Mastery Year 3: Part 4: Post 2: A Puzzle

Summer is in full swing. The summer camp is in session, so we’re all pretending to be more or less normal in case the campers see us, and I hardly get to see June because she’s busy running the camp. I teach a couple of workshops for the kids, and I’m also teaching a full, semester-long class this semester—my first one.

It’s the one I told you about a while ago, about the school’s various pro-environmental systems and practices and why they are how they are—I mean not only the five-minute explanations, like reclaiming gray-water for irrigation reduces overall campus water use by 56%, but why is it important to reduce water use? Why is energy efficiency important? Why is locally-produced food better, and is it better? Where are the legitimate points of controversy? I’m covering a lot of the same material as Charlie’s Environmentalism for Dummies, because, as he acknowledges, “a lot of the dummies pay no attention.” This way, they get a second chance to absorb the material, and it’s from a different, more concrete, angle, so maybe it will interest different people.

Only five people signed up. Usually, the threshold is ten. There’s no threshold for talks and seminars, but they don’t like to let faculty members commit themselves to super-small classes all semester long, so if too-few people sign up, they’ll cancel the class. But I got special dispensation because it’s my first time and because I structured the class so that each unit is semi-independent so that additional students can drop in for a couple of class meetings as though it were a series of seminars—but those five who signed up for the whole course have a term paper to write arguing either for or against some alteration to campus practice, and so the course as a whole is a greater educational opportunity, and carries more credit, than all the “seminars” put together.

Rick is visiting, and I told him about all of this after my first class meeting.

“So, you’ve lost your teaching virginity now?” he asked.

“There are so many things wrong with that metaphor,” I told him.

I have seven and a half months left as a candidate, if all goes well. At the end of that time, I plan to walk into a job interview and argue that I am qualified to belong to the Six, not that I expect ever to actually join, but that’s the way it works. You have to be eligible to join the Six in order to earn your green ring. Doesn’t seem like a lot of time to do something that still seems barely possible—there are days when I still very much put the masters on pedestals—but when I break it down into distinct tasks I’m really almost done.

I’ve completed 52 Elizabethan sonnets about my spot in the woods, one corresponding to each week of the year, and Charlie and I are moving into the publishing process, now.

I’ve used what I learned in grad school to develop workshops, talks, and classes that are relevant to what students are doing here.

My workshops and talks are well-attended and I get good reviews.

I’ve interviewed over half of the people I want to talk with about the school’s history and how it works.

A lot of students are coming to me for tutoring with writing.

I’m gaining much more confidence in my ability to guide and support Steve, and he does appear to be making progress with my help.

Which brings up a question: Steve isn’t planning to get his ring this year, so the work I’m helping him do won’t be done by the time I hope top be ready to face that interview—how do I tell whether I’m done when he isn’t?

Mastery Year 3: Part 4: Litha

As I write this, Litha is still a few days away, but the post is written as though it were a day or two in the past.-D.

"Why don't we do drugs here," asked Ash, one of the yearlings.

"I don't want to," answered Allen. "I can't speak for your half of 'we.'"

And Ash made a pff! sound because Allen had deliberately misinterpreted her, as he does.

We were all sitting in the Dining Hall, which was rather over-stuffed and noisy because it's Litha, and almost everybody has their family and friends visiting, so there were five or six hundred people on campus. AND it was raining--hard--so rather than picnicking outside, a lot of us were camped out in the Dining Hall. The event tent, the one we use for Mabon, was set up, too, and there had the pigs roasting there and some of the rest of the food, so some of the people were in the tent, and others were variously scattered all over campus, I'm not sure where.

The Sprouts had accreted to the Dining Hall, and were running around the margins of the room playing some kind of game that involved shrieking and shooting imaginary guns at imaginary enemies and sometimes each other, but then Charlie stood up on a chair and shouted "ATTENTION!!!"

The room went silent. We all looked at him.

"Attention, Sprouts!" he said, "You're not going to melt, you're not going to get hypothermia today, Go PLAY OUTSIDE!"

All the Sprouts filed out, most of them glancing rather sheepishly at Charlie as they went, and when they were gone everybody burst into applause.

"Except  he did that for the Sprouts, not for us," I said, quietly, to Allen. He nodded.

"I expect he'll join them, shortly," he guessed.

"Should we?"

"And blow his cover?" Allen shook his head.

The conversation about drugs continued, somewhat without us, as various people discussed various mind-blowing experiences they'd had on various substances. Something like this comes up every year, and the conversation usually evolves into extreme positions, with one camp insisting that human consciousness evolved in partnership with entheogenic plants (that many of these "plants" are actually mushrooms is only one of the things that has come to irritate me about such assertions), and the other camp equally certain that the "vibrations" of mind-altering chemicals are too intense and that attachment to their use indicates "the left-handed path."

It's no good pointing out that they're both clinging to dogma that has no actual basis in anything, they'll just think you're being un-spiritual, if they hear you at all.

Allen winced, slightly. Discordant noise bothers him, and the conversations of two hundred people were bouncing off the walls.

Charlie approached us, gradually, talking briefly to several others on his crowded way and looking rather like a popular politician as a result, and he arrived just as Ash was describing an especially intense trip she'd had involving, I think, MDMA (also called Ecstasy). She saw him and cut herself off mid-sentence, apologizing and biting her lip.

"You don't need to stop on my account," Charlie commented. "It's not that my virgin ears can't handle it."

"But I thought you--" said Ash, and stopped. That Charlie is a recovering alcoholic is widely but not universally known, and so it is never discussed.

"You don't like talk about substances," finished another yearling, inexplicably called Beta.

"Why should I care what you talk about?" growled Charlie. "You want to be stupid, go ahead."

"Why do you think all drug use is stupid?" asked Ash. She seemed genuinely curious, and Charlie sat down to talk to her.

"You're putting words in my mouth," he said. "I don't think all drug use is stupid. You want to join some shamanic tradition, fine. There's a place for everything. And there's possible uses in therapy, and maybe some people can handle recreational use, I don't know. But most drug users are using drugs because they're being stupid, some way or other, including the psuedo-religious crap people around here get into."

"Psuedo-religious?"

"Yeah. You do it to see God, right?"

"Yes."

"Drugs, sex, dancing," interjected the second yearling, "all the things the Christians don't want us doing because they don't want us to cut out the middle-man and see God ourselves."

"Those things make you feel like you're seeing God," Charlie clarified, "but what good are your feelings? When the feeling goes away, has your life changed?"

In the background, somebody cheered and Allen winced again. In another corner of the room, a drum circle started up. The rain on the roof of the Dining Hall intensified. I wondered how we'd ever set the Man alight at sunset, but around here, something always seems to work out.

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 3

Hi, all, this is Daniel-2019. It's interlude time again.

Which really surprised me. I mean, it was just Beltane, and now it's almost Litha. Part of it is the weather has been cool, so it doesn't really feel like June, and part of it was that friends of ours had an issue I don't really want to get into that sucked up a lot of my time and energy for a bit. But the long and the short of it is I got discombobulated and any plan I had for narrative structure seems to have flown away.

Life complicates art, I suppose.

Father's Day is coming up. I'm looking forward to it. We don't have any plans, but I rather hope that means there's going to be a surprise for me. I don't know that there is, it's not like we have a tradition of Father's Day surprises, and it's possible June is just as discombobulated as I've been and doesn't remember Father's Day is coming up, but in the mean-time I'll live happy in the knowledge that there is a surprise in store for me--and, one way or another, I'll be right.

Camp is starting soon. The children's camp associated with the school? It survived and is still around, on the old campus, no less. It always was legally distinct from the school, so when the school closed, the camp spun off, as did the open-to-the-public classes that Joy and Karen taught, and a couple of other things. So, as I do every year, I'll add teaching a few workshops to the campers to my roster of things to do...I don't seem to have developed a career so much as developed several of them. This year, Carly is old enough to attend. It's a curious thing, growing older.

-best, -D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 4: Paying Attention.

So Steve found his favorite spot on the Island--his choice was almost as arbitrary as mine, the year I was assigned to choose a favorite.

I had searched the whole Island, hiking up and down mountains, around ponds, and along streams (there really are no true rivers there), and nothing ever jumped out at me as more special than any other part, so at last I chose a spot randomly just so I wouldn't have to tell Charlie I hadn't done the assignment. And, weirdly, that spot then became my favorite. I visited it again this year, just to see how it's doing and to reconnect.

Steve wasn't searching, not exactly, for though he hiked all over the Island, too, he didn't seem worried about the assignment at all. Which was good, since the whole point of the trip was for him to stop worrying, but I worried for him, thinking that he wouldn't finish the assignment. Finally, on the last full day there, he suddenly announced "this is it. This spot is my favorite."

"This one?" I asked. "Really? Why?"

"Why not?" he answered. "It's just as nice as any other part."

So like me and yet so different.

I had assumed that if Steve's decision was arbitrary, he must not have noticed anything about his spot--the thought worried me a bit, as it seemed to defeat the purpose of the exercise, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. I was going to ask Charlie about the issue, but didn't get a chance until we got back to campus and then Charlie himself asked us to report. He didn't ask me to report when I did it--I'll have to ask him why not, this mysterious master thing is all well and good until you set yourself to become one of them and have to figure out how it's done.

Anyway, so Charlie asked us to report and we did and then he asked Steve where his spot is. Steve told him. Then he asked Steve to describe it--and to my surprise, Steve did. In perfect, glowing detail.