Master Year 3: Part 1: Post 4: Another Rough Week

Note; the events described here happened on a Tuesday, not a Monday.-D.

For the second time in as many weeks, crisis has erupted on campus, though at least this time nobody is dead (last week, in case you missed it, Eddie’s dog became vicious and had to be shot).

I was walking upstairs to shower after my early-morning walk when Greg poked his head out of the Meditation Hall, saw me, and said “get Allen.” His voice was calm, quiet, and full of such urgency that I ran to to office to ask Sharon if Allen had arrived yet. She said he had not, so I ran outside and up the fire escape so I could get a good view of campus—there are two driveways, and I didn’t know which one he would use, and if I picked the wrong one and he went by me, he’d be much harder to find.

Never mind that Sharon would know when he arrived—Sharon knows things by means the rest of us do not have at our disposal.

There he was, a movement in yellow coming in the front gate, just visible through the trees. I ran down again and met him.

“Greg needs you!” I said.

Allen stopped his bike.

“Oh? Why?”

“I haven’t a clue. But it’s urgent and it’s in the Meditation Hall.”

“OK,” he said, and sped away.

I walked slowly back to the Mansion, back in through the office, and I was going to continue on up the stairs but I stopped at the now-closed door to the Meditation Hall, desperately curious. Obviously, whatever had happened was none of my business. I continued upstairs.

At breakfast, Allen seemed to be missing. Afterwards, Greg had an announcement. Greg’s announcements are seldom good news, perhaps because he delivers bad news well, calmly and with grave authority. This one was bad news.

“Ryan has a health problem which has necessitated his leaving campus this morning. Most likely, he will withdraw from our program. He will be welcome to visit, however, and when he is stabilized enough to receive well-wishers he will let us know.” A low hum of shock and curiosity swelled, and Greg held up his hand. “I am not at liberty to give details about his condition,” he said. “It will be easier on all of us, including Ryan, if you all refrain from speculation and gossip. Sometimes we just don’t know, and wish we did.”

I know Ryan slightly, though we haven’t talked, much. He’s a yearling in his mid-thirties, interested in a mix of Buddhism and New Age spirituality, and he has this odd serenity to him—I had forgotten that he also went through phases of seeming irritable or fidgetty every few days. I had not forgotten, though, the events of the early morning, and I had a fair idea of what sort of health crisis Raven had—what kind could require running to fetch a psychologist? What I didn’t know was why.

I lingered, on my way out, near Greg, who was also lingering, talking to Ollie near the door of the Dining Hall. I wouldn’t look at him, because I had not made up my mind whether I wanted to talk to him. Arguably, I should not, and yet I lingered.

“Ask or do not ask,” Greg said at last from behind me. “Attempting to do both at once is seldom effective.” He spoke with some humor, but when I turned to face him I saw that he looked tired, even old. Ollie had gone.

“I don’t want to invade his privacy,” I said.

“But you have special knowledge,” he replied. “You know more than you’re supposed to, and now there’s no one I can talk about it with.”

“That’s true.”

“And, curiously, I’m in the same situation. I am allowed to share information with the other masters, but I am unaccustomed to talking with any except Charlie and Allen, and both are indesposed.”

“I noticed that Allen has left.”

“Actually, Allen is still on campus, as is Ryan, at least in a technical, as opposed to a social sense. We’re still trying to find a bed.”

“In a mental hospital,” I said, in a low voice.

“Yes.”

I waited. Greg had never confided in me before, and I wasn’t sure he was really about to do it now, though he clearly wanted to, but the longer I’ve been here the more even the masters have seemed to appreciate my witness. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s that I have become a naturalist of my own species, and there is something about a gaze that is both interested and dispassionate that comforts. I don’t know. But one by one they are gradually coming to treat me as more of a peer.

I waited.

Greg walked out of the Dining Hall, and a turn of his head indicated I should follow. The morning had dawned gray and thick—it snowed last night—but a rising wind had swept away the clouds and the day had gone bright and sunny, though very cold. Greg paused in his walking, closed his eyes, and appeared to inhale the sunshine before walking on again.

“Ryan’s ill health is not exactly my fault, though it’s hard not to see it that way,” he said at last.

“Oh?”

“Ryan is suffering from a form of psychosis triggered by meditation.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“If meditation makes people crazy,” I ventured, “then why aren’t all of us psychotic here?”

“Because it’s not common. I’ve seen it before, but only in advanced students. Minor psychological disturbance, such as emotional deadening and a dulling of the senses, is a normal part of intensive meditative practice, and it’s usually temporary. The student can either pull back or, with guidance, push on and come out the other side. Alchemy candidates sometimes develop what looks like full-blown psychosis, but that, too, is part of the process. I know how to guide students through it. But Ryan lacks the background to make use of this state—and I lack the background to get him out of it.”

“How is he different?” I asked. “What went wrong?”

“Some people are vulnerable,” Greg acknowledged. “Meditation alters brain function—that is its point. Not all brains can be safely altered. Ryan elevated his risk by spending far longer in meditation than I suggested. I knew he sometimes attended the afternoon make-up session, but I didn’t know he also meditated on his own. This past week, he began spending as much as three hours a day in meditation. Today he broke. This morning I noticed something ‘off’ about him, so I asked him to stay after. I very quickly realized he has become completely irrational. He has begun the process of ego-death without prior preparation. It’s making him delusional.”

Ego-death sounded bad, though I didn’t know what it meant. I wanted to ask why Greg hadn’t warned us, why I’d never heard of any risk associated with meditation at all, but I wasn’t sure of my role, whether it was OK to ask that sort of question of a master reluctantly seeking catharthis.

“What will happen to him now?” I asked, instead.

“He will likely receive anti-psychotic drugs in a hospital setting until he stabilizes,” Greg said. “After that? I’m not sure. There’s very little clinical research on meditation psychosis, and it’s not something meditation teachers usually talk about with each other. Perhaps we should. He will likely not be the same again.”

We had reached the other side of the Central Field, near the turn-off to Chapel Hall, as if we were headed to class, except that building is closed until after Ostar, and classes are still being held in the Mansion.

I thought about how Charlie pushed Rick to survive outside in the snow, how Allen allowed Ebony to experiment with cannabis so she could see….This with meditation is a somewhat different issue, since Greg wasn’t doing anything outside of the normal guidelines of his profession, but I’d thought before of how some of the masters confront the possibility of a student getting hurt in their care. The idea had seemed very abstract to me then, but now Greg’s gone and done it—he’s lost a student.

I had no idea what to say, so I just hugged him.

Eddie is doing well, by the way, at least in a physical sense, and expected to recover completely from his various injuries. He is still rather bandanged up, and since he can’t walk on a broken foot and can’t use crutches with a sprained wrist and a chewed-up arm, he’s in a wheel-chair for a few weeks. The Mansion isn’t remotely wheel-chair accessible, so he’s living with Charlie’s sister for a while. The thought is that if anyone can keep him from folding in on himself out of guilt for his dog, she can.

He calls a few of us every day, and I am one of the ones he calls.

Mastery Year 3: Part 1: Post 3: Another Mastery

Today was not a good day.

I suppose you could quibble with that assessment—there’s that old Zen story involving a man and his horse and the repeating line “how do you know?” The point being that apparently good events can lead directly to apparently bad events, and vice versa. Non-attachment, non-judgment, and all that stuff, which is all well and good, except there’s also a story about a Zen master who cried when his son died—when his students said “but aren’t all things illusion?” the master replied “yes, but this is a very convincing illusion.”

Anyway.

I had plans to interview Joy today. I was supposed to meet her down by the barn after breakfast, since she had a few hours free for barn chores, and the plan was I could help her work as we talked. She got held up by something, though, and when I got to the barn she was nowhere in evidence. So I wandered around for a while. I had a vague desire to go look at the sheep in their pen, or maybe find a barn cat willing to let me pet them. I’ve always found the sheep relaxing, somehow. But then I heard a noise.

It was an odd sound, a kind of animal roar combined with a high, surprised yelp, then an eruption of barking, coming from inside the barn. I ran towards the noise, and found….

Remember they’d used straw bales to build a kind of divided pen in there for Eddie’s dog, the supposedly untrainable animal Eddie was supposed to, non-the-less, train as a therapy dog to earn his mastery. He’d been making a lot of progress, of late, but the dog was still touchy, and spent all his unsupervised time in the pen, away from people and other animals who might get hurt if his fear-aggression got triggered somehow. And I guess he’d gotten triggered, because what I saw when I came in was Eddie, clinging to one of the angled beams that support the rafters of the hay loft, his body curled up, as high off the ground as possible, holding himself away from the dog, who was barking and lunging beneath him. I couldn’t see clearly, having just come in from the brighter light outside, but there seemed to be something dreadfully wrong with Eddie’s right arm.

I stood there for what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a few seconds, not knowing what to do, not sure if either man nor beast knew I was there, and then Eddie half turned his head in my direction and shouted “No! Wait!” and then something exploded right behind me and to the left. The dog yelped and stumbled, recovered, turned, and leaped towards Joy, who of course stood right behind me. She strode forward, shot him again, and this time he fell, his head blasted open.

In movies and such, when this sort of thing happens, people shout “NOOOOOOOO!!!” and tear their hair and look towards Heaven. Eddie did nothing of the kind. Speechless, he dropped from his perch, landed awkwardly on a straw bale, tripped backwards, and stumbled towards the dog, favoring his arm, which I could see now was all bloody and torn. He hovered over the animal, his hands waving helplessly, as though he were trying to think how he might put the ruined body back together.

“Don’t touch,” Joy warned, “I’m not sure he’s not carrying something.”

Eddie obeyed, but looked up at Joy helplessly, unable, I suppose, to make sense of so many emotions.

“But he was doing so well,” he said, and my heart just about broke for him.

“He was going to kill you,” Joy told him. “Get Charlie,” she told me, over her shoulder.

Charlie is a certified wilderness first responder, as well as a fair herbalist. Unlike Joy, who’s a vet, he’s trained to treat humans. I ran off and found him without difficulty, but moving back and fourth across campus on foot takes a while, and by the time we got back, Joy had cleaned the wound and stopped the worst of the bleeding, veterinary degree notwithstanding.

Charlie examined Eddie from head to foot, found a probable sprained wrist and broken tailbone, from the fall, as well as the multiple bite wounds and numerous splinters. He re-washed the wound, directed Eddie to knock back a shot of cayenne water, to stop the capillary bleeding, bound up the wound tightly to keep the more serious bleeds from starting up again, and then set about pulling out the larger splinters while Eddie cried. Charlie, typically, neither encouraged nor discouraged the tears, he just let them happen and worked with quick, professional efficiency.

“I’m not going to bother wrapping any of the rest of this,” he said, speaking for the first time since we arrived, “I’ll let them do that at the emergency room. You mind if I carry you? You’re in no shape to walk.”

“That dog—I’m supposed to train him for my Mastery,” said Eddie, wiping his eyes. As if his primary concern were academics.

“There are two kinds of mastery,” Charlie told him. “The one based on success and the one defined by failure. The first kind you can achieve anywhere. The second kind you do better to get here, where you’re not alone.”

“You set me up for this. You did this on purpose,” accused Eddie, wiping his eyes again and passively allowing Charlie to scoop him up. Seeing him in the bigger man’s arms, I for the first time saw Eddie appear girlish. Maybe it’s only that he looked childlike, limp with mixed-up emotion, vulnerable in a way men are not supposed to be, but sometimes are anyway.

“You are seriously overestimating our ability as fortune-tellers,” said Charlie, and walked out of the barn, carrying the little man.

I collected Charlie’s various med-kit items, which he’d left scattered on the barn floor, knowing I’d return them to his office. Joy put away her rifle and came back to stare at the dead dog with me.

“He looks so little,” I said. I’d never thought of him that way when he was alive.”

“None of us have ever seen him relaxed before,” said Joy. “Poor boy was terrified every minute he was here.”

I was about to say something to the effect of its for for best that he’s dead, when Joy suddenly spun and kicked savagely at a straw bale.

“I hate killing animals,” she raged. “I Goddamn hate it.”

“But--” I started to ask. I mean, she slaughters chickens and sheep and so forth as a regular part of her job. But she held up her hand.

“Not now, Daniel,” she said. “Not now.”

Mastery Year 3: Part 1: Post 2: Recognition

"Kit, after all the years I've been here, I just realized, we have no system for publicly recognizing anyone's accomplishments. We have no awards, no honor society, no Employee of the Month, why is that?"

Kit took my question, as intended, as being about the school, not my own level of obtuseness. We were sitting on the Mansion porch, looking out at the snow, I in several layers of school uniform, she in a white faux-fur wrap she'd gotten in a second-hand store. Her red hair, graying now in places, tumbled out from the wrap around her face. Also, her nose was pink.

"Oh, come on, Daniel," she said, "I'm enough of a diva without any ritualized occasions for people to tell me how great I am."

Ordinarily I wouldn't call her a diva, but....

"I suppose you're right, Kit," I said. "Especially as it wasn't you're accomplishments I had in mind."

Her cheeks turned pink to match her nose.

"I didn't mean--" she stammered, then recovered herself. "All of us are divas, in one way or another, yes, including Charlie. Though I suppose he'd be a devo." She hadn't picked on Charlie in my hearing in some months. I'd been starting to hope she'd gotten over it.

"That hardly seems fair," I protested. "All of you have done such amazing things, and most students don't know the half of it. There are senior students who don't realize Greg's an alchemist or that Charlie's a writer. Karen does flowers. You have a masters' degree in dance movement therapy!"

"I don't keep up with my certification."

"And what about students? Why don't we get recognition?"

"Care to be the change, Daniel? You know, you can always tell the other students I'm awesome, if you don't think word is getting out properly."

"That's not what I'm talking about--although, you know I do think you're awesome, right?"

"Of course."

"I mean, how did we get here and why?"

"Ah, that. I knew you were going to interview me, but I thought you'd make an appointment."

"If this isn't a good time, we can reschedule," I told her, "but mostly I just ask questions that pop into my head."

"I know." She said it with a great deal of fondness, then took a deep breath and collected herself before going on. "Well, I wasn't being facetious about being the change. Around here, things happen because someone sees a need and answers it--or has a need and asks for it. No one has gotten serious about public recognition yet, so it hasn't happened, but you could change that, if you wanted to."

She fell quiet a moment, maybe watching the blue shadows of the cedar hedge, maybe giving me a chance to respond. But I said nothing, and she was looking at the hedge.

"The thing about student awards, though," she continued, "is that we could only give awards for superlatives. Giving an award to everybody is stupid. And defining some people as better automatically defines everybody else as worst. I almost never won awards in school. I can't say it bothered me, but it didn't help, either, so what was the point? What's the point of recognizing the few if the best it does for the many is not hurt them?"

"I suppose it could be motivation," I said, "but I did get awards in school a few times, and it never really meant much."

"Well, there you go. I guess we're all motivated by something other than recognition."

"But I want you to be recognized, Kit," I told her. "And I want you to recognize me." Not just her, of course, but yes, including her. She reached over and took my hand a moment. Her hand, despite having been wrapped in fake fur, felt like ice.

"I think you're awesome, Daniel, you know I do. But that's interpersonal, different from some public, institutional thing. There's no problem with it."

"So, how did you get here?" I asked. "What was the school like when you started? What do you know of it's history? And what do you actually do? Like, all the stuff I don't even know to recognize you for?"

And so she told me. We sat and talked for a long time, and while I found all of it interesting, I'm not sure that it would interest you were I simply to repeat her account. I'm also not sure she really told me everything relevant.

For example, she never did tell me what really happened between her and Charlie.

Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Brigid

So it begins.

That sounds suitably dramatic, doesn't it? But something kind of dramatic is beginning, my last year here as a student. And this time there's so asterisk attached to that awareness, no possibility of coming back as a different kind of student, there's just no more student to be for me. Allen would say true masters are always students, and I'm sure he's right, but the question is student of what?

Schools are very odd communities in that if you do everything right, they make you leave.

But I knew that going in. I didn't expect this year not to come. Now I want to stay, and the only way to do that is to become one of the Six--which I probably won't get to do, but failing that, I'll at least be an ally. How did I get here, me, that awkward 19-year-old with no plans?

Anyway.

The day wasn't just about me. New students coming in, senior students graduating, some new green rings earned...it's pretty much the same ceremony every time, and what makes for comforting, ritualistic continuity makes pretty boring description, over and over again. The only thing that really changes year to year is individual experience of the event--fitting for Groundhog Day, I suppose. The big difference for me between now and my first Brigid on campus is that what was then new, exciting, and fresh is now familiar, traditional, and full of accumulated meaning.

But let me describe it again, as I haven't done so in years.

June and I had nothing specific to do earlier in the day, so we just wandered around, greeting students returning to campus. There were thirteen new yearlings (about half as many as last year--because we don't accept student loans, the recession* seems to have impacted enrollment) arriving and wandering around campus with their guides for the day, and we spoke to some of them.

We did not see any of the candidates about to receive their rings. I do not think they were kidnapped for any Ordeal--surely that trick can only work once, and anyway I really hope mastery candidates don't go through an ordeal, once was enough. But they must be doing something. I could ask, but I think I'll leave that mystery until I go through it.

It had snowed a few days earlier, inches of wet, white fluff, much of which melted and then froze, leaving irregular patches of white ice on the fields and black ice crusted in the dirt and gravel of the campus driveways. The air was cold and damp, and thick, snow-filled clouds kept the day dark and nearly monochrome. When the day grew darker yet, and the clouds glowed a dull pink for a while in the west. That's when we knew it was time to go in and take our seats.

The Chapel was about 40 degrees, F. when we got in, which is about the best a single wood stove in such a big room, plus heat migrating upwards from the Ordeal rooms in the basement, can do when the temperature outside is around 20. The metal folding chairs were too cold to touch bare-handed. June and I were well-prepared, though, in long-johns and two layers of school uniforms and our big, brown, wool cloaks, and we weren't uncomfortable. We actually put our hoods down, so we wouldn't get too warm. The room, lit warmly and faintly by candled in holders along the walls and in stands at the ends of each row of chairs, smelled of beeswax, wet wool, and snow, as it always does on Brigid.

We sat with Steve and Sarah and the baby on one side and Eddie on the other. A new yearling had the end seat, quite on purpose, though the yearling didn't know it. We all chatted quietly, waiting, until the repeated Ding! of a small bell we could not see silenced us.

We turned in our seats to watch the masters process in, the Six, the non-teaching masters, and a few allies who wear the ring whose role I've never been clear on. They walked in slow, measured steps, their hoods pulled up, each carrying an unlit candle. This year, Charlie led them. They take that duty in turns, two years per stint.

As the bell continued to ring, Ding! Ding! Ding! Their column divided in two, passing around the audience in our chairs, to either side of us. Abruptly, the bell stopped and they stopped, one at the end of each row, and turned to face us. The student in each end-seat lit the candle of the master facing them, and the procession, and the bell, continued until they had mounted the stage, set their sixteen candles in stands on the stage, and then sat there, on the stage, in their own folding chairs, their hoods now lowered.

Charlie stood at the lecturn, said some opening words, and introduced the new yearlings--he had them stand up, say their names, where they were from, and which of four animals or plants they most identified with. That seemed like an ice-breaker exercise, but actually someone out of sight was writing down their responses and using the plants or animals the new students picked to assign them to dorms. That introduction, that hidden ritual, made them part of us, and ensured an overlap, even if of only a few minutes, between the incoming newbies and the outgoing graduates.

Then Charlie said the ritual words to summon the first of the graduating students to come out and kneel, then stand and remove the black cloak that symbolizes the novitiate--the rest of us wear brown. Each graduate spoke a few words at the lectern, then exited the stage, receiving a diploma on the way. When they all had crossed the stage, they processed away out of the room in a group.

Then Jasmine, Nel, Rick, Ollie, and Oak each received their green ring from their master. Charlie went first, giving Rick is ring, with the ritualized words, always the same, used for the first candidate to receive a ring each year--the others are allowed to improvise. But Rick, being Rick, improvised anyway, and hugged Charlie, but to the latter's obvious surprise. Neither of them are known at affectionate types, and a ripple of appreciative "ohh"s spread through the audience, those of us who know them both and know Rick's story.

Then Allen and Karen gave rings to their students, then Kit went--she had two, Nel and Oak. She usually has more than anyone else because Kit, more than anyone else, embodies why most of came here--she's a gorgeous, red-headed witch-woman, Lady of dance and music and magic.

Then Charlie said a few more words, and the masters, old and newly-made, all processed out to the ringing of the bells and we got up and milled about at the back of the room, talking to the yearlings and eating nuts and raisins and dilly-beans and whatever else from long buffet tables. The graduates--but not the new masters--joined us, and then we all went back to our dorms (the janitorial group stays behind to extinguish the candles and clean up), where we saved the new students from incipient hypothermia (most hadn't known to wear long underwear) and then fed them chocolate and alcohol and snow cream and maple snow candy.

The snow had started to fall during the ceremony, and fell thick and comforting and silent around as as we walked back, so we had an easy time setting out pans to collect the stuff and make candy.




*Remember, this was 2009