely unenthused.

"Well, I am your friend," I said, laughing a little, "so I'll give you the present of not asking you to dinner."

"Thank you kindly," he told me, with some grumpy sarcasm in his voice.

"Why am I so persistently drawn to misanthropes?" I asked after a bit. "There's you, there's Rick...My friends just don't like people." Actually, most of my friends do like people. Charlie and Rick are exceptions.

"I'm not going to attempt to explain your proclivities," Charlie told me. But then his expression changed somewhat. "Actually, people generally get me wrong."

"Oh?"

"You want me to tell you a secret, Daniel? I'm not really a misanthrope."

"Oh?"

"The real reason I've given up trying to organize my own birthday parties is I can't find anyone willing to pay enough attention to me. Fox and the grapes, I suppose."

And he returned to eating, evidently uninterested in further conversation.

You think you know someone.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 4: The Other Side of Magic

Steve's grandfather died, as expected. He's sad, of course. We're going to stay here a few more days through the funeral, then go back to campus.

There's no reason for me to be here whatever, except I rode out here with the Kellys in order to help them deal with the stress of travel, and now I'm waiting until it's time to ride back with them. It's an awkward position, as most people here don't really understand who I am or what my role is, given that I never met the deceased and can't quite remember his name (Edwin? Edward? Edgar? Ed-something). I don't really know how to talk to people under these circumstances. But I am here, and here is where I want to be.

I remember how, when I first joined the school, how blown away I was to be given my own little stainless-steel cup. We all got one to carry clipped to our uniform belts in case we got thirsty and wanted a drink in class or something.--we don't used bottled water or disposable cups. Just something about being given my own cup felt very welcoming, very generous. Since then I've seen other, more dramatic, acts of generosity. There was when Andy arrived and the masters got him into treatment for his various ills--a man they didn't even know, yet. There was Kit taking Hawk out clothing shopping, Hawk's first real public appearances as a woman. There was my own wedding, which took over much of campus for the better part of a day and a night, just as if it were a community holiday.

Now, this.

The funny thing is, it doesn't seem extravagantly generous, what I'm doing. It just seems normal. It seems right. Steve and his family needed something, I'm available, so here I am.

The weird thing about magic is it doesn't always feel like magic when you do it.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 3: All Gone to Look for America

Steve's grandfather is dying. Of course he and Sarah and Sean had to go, but it's a long trip, raising the specter of sleep deprivation, challenging childcare, disrupted schedules, and possibly missed medication doses. Sarah's health has seemed a bit vulnerable lately--her doctors want to change her meds but they're not sure yet how--and she was concerned that the trip might trigger a relapse.

For a while she considered just not going, but she's close to the grandfather, too. The candidates' group discussed the matter (it's really the first time we've functioned as a real-world problem-solving body, not a college class) and decided that Sarah should go, but that one of us should go, too. That way, Steve could focus on making sure his wife ate and slept and took her pills on time while someone else entertained Sean and kept the boy fed, hydrated, and in clean diapers.

Somehow, I was chosen.

So I cleared my schedule, and got on a bus--and I stayed on that bus, or inside one or another bus terminal, for almost three days.

You'd think that inside Bus World, as I came to think of it, would be the most prosaic, least magical place imaginable. Buses are dirty, most bus stations are worse, most of the people one meets in that world are crabby, and basically you're all hurtling across America in a fossil-fuel-powered, air-conditioned box while surviving on fast food purchased at truck stops. It is a world of strangers, most of whom have probably never heard of sustainability or magic or deliberate communities founded on kindness and wonder. And yet, on our last night on the bus, while Steve and Sarah slept leaning on each other and Sean slept cuddled in my lap, the man sitting next to me started talking.

He told me this long story, beginning with the fact that he had once had a wife who also had schizophrenia, and that they had both known she couldn't handle the stress of living closely with someone (why not? Sarah seems to draw strength from living with Steve--but of course I did not ask), but they had married anyway because they loved each other and wanted to honor that love while they could. And a year later, still loving each other, they divorced so she could seek the solitude she needed.

The story went on from there. Much of it was convoluted, and most of it was sad. Some of it involved guilt, shame, and uncertainty. But the man seemed to need to talk, and so I listened. Finally, as dawn started to color a world that had got flat and agricultural and arid over night, he slept.

I felt as though I had been treated like a priest. And I suppose I had been.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 2: Invisibility

It is entirely too hot.

Or, at Charlie would point out, I'm entirely too hot. "It," meaning the weather, is just fine, doing what it does in August.

My annual case of "lasts" has begun, my obsessive awareness of the approaching end of the school year. The beginning of the last semester, the end of the last summer, the last time I might see or do or experience this, that, or the other. There have been years when it was fairly mild, since I knew I'd be back the next year, it's just that I knew people who wouldn't be. The year I completed my novitiate it was very intense, as I knew I'd be entering Absence, three whole years away.

This year it's again different. I'm not going anywhere--I probably won't be living on campus next year, but I intend to remain fully involved as an ally. I won't really ever have to leave. And yet I won't be a student anymore.

I don't know why this bothers me so much. I've been gradually ceasing to be a student for a long time, now. I know novices mostly because I've had them as students, not as classmates. Most of my friends around here are masters or candidates. It's not like I want to be a student here forever, I'd get bored. And yet.

I watched Hawk flying her hawk the other day. I almost wrote "flying with her hawk," but that's what it looked like. Woman and bird seemed equally un-self-conscious, equally focused, and perfectly coordinated, as though they were a single organism and each could go where the other was. It wasn't then quite so hot as it is today, and the sky was a hard, pale blue with streaky clouds across it. Hawk stood at the Edge of the World and launched the bird, not at a specific prey animal--the normal thing in falconry, I understand, as falconers don't want their birds flying free without anything particular to do, lest they fly off--but there were birds in the canopy of the Enchanted Forest, and mice and rabbits and ground hogs in the pasture, especially near the cover of the apple orchard. The bird circled for a bit then dove at something I couldn't see, broke off the attack, and lit in a tree.

Hawk watched the hawk in the tree for a minute or two, then jogged towards the apple orchard and along its edge, through the tall grass where the goats and sheep haven't been yet this year.

Suddenly, a rabbit flushed out of the grass and ran out across the cropped pasture at the base of the Edge and the hawk dove but missed the rabbit by a hair (no pun intended) and the animal dove into a clump of goldenrod and hid. The hawk circled around and returned to the tree, but by that time crows had noticed the situation and began mobbing, calling more and more crows in. The hawk hunched its shoulders, seeming vaguely bothered. Hawk called out, offering a piece of meat, and the hawk flew to her glove. Woman and bird together left the scene, heading for the farm fields and the shed where Charlie butchers deer in the fall.

Neither of them had seen me watching the whole time. I was invisible.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Lammas

Note: Lammas is August 1st, but I'm writing this as though it had already occurred.

Happy Lammas! Or Lughnasadh, a name reported to mean "mourning for Lugh."

Lugh is a god, as I've explained before, but one nobody on campus seems to pay much attention to, let alone mourn. It's always seemed strange to me. I've had some thoughts about that this year.

But let me tell you about the actual day. It's been hot lately, but today the weather was lovely--cool and dry with thin, fleecy clouds under a blue sky. As in years past, we had a feast in a large event tent on the Central Field, everything the farm produces on offer in a fantastic variety of dishes, plus an organized tasting of different varieties of apples and a separate tasting of different breads. I assume the results of the tastings will have something to do with what campus is eating going forward, but nobody said anything about any plans.

In years past, we've had talent shows, often structured as contests. This year it was all about athletics--a martial arts demonstration, a yoga demonstration, short foot-races, tug-of-war, and other events, including juggling. I was watching all of it when I felt a little puff of resentment because I can run and I can do a form of yoga, but I wasn't included--but of course I didn't volunteer, either. I don't know how to volunteer, who to talk to, and in fact I've never known, though I've been part of this community for a decade. And I never realized before today that I didn't know.

I've been so...pleased with myself for the things I've noticed about the school that all other students--or at least most other students--overlook. The secret stair and the door the masters use, Charlie's habit of lurking in trees to watch life go by, Allen's ability to vanish, and, perhaps most relevant at the moment, the fact that the majority of all people who have ever won a green ring all converge on campus at Lammas each year to do something together in the Mansion. But then there are all these other things I don't notice that evidently other people do.

Anyway, about Lugh.

I've heard various people (people more informed about pagan symbolism than I) explain that we mourn Lugh in August because he is a sun god and the power of the sun has gone into the grain and is about to be cut. Not, again, that Lugh actually has any devotees on campus, nor do we grow much of our grain here, but neopaganism (and maybe traditional paganism, too, I don't know) has a curiously fluid nature, with stories and symbols and reality all merging into and out of each other, such that any god or goddess can be an aspect of, or a reference to, the God or the Goddess, making it somewhat beside the point whether anyone specifically worships Lugh or not.

I've been confused about all this before. I've been confused about what many of these holidays are actually about. I'm not confused this year, and, looking back, I realize it's been a while since I was confused. I've realized, one, that I don't need to understand the symbols and concepts and so forth, that I know what Lammas is about, though I can't quite explain it, and that meaning is present, quite simply, when I enjoy the holiday. Two, the symbols and so on no longer confuse me because I know, after a fashion, what they mean. I can feel them from the inside and, occasionally, come up with my own way of explaining it.

It's simple; at Lammas, the harvest begins, and the harvest is a kind of shift from the potential to the actual, from what might become to what actually is. And as good as what is may be, that's sad. Something is gained, but something is lost.

That I will soon cease being a student here, cease preparing to be a master someday and simply be a master--I'm excited as all anything, but it's sad, too,