Afterword: Post 9: Finis Part B

So, yes, a disgruntled student of Allen’s triggered the closure of the school; her parents filed a lawsuit and as we had no liability insurance, in order to settle out of court we had to sell the school itself to pay our bill. Each of our several other options, including fighting the suit in court, would have required we compromise our community in some important way. We decided it was better for the school to die intact than live on as less than itself. Whether it actually did die at all is the subject of this last post, but at the time we saw no hope, no way forward but an ending.

I want to emphasize that while I have mentioned that the student was mentally ill, her illness was not the cause of her vindictiveness—mentally ill people are not inherently dangerous to anyone, and lots of healthy people are vicious. Indeed, we don’t know whether it was she or her parents who decided to come after us. The reason I mentioned her mental status at all is that had she had any other kind of crisis, legal blame would not have landed on Allen—there might have been no way for blame to find purchase at all.

Allen felt horrible, for while he was not in any way responsible for what happened, he had made a mistake. There was a kernel of truth to the lawsuit. But we all felt horrible. I can’t overemphasize how awful it all was, every step that we took felt just plain wrong. And there were a lot of steps to take.

Again, I don’t want to be detailed, or even entirely accurate in my description, because we engaged in some subterfuge that I don’t want to come to light.

The first priority was to appear to capitulate fully in order to satisfy our attackers and distract from the fact that we weren’t capitulating fully. The Six were the board members of the school as a legal entity and its sole shareholders, so we could not appear to remain involved after the sale, nor could we arrange to sell the school to an ally whose connection to us could be traced. We (staff and students together) therefore created the illusion that we were and had always been a quirky private liberal arts college, and we presented that illusion to several potential buyers.

We also quietly made a deal with a different quirky liberal arts college to accept our students and transfers and find ways to properly credit their real educational experiences, including the courses on magic and so forth. We would continue working with the students in secret, and the other school would find ways to credit that secret work.

Thus, we planned to honor our obligations to existing students, although we could not take on new students because we would all shortly have to find other ways of making a living.

We were sued in August. We sold the school in October, and according to plan Allen, Kit, and Greg all walked away unemployed and penniless. I stayed on, since I had not been legally added to the board, pretending to be an adjunct science professor and writing coach. The other allies stayed on as well, and more allies stepped in to cover Allen’s psychology classes and Kit’s classes on dance and movement. Joy and Karen lost their positions on the board, but they both owned their own businesses—as you may recall their classes were open to outsiders—and so they both kept going as though they were simply contractors who had lost a client.

Over the following year, most of us allies gradually left the school’s employment, replaced by real liberal arts professors who had no idea what the school had really been. Most of the students, particularly those close to graduating, transferred to the other liberal arts college, the one we had a secret deal with, to finish their studies. New students came in with no thought of magic. The place very rapidly became the ordinary liberal arts school we had pretended it was.

But we had not sold the campus to the same buyer. The campus was our home. It contained Charlie’s ashes and some of those of Shrimp and Jim, who helped found the school and whom I never met but have heard a lot about. And remember, ashes from the campus lie under my skin; as Charlie predicted, I can’t ever permanently leave.

So we sold the campus to a newly-formed non-profit created by Sarah Grimm whose stated twin purposes of sustainable agriculture and education would be furthered by continuing the farm and by renting the campus facilities to various other groups, including the college that bought our school and Karen and Joy’s businesses—and the summer camp, which my wife continues to run. How did Sarah get the money? Some of it was hers, some of it raised from our community, but the entire down payment came from Charlie; he had bequeathed her his life savings with the understanding that she would do just what she did, if it ever needed to be done.

We expected our retention of the campus and our deal to stay involved with our students to function merely as lifeboats for a sinking ship. We expected to more or less all go our separate ways. Kit spent a year as a full-time member of her husband’s band, the Blue Pixies, then got herself re-certified as both a dance movement therapist and a yoga instructor. She then taught yoga at the YMCA and volunteered her services as a therapist at nursing homes and in a women’s prison. Allen expanded his private therapy practice to full time and eventually founded an after-school program for troubled youth. Greg, long since retired from teaching, went to live with his sister, his social security check supplemented by a small pension collected from the school community at large, as per our promise to take care of the Six. The Joes moved in with their son. Raven G. went to work for Sarah supervising the care of the non-farm parts of the grounds. Rick went to work for the US Forest Service (where he stayed until shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump, when he went to work for a state agency instead) but continued to consult on the management of the campus forest. Karen and Joy continued teaching their classes and did quite well for themselves. Sadie put her energy into her restaurant, becoming Sarah’s primary buyer.

And I became a full-time landscaper, supplementing my income in the off-season as a free-lance writer and writing tutor and by sometimes doing classes or workshops for area high schools and the community college. And I had a baby. And I wrote this blog.

The blog was an idea that came up very soon after we sold the school, the idea being to “seed” some of the values of the school into the wider world. We hoped that someone would take our example and create another community such as our was—if that has happened, we have not heard of it. But we had another goal, too.

Our community was never unique. I’m not the only one who has had the experience of meeting people who seem to be masters in our sense of the term but appear not to have gone through our program—they are out there. And there are places, or corners of places, where magical little communities very like ours grow. They aren’t obvious. In fact, they’re generally hidden, much as ours was, in plain sight—a school or a business or a private club or a neighborhood, wherever two or more gather amazing things can happen and yet the third who has also gathered might notice none of it. It’s very strange, yet somehow comforting.

So the other mission for this blog was to give encouragement to such places, and to all those who seek them.

The reality is that if our school is seen as a larger phenomenon, a reality beyond a single institution, then it never closed. It still very much exists. If you want to figure out the specific reality of my stories, who we really are, what really happened, you can give up now—I’ve hidden us so deeply you’ll never find us. But if you want to join us as a student, you’ll find we are all around you. All you must do is recognize our existence and want to join and we will take you in at once.

That paragraph was to be be the end of the blog. I thought of it years ago, almost word for word, though I have not written it down before today. I figured that the tragedy of Charlie’s death and the school’s closing might impel some readers to take me up on my invitation, to take seriously and offer care to the secret magical places and people around them, and then maybe my losses, our losses, would mean something.

But while I’ve been writing, a curious thing has happened, to me specifically and to us generally (something I found last week would require enough words to explain that I had to split the last post into two parts).

I have found myself transformed once again, no longer merely a science major who likes to write but a chronicler, a person concerned with and knowledgeable about the uses of narrative to communicate, to frame, and to transform. It has become my special skill and magic, and while I once felt myself inadequate as a leader of our community, I now have a place here. It has grown around me. And around me, around us, has grown a new version of “us.”

It happened gradually, as our meetings shifted from nostalgic get-to-gethers (sometimes precipitated by people wanting to know how the blog was coming, or by me wanting to consult the memories of others on points I wasn’t sure of) to catch up to semi-organized discussions of our various projects and how they fit into some kind of whole. We became, once again, the Six. I’ve given you hints of this process as it happened, told you of our decision—or was it a discovery?--to begin moving forward, to build something new.

Initially what we built did not resemble a school. Sadie had her restaurant, and when she decided to move it into a slightly larger space with a better location, we pooled our resources to help her buy a building with a restaurant and two other retail spaces on the first floor, a large finished basement, and two second-story apartments. The basement became the new home of Aaron’s library, which he had been running as a lending club through the mail from his home since the school closed. I took charge of one of the retail spaces with several business partners, also from the community, and sold science books and supplies and art supplies. Kit took charge of the other retail space and built a metaphysical book store. We rented the library after closing hours to 12-step groups and other community functions, and turned one of the apartments into an Air B&B. The other we gave to Greg, rent free, when his sister had to give up her house and move to an assisted living facility. We taught classes to the public. We took on small numbers of students secretly, bringing them on as novices at Brigid, just as we used to.

By that time the school that had once been ours had failed, its resources folded into other programs of its owner—enrollment had dropped precipitously after we left. We started talking about what might be done with the campus.

The election of Donald Trump was a turning point for us. The “real world” no longer felt safe for us or our values, and we realized we needed to create a refuge for ourselves, not to hide from the world, which is what we had done before, but as a base from which to act. We needed our own land again.

It took a few years to organize, but...we’re back. This Brigid, as I prepared to finish the blog, we inducted our first new group of resident novices. Some are new, but some have been secret students of ours for a few years now. We even have two candidates living with us.

We’re not the same school that we were. We couldn’t be—we don’t know how far the antipathy of that student’s family extends, for one thing. For another, we recognize now how vulnerable we were and have taken steps to make ourselves less so. The Six is no longer the institutional leadership on paper, nor are we one entity, we we used to be. Instead, we are a group of legally separate organizations, one of which is the school, which rents the campus facilities from Sarah’s non-profit. Never again can an outside attack threaten the entire structure—the school could close again, but it could be immediately replaced by a new legal entity with new people acting as its public face and behind that face the rest of us doing the same work.

It’s just in time. COVID19 has given us very good reason to retreat to a place that can, after all function independently. We grow our own food, and since the restaurant and our stores are shut for the duration, we none of us need to leave. We have invited our friends, allies, and families to join us—the student body is still quite small, so we have plenty of space and food—and some have taken us up on our offer. For over a month, now, no one have come in or gone out, we’re like the mysterious workers in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and so far none of us are sick.

But who “we” are has changed, too. Of the Six who I knew as a student, only Allen and Kit remain. Greg has completed his retirement. Karen and Joy have been gradually drifting away from us for years, getting involved with unrelated projects, and when we decided to re-open the school they elected not to come with us. And of course Charlie is gone.

I am the new Craft Master, though my primary craft is writing. Allen retains his old position, but Kit is the new Spirit Master, replacing Greg (yearlings no longer do zazen; they do yoga), and leaving a vacancy that Ebony has filled. Ebony is the new Art Master, teaching mostly visual art and poetry. Breathwalker is the new Athletics Master (as well as our new grouchy old mystic). He spent many years as a long-distance hiker, before permanent injuries took him off the trail, and walking is the primary athletic form he teachers. It’s harder than it sounds. Our new Healing Master is a physical therapist named Brian who earned his Green Ring in the years when we didn’t have a campus.

Two months in, our new residential community seems to be doing well, still feeling its way into existence, but we seem to be finding our way. Yesterday’s on-campus Easter service was well-attended and lovely.

June and I and Carly (who is, by the way, named after Charlie, as are several other sprouts with similar names all born since his death) have given up our old apartment and moved into the suit of rooms formerly occupied by Charlie and Greg. June and I share one room, Carly has the other, and there’s the shared living room, too. It’s less space of our own than we used to have, but room and board is free and we have the entire campus as our home.

Greg, who was less sentimental than I, chose a different room from which to enjoy his retirement. He was 93 and though still perfectly clear mentally, he was getting frail physically and spent much of his time dozing or getting to know our newly-acquired barn cats.

Did you catch the past-tense?

This morning Greg Monroe did not wake up. When he didn’t come to breakfast, Kit went to check on him and found his body cold and stiff in bed. He must have died quietly very early in the night. Brian is dealing with the details of properly caring for the body and for the legal details of a death. We have another funeral to plan, and while we’re not sure how, yet, Greg’s ashes, too, will enrich our soil. And yet Kit found the body not quite as cold as it might have been, for his remains lay guarded and warmed by all our barn cats. We have no idea how they got inside.

I was among the first Kit told, and I returned to the Mansion in time to see Greg’s body, though not in time to see the cats. I did not involve myself in the initial discussion of whom to call and what to do, but instead retreated to my room. I wasn’t scheduled to teach until the afternoon—now, of course, classes are canceled for the week—and I blog post to write.

I sat there in my room, which used to be Charlie’s room, thinking about Greg and about my history here with this school since I have known him and everything that’s happened, everything I’ve learned and done, and thinking too about what I wanted to write in this, my last post. Because that’s what this is. It’s the end. The end always comes, sooner or later, and while beginnings are not guaranteed, they tend to come, too. This story may someday become a novel, and if that’s going to happen I’ll post about it here—so please stay tuned. Or you can go back and read the story again from the beginning. It’s all here. It’s not going any place.

So my thoughts went and my ideas moved, and I got out my laptop to write this post. But before I began to write I got up and I stepped outside and I played my tin whistle on my balcony.

Afterword: Post 1: Diagnosis

So the story is finished and yet it is not complete. You’ll want to know how I came to write this blog, for one thing. I’ve been referring to the closing of the school, and you’ll want to know how and why that happened, too, and maybe you’ll have noticed that I’m a member of the Six but have not explained how or why.

In short, I’ve brought my story up to a happy ending in February of 2010, but not up to the spring of 2012, when I made my first disjointed attempts at blog-writing (and started giving you equally disjointed hints as to the state of our community now), and some pretty heavy things must have gone on during the gap. You want to know what.

Fair enough.

I’m curious as to how much you’ve guessed? I haven’t meant to drop hints, but as I suspect you’ve noticed I am not the most disciplined or organized of writers, and I’ve let a few things slip. For example, I have not been able to bring myself to lie and refer to Charlie in the present tense.

Yes, one of the things that happened during those missing two-and-a-quarter years was the illness and death of my teacher—I still don’t like writing those words, especially not since some of you may not have realized and so for you, and for me when I wrote to you, he was alive until fifteen seconds ago. I suppose I could have waited, at let it be a surprise for you at its proper place in the narrative, but honestly you would not have been waiting very long because his diagnosis was almost the first piece of school-related news I received after earning my Ring, and his diagnosis was terminal from the start. The only doubt was how long that termination would take and how it would go.

Of course, here is where Charlie would grump (and here is where the part of Charlie that he gave to me does grump) that life is a sexually transmitted terminal condition, and that the only real uncertainty is always how long we have and what we will do in the time we get.

The other events I have to relate are related to that one, but not directly triggered by it, and I’ll get to them in their turn.

In a way, of course, Charlie’s death was a predictable part of the story, whether I slipped up and dropped hints or not, simply because of how I’ve chosen to structure the tail. Charlie always referred to the art of storytelling—and story composition—as “sectioning reality.” He was referring to conic sections, a group of two-dimensional figures that can be derived by slicing a cone: a slice perpendicular to the cone’s long axis yields a circle; a slice slightly off the perpendicular yields an ellipse, or, if it intersects the flat bottom of the cone, a hyperbola; a slice parallel to the long axis yields a parabola; and a slice along the long axis yields a triangle. Such different shapes, and they are all true two-dimensional approximations of the same three-dimensional shape. Similarly, since a story must also be a radical simplification of reality, multiple seemingly incompatible stories can all be derived from the same real events and yet all be true (doesn’t mean all stories are true, though; you can’t derive a square from a cone without lying). And I’ve chosen to section these particular events largely as a story about a teacher, and these are almost always elegiac in the end.

I mean stories about teachers from the viewpoint of the student. The natural and expected-if-not-universal of these is that the teacher dies, the same way that the natural and expected end of a romance is happily-ever-after. Why is this? I thought, for a while, that it was because only when a teacher dies do former students get moony enough to want to write an idealized account of the person. After getting to know Charlie, I guessed that maybe teachers usually object to being put on pedestals and so forth, and that students therefore can’t get away of much in the way of tributes until the teacher is safely out of the way. But neither explanation applies to people like Yoda, who are figments of their author’s imagination from the start.

I think now, rather, that the answer depends on a curious fact; at what point can you tell that the teacher has succeeded? At the point when the student no longer needs him or her. And how better can you prove, as a storyteller, that the point has been reached but to say that the teacher is no longer available, has died?

Except, I still feel like I need Charlie, and here I am without him—except for the grumpy, intelligent, and sarcastic voice in my head. That I appear able to keep.

As I mentioned before, I’m not going to tell these final stories journal style, as though reporting on the events o the week as they happened. Most of them played out far too slowly, with weeks going by between major plot points, and some of them played out far too fast, or overlapped in time with others. Then, too, I was not living on campus during those months and years, so there were long stretches of time when I had no clear idea what was happening at school at all.

So I’m going to try a more novelistic structure, where each section covers the time period that it must, short or long, on order to deliver a narrative or thematic unit (oh, god, I’m talking like an English textbook….). I don’t know how many posts this is going to take, but I’m hoping for eight and a nice congruence with the structure of the rest of the blog.

Here goes.

So, June and I moved out about a week after I earned my ring. We moved into a three-bedroom apartment carved out of the back of an old farmhouse. The owner lives in the front half and there’s a nice yard, which we agreed to henceforth take care of in exchange for a very good deal on the rent. It’s within biking distance—albeit a very long biking distance—of campus, some basic shopping, and the landscaping company Charlie used to own and where I still work (had I said before that he used to own it? He did—the friend of his who has owned it the whole time I’ve been around was his business partner). June can carpool to work.

We had to buy bikes, of course, since we can’t use the campus bikes all the time anymore, and we decided to buy a car, too. Cars are hard to avoid. We learned to eat from the store. We had utility payments. What all did to our carbon footprints I hated to think. I let my boss, the landscaper, know that I’d be available for a full fifty hours a week in the season, rather than my traditional twenty, and I pursued work as a writing coach for high school and college students, and so I prepared to earn my way in the world.

I made no attempt to find work as a paid ally at school because while I had demonstrated that I could be a useful employee there, so had lots of other people, and we couldn’t all be employees. I planned to wait for an actual opening, and I made my peace with the fact that one might never come. I believed myself to be competent, but not superlative, so I figured I’d just always be beaten out by the competition.

Months went by in which I rarely visited campus and I interacted with the people who lived there almost as rarely. I may have been trying to establish myself emotionally as well as physically without them, but the school is no insular, so different from everything else, that it can be difficult to get across without a determined effort of will. I saw Allen, Kit, and Steve occasionally—I was pleased to hear that Steve was making steady progress towards ring—but Charlie does not really socialize. I exchanged a few short emails with him only. I planned to return for sabbats, but for one reason or another I didn’t, not even for Lammas, so I didn’t get to find out what the masters do in the Mansion on that day (though I have since experienced it, and will tell you). Life went on and started to feel normal. June and I talked about maybe starting a family.

And then….

On a beautiful fall day in early October, Charlie texted me. He’d only recently gotten a cell phone, holding out even after all the other Masters had them, but I’d heard that lately he’d taken to using the technology to issue edicts. From what I’d gathered, this one was typical;

Come to campus today. Ch.

The “Ch” was a signature. After a lifetime of writing letters, Charlie could not help signing his texts.

I had planned to spend the day doing yard work, but there was no arguing; Charlie had turned his cell phone off. I had no idea what Charlie wanted or how long I’d be gone, but I keep a “bag for anywhere” packed for adventure or emergency, so I just wrote a note for my wife, changed into my uniform, and went—driving, not biking, as the day was far advanced by then.

When I found Charlie he was digging in the front bed, kneeling on a foam pad to save his knees and his uniform pants. He was in almost exactly the same place and position as he had been when I first asked to help him garden, over ten years before, a coincidence that struck me, for some reason, as eerie. He looked old. Of course, Charlie had a right to look old; he was almost seventy-three, but I had never thought of him that way before. Was it only the juxtaposition of the present with memory, or had he really aged a decade or more in the months since I had seen him last? I put the thought from me as he stood to greet me and dusted off his knees.

“Walk with me, Daniel,” he said, with no preamble. So we walked, strolled casually out onto the Flat Field towards the Edge of the World, and he politely asked me about my wife, my parents, and my writing. I answered as briefly as I could, as I knew he had not asked me there to make small-talk. When we reached the Edge, he finally got to the point.

“Daniel, I’m dying,” he said, and the bottom dropped out of my mind.

His voice was businesslike, unsentimental, and I just looked at him. He took my looking as a question, and answered me.

“I have pancreatic cancer. Stage four. My doctors think I have about three, maybe six months to live, with treatment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fighting this, but I don’t think I’m going to win. Everybody has to die of something, and I think this one may be mine.”

I said nothing, and again he continued as though responding to me.

“I need you to take my spring classes. You don’t have to take all of them, there are other people I can ask, and if I can I’ll help you. Rick is taking over groundskeeping, and you can help each other. But I want you to take over as many as you can. I can’t think of anyone more qualified.”

I could not speak. My mind was a mess of competing emotions such that I could not express any of them. I just looked at him. It was such a beautiful day, that day, and he looked so at home in it, his face nearly expressionless, he short, gray hair somewhat mussed by the breeze, his eyes—and I had never noticed this before—the same color blue as the sky behind him. He was so incontrovertibly alive. I could not help it; I hugged him.

It was the only time we ever embraced, and he was stiff, at first, then hugged me back warmly. His body felt too thin—still strong in a muscular sense, but already bony to the point of frailty. His hair smelled like fresh fall leaves. When we disengaged he looked guarded for a moment, searching my eyes, perhaps, for traces of pity. He patted my arm, then turned to walk back to the mansion. We spoke of ordinary things, how many chicks the phoebes in the car port had fledged that year, which of the migratory birds had already left, and so forth. It was gossip to him. It was current events. Charlie did not watch TV, and I had learned he no longer read newspapers. I couldn’t tell if he had taken my hug as an answer to his request, or if he had simply assumed I would do as he told me—I always had. as his student. Maybe he just knew I was in no position to think. When we got back to the beds he excused himself.

“I may be dying, but I still have things I need to do. And you need to go meditate, or whatever it is you do these days.”

I took my leave as though the day were still ordinary, and walked back to my car. But I did not get in. My bag for anywhere was in the back seat. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be, except where I was. I called my wife, relieved to get her voicemail so I didn’t have to deal with her response to my news just yet. Then I grabbed my bag and headed to the office to ask Sharon for the loan of an extra cloak for warmth. When I told her to tell Charlie I’d take his classes, all of them, she merely thanked me and said we’d make arrangements right after Brigid—but her eyes filled with tears. Then I left, headed uphill to my spot among the trees, my need for it itself a tribute to my teacher.

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: 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: 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: 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: Interlude 2

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

And as seems to happen often, the holiday has snuck up on me—we’re delaying the celebration until Saturday (which still seems a lot closer than I thought it was) but the holiday is actually on Wednesday. June and I have thought about having a private family celebration on the actual day, but we’re not sure how that will work. The school tradition, which is really the only way to celebrate Beltane that I’m familiar with, is so community-based. We can’t dance a Maypole just the three of us. Maybe we’ll get take-out and Netflix a David Attenborough documentary. That seems a pretty good way to celebrate the fecundity of the planet.

If the school still existed in the same form it used to, I suppose we’d be preparing to go to the Island. For all the times I went with Charlie as an assistant, I never did go as one of the Six. Maybe one day I will.

The funny thing about being of the Six only now, with the community in a kind of exile, is that there is a constant looking back, a constant attention to how things would be, or how they’re supposed to be, the present defined by the shadow of the past, a past I wasn’t even part of the six for. But Charlie would say that such a sense of dislocation is normal, that everything is always in the process of becoming something else. The idea that either the past or the future is solid or stable is an illusion, though a persistent one.

My mind is foggy today. I’ve had a persistent head-cold for a while lately and all I want to do is sleep, but I can’t really afford to take any time off. For one thing, I’ve got a holiday to help plan. And I’m not even all that sick.

I’m just under the weather enough that I can’t tell whether what I’ve just written about change and time and all of that is profound or just nonsensical.

In any case, happy early Beltane.

-D.

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 1.

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

I'm making this my interlude week, even though it seems a little early, because I've decided I like posting the sabbat posts before the big day, not after--like how Christmas movies mostly come on before Christmas. It's a matter of anticipation.

For the first time in a long time, I find myself having to issue a clarification.

Reading over what I wrote last week...I described Sarah Kelly as sometimes seeming "crazy." I think I did use the scare-quotes, I was trying to indicate a subtlety of language that might have gotten lost. I meant that she sometimes acted in a a way that prompted me to think "she's crazy," probably because the bizarreness of her behavior frightened and confused me. I didn't mean that she actually was all the things that word implies.

"Crazy" is a pejorative, an insult based on the assumption that nobody wants to be compared to a mentally ill person. Of course, it insults mentally ill people in the process. So, first of all, I probably shouldn't use words, even in scare-quotes, that require me to explain the following week that I used insulting language but didn't mean it. I'm sorry.

Second of all, the popular ideas about what mental illness looks like are all wrong, or at least, I've never seen any of the several people I know who have such diagnoses act anything like what people do when they mimic mental illness as a joke--you know, maniacal laughter, exaggerated reactions to goofy hallucinations, all of that. So when I say that sometimes Sarah acted "crazy," I'm not only being insulting, I'm also not doing a very good job as a writer.

That word doesn't tell you what I mean.

I've never seen Sarah react to a hallucination, though she's told me about some of them after the fact. I have witnessed others' reactions--a large minority of the school population had them. The reasons, in a psychiatric sense, probably varied. Some had a history of hallucinogen use and had "flashbacks." Others had "natural" hallucinations for one reason or another. Interestingly, many did not define it as a problem but called it clairvoyance--the difference between a vision and a hallucination is complex and debatable and I'm not going to get into it now, except that there are people who see things and appear perfectly sane.  Other people see things and don't.

Usually when someone sees something they know it's not real in the normal sense and don't react overtly, except possibly by seeming briefly distracted. They might react emotionally to what they see--the vision might be funny, confusing, pretty, frightening, or whatever else--but it's the way people react to emotional thoughts or memories. It's not like people ducking to avoid invisible birds or that sort of thing.

What Sarah did that frightened me into thinking of her as "crazy" was to seem subtly irrational. The "weird" or "off" behavior I  noticed before she was hospitalized didn't come back, but sometimes when she spoke she would sound like she was speaking from inside the illogic of a dream.  More often she was simply easily distracted or confused. I don't know how much of it was her meds and how much was the disease. It never looked goofy, free-spirited, or fun--she is all those things, but only when she's healthy.

I  also said she couldn't be much of a mother--that, too, needs clarification. She couldn't be much of a care-giver, not for the first several years of Sean's life, not so much because of the dream-logic issue, though that didn't help, but more because she couldn't handle a lot of stress. But of course she was very much a mother in the other sense. She spent a lot of time with him, sharing affection and attention, while Steve and various friends and family took care of feeding, cleaning, safety, and all of that. Sean has no doubt whatever who his mother is.

Anyway, I wanted to clear these things up.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Interlude 8

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2019, here.

I had a dream about Charlie the other night. It was “unrealistic,” as dreams tend to be, and all jumbled up, but I was glad to have it. We were all at the school again, only it was a fantasy-magic school, like Hogwarts, and we were all in some basement catacomb trying to open a magic box or treasure chest rumored to have killed anybody who looked inside it, the Nazis melted in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Anyway, everybody had their own ideas for how they could open the chest safely, and they were all expounding on their ideas at once, everybody talking and nobody listening, except then I noticed Charlie wasn’t talking, he was just standing off to the side with a very dubious look on his face. He got up and went to leave. I met him at the door and told him and said “I’m glad you’re going to survive. I may step out, too.” And we hugged each other for a very long time and then I woke up.

Into the dark of my bedroom I spoke, saying “I guess I did step out of that dream,” and June mumbled and shifted in her sleep.

I had not dreamed of Charlie in a long time—I do not dream on him often, and in fact I seldom dream about anybody I actually know. It felt like spending time with him. I do not know what, if anything, it means.

As usual, I meet the upcoming holiday (Brigid) disorganized. I didn’t manage to get in a post that really expressed the feeling of anticipation in the last days of January, 2009, just before I began my last year as a student. It wasn’t a particularly unusual January, all told, but I never spent very many Januaries on campus, and for most of them I was rather preoccupied by my own situation and so did not take much notice of the mood on campus. But that last January I much more sat back and watched—yearlings milling about, finishing up their year-and-a-day of zazen meditation and group therapy and unsure what might happen next; senior students returning from weeks or months off-campus and greeting friends, re-entering the odd and oddly-familiar world of the school; graduating novices disappearing into the Ordeal and the magic trick of nobody else noticing; the return of the faculty, totally unannounced and then you’d bump into one of them. The whole place had an aura of waiting, of quickening, of looking forward to the not-quite-known.

Not that I had no feelings of my own, and not that I wasn’t busy. I conducted my first several interviews, lined up several others, and in general started acting on my plan for my last year in a serious way.

And twice I tried to sneak up on Charlie and twice failed.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Interlude 7

 

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here!

Next time I address you directly, I’ll be Daniel-of-2019. Curious how this convention of naming myself after the year—which is basically accidental, it just popped into my head a while back and I kept using it—makes it sound as though it is a different me every year. And I suppose I am different, though not very different. All the different mes have a family resemblance. Is this then, goodbye? Am I about to be replaced?

Anyway.

In recent years, I’ve flipped the schedule a bit, doing the eighth interlude after the holiday, but this year I’m doing it the other way and we’ll see how it goes. June and I spent Yule on campus, of course, then Christmas and New Years with her parents. Then we came home (campus) so she could go back to work, and I sat around feeling stupid.

After all, she had a job, and therefore a definite purpose, a reason for being where she was, whereas I occupied some nebulous middle ground between furlowed employee and student without classes. Exactly why was I on campus, paying room and board, instead of with my family?

It’s not that I literally had nothing to do, since I was still supposed to be working with Steve Bees and hammering out the details of my next years’ course of study, but none of it felt pressingly important and I missed my parents. So I went to stay with them for almost two weeks, most of which I spent missing my wife and worrying about how Steve Bees was doing.

So there will be about three or four weekly entries I’ll have to get creative about, just to give you fair warning.

It’s weird to think this is the last time I’m going to be heading into a new year of writing this blog. No, this story doesn’t go on forever. A year from now, I’ll be writing about getting ready to get my ring. After that? There are a few more things I’ll want to talk about, just to wrap up loose ends and bring my story up to the point where you came in on it. I don’t know yet whether that will take months or weeks or what, but I doubt it will take the whole year. And then the various identities I’ve taken on for the project the me of this year and the me of that year and everything else, will be at an end.

And I’ll just be me.

Mastery Year 2: Interlude 6

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here.

The "vanishing" of the masters I wrote about last time no longer occurs--and if it did, I would vanish with them, being a master myself, now (a thought I still sometimes find deliciously odd).  We have no need of that particular tradition, because while we again have students, we don't live with them and are not available to them except when we choose to be--so we no longer need to choose not to be.

On balance, I think it is better for the community that the students live together and that we live with them, though doing so does create boundary problems we then have to solve, such as by vanishing and by using secret stairways and so forth. But even aside from that, there were advantages to the vanishing itself.

The withdrawal of the masters at Samhain, often in the literal middle of a sentence, symbolized and made emotionally real the losses of death, without which the Day of the Dead can come to seem merely spooky or picturesque, especially for those who have never really lost anybody. It created a frustration, in some cases an anger, a helpless recognition that all conversations, if carried on long enough, end without our permission and before everything has been said.

The withdrawal also reminded us, "us" being the students, I mean, that the school community was us, that we were its heart, and that although the masters comprised its other heart, we did not exactly need them. They could go and the school remained.

Finally, the fact that the masters left meant they could return, filing into the Chapel at Brigit, candles dark until we lit them, familiar and yet exotic, elfin, eerie, with hoods drawn up and that strange, small bell ringing....

I miss that, and I miss being able to provide that, though in truth I never was able to process in at Brigit when the school still had its campus, because I did not join the Six until afterwards. But I have processed in, for variations of the ceremony, and knowing that it is not the same, I feel sad for those students who don't get what I received.

And that, too, is part of the strange magic of Samhain, because all things pass, nothing endures forever, even the excellent things that should, and yet there is an underlying reality that ever returns.

The river moves but does not move. Lives end but life continues.

Mastery Year 2: 5th Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018 here.

Last week I was unable to post and here it is a few days after Mabon already. Things seem to be getting away from me, both in general and this week in particular--I'm playing catch-up after having a house guest for several days last week and then having to throw an unexpected party for someone I didn't even know (long story, but the party was fun and the guest of honor was...interesting).

Anyway.

So, I'm writing TWO posts today, an interlude and the Mabon post, and they will both likely be short.

Our new retail complex is starting to hit its stride. As you may remember, we now have a restaurant and two connected retail spaces, one a metaphysical bookstore and the other a natural science bookstore and gift shop. Aaron's library has moved into the basement, and there are apartments on the second and third floors, one of which is now home to Greg--though how long he'll be able to stay there is anybody's guess, as his health is getting poor. One of the other apartments is unoccupied and we use is for classes and rent it out for 12-step meetings and such.

As a campus of sorts, it's not ideal, but at least we as a community have a physical space to call home again.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: 4th Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here, feeling...wistful.

I woke up thinking about Charlie last night and could not get back to sleep. I can't really tell you the contents of those thoughts, we're not there yet in the story, but the night has left me both sleep-deprived and melancholy. Perhaps my thoughts landed thus because we're preparing for Lammas and I've been calling a lot of people I don't normally talk to, gathering the tribe, so to speak, and so I think of the past.

But you know Charlie through my words, and can appreciate my thoughts without knowing exactly what they were. So let me tell a brief Charlie story, one of my favorites, though it doesn't fit in to my history any place--for one thing, I don't remember precisely when it happened, though I was wearing brown at the time, so I must have been a candidate.

I was walking along beside the row of trees that separated the farm from the rest of campus, and I saw Charlie on the path that leads through the row and into the farm. He probably knew I was there, he knew most such things, but I can't be sure because he did not react to my presence at all. He's been hunting woodchucks and carried his game bag and his bow, but his bow was unstrung. He was done hunting for the day. And this rabbit approached him. I mean it hopped right up to him and looked at him. He looked at it--he may have spoken to it, I was too far away to hear--and then walked on, but the rabbit followed. This time man approached rabbit, maybe to test how close he could get, and the rabbit hopped away. So Charlie continued on his way, but was followed by the rabbit.

Now, Charlie did just hunt woodchucks and deer, he also hunted rabbits, and sometimes squirrels. Anything likely to interfere with our farming could find itself harvested if it entered our fields while Charlie had his bow strung. I've eaten rabbits he has killed. But when he found himself once again being followed by this abnormally friendly rabbit, he turned and spoke to it kindly. I still couldn't hear his words, but I could see his face and it shone with a kind of fond amusement.

The rabbit looked up at him and then picked up a small it of stick in its mouth and threw the stick some feet with a jerk of its head. Charlie looked at the rabbit for a few seconds, considering, and then he fetched and returned the stick. The rabbit threw it again, and again Charlie fetched it. And so on for some minutes, until a dog barked and the rabbit ran away.

I later learned that a wild rabbit someone had raised as a pet had been released on our property, and of course that must have been the rabbit I saw. A few other people saw it, too, and then after a few weeks it disappeared, probably eaten by something, but not by any off us. And what sticks in my mind is that image of the man and the rabbit playing fetch together early one summer morning before breakfast. 

I can't stay in this mood long, I've got to get to work so I can get certain tasks out of the way in time to take the holiday off. And as usual, I'm slightly unprepared, since I should have written the interlude post last week so that I could write the Lammas post this week. Everything is disorganized. Time has a way of running out. Maybe I'll write a second post this week, for the holiday?

.... .... ....  .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

And now I've been interrupted again--it's almost four and I need to pick my daughter up from her friend's house and I'd better send this off before anything else gets out of wack. Use the time you have, I guess I'm saying.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Interlude 3

Time for another interlude already? I guess it is.

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018 here.

Gosh, I've been doing this a long time, now. I only have about one more year to go--I was a candidate for three years, and then, not long after I won my mastery, the events occurred which led to my writing this account. If I continue at the current pace, I will describe those events, and thereby catch my narrative up to the point where you came in, sometime in the spring of 2020. This story does, in fact, have an ending....

What shall I do after we reach the ending? I haven't decided yet. As you may have noticed, I regard this blog as far from perfect, and I'd like a chance for some kind of do-over. I might write the story over in book-form--possibly several books?--or I might do it again as a blog, but with all the entries pre-written and nicely edited and organized. I lean one way and then the other, depending on the day. What do you think? If you have a preference or an idea, please let me know.

My plan is to write this year's Litha post this coming Monday, so that when Litha itself occurs I can include the link to the post in online holiday wishes. The alternative is to wait until the following Monday, which seems less satisfying, emotionally. Better early than late?

It's funny, in the secular world, people celebrate either Memorial Day or 4th of July in much the same spirit as Litha, as though they need to celebrate something in that spirit. And neither of those holidays is really for that. Memorial Day properly memorializes dead soldiers, it ought to be more like a species of Samhain in feel, but no. It's like Litha erupts through whatever aperture it can.

And perhaps Litha as we celebrate it is itself an eruption of something. After all, I don't know what the "original" Litha celebrations were like. Maybe we're not doing it right. But something has to go here, it seems, and this holiday we have cobbled together is our something.

And I like it pretty well.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Interlude 2

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here,

Gosh, that was awful, the early days of Sarah's diagnosis. We all thought both that she had to be cured, must be cured (or proven not really sick in the first place) and that she would be. A kind of hopeless hopefulness. In time we discovered neither was true.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but it's worth saying that there's a tendency to believe that life is the plans that we make, the hopes and ideals and expectations, and that illness and accident and all of that is the interruption, stuff you deal with so you can get back to living your life. Except the interruptions never stop, and there are no interruptions, because it's all life.

That was the central lesson I was supposed to be teaching Steve, I think, but I was slow to understand it myself.

Much of the politics of the past year and a half have seemed like an interruption, an aberration I can't quite believe in, now that the first shock is over. We're ok, as long as "we" is defined narrowly. I suppose "we" are always ok, until suddenly we aren't, and the important thing is how narrowly "we" must be defined to remain ok. Greg often reminds us of this, as does Steve.

And so, we continue to act, deliberately, if we have to, as though this unbelievable turn of the nation's fortunes is real, and worth doing something about. We do this by acting on our convictions, making a safe and sacred space, and sharing it. We have a small community again, about thirty students total who have passed the entrance exam, plus about sixty or seventy more who are frequent attendees of our various public workshops and events.

We are interrupting the interruption.

Mastery Year 2: First Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel-of 2018, here.

I don't have much to say. It was curious writing last week's post on the birth of Steve and Sarah's child, since so my of my reaction to those events had to do with my awareness of not being a father yet. The idea of being on deck, that Steve was the first of us to have a child but that the rest of us would follow. And now, of course, I do have a child, so writing that post just really reminded me of how much my life has changed.

I never had that feeling about the men I went to high school with, or about the men I went to grad school with--that sense of there being an us, a kind of generation or cohort, going through milestones together. I'm not sure why. I mean, I know how, I know the mechanics of the cohesion and its absence. My high school buddies and I drifted apart as we started separate careers and partnered up--I'm still friends with most of them, but barely. I see them on Facebook. We don't talk much except to say how we should talk more. And my grad school friends were never close (except, obviously, June), and most of them were married, or otherwise in committed partnerships, when we met. So there wasn't this before-and-after feeling.

Ollie, Steve, and I were single together. Now we all have families. Andy and Eddie and Rick were part of our group, too, and still are, but haven't taken the plunge. Eddie is still in love with every woman he meets, Andy does not seem to date, and Rick...is still Rick. But the sense of brotherhood holds.

What I don't know if why moving on from adolescence broke up my adolescent social group, or why I never developed that sense of brotherhood with my friends in grad school, even the ones who were single with me.

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm not friends with women. You know I am friends with women. It's not even that I'm closer to my male friends. Maybe it's that I identify with men more. Or something. I've never had this sense of camaraderie in the face of milestones with the women.

How did I get on this topic?

I have only one "programming note," as it were. Steve's wife's name is Sarah, and she's going to become an important "character" this year, which presents a problem because, of course, Sarah the farm manager also remains a character. We never gave them separate nick-names or anything like that. Usually it was clear from context which was which, and if someone wasn't sure they could ask. But you can't ask, or at least I'd be a pretty sorry writer if I made you post comments to the blog in order to find out who I'm talking about. If I were writing all of this as pure fiction, I wouldn't run into this mess because I could give everybody unique, un-mix-up-able names, like you're supposed to do in fiction, but the fact of the matter is, in the real world you end up with a repetition of names.

So I'm just going to have to use last names more often than we actually did. Sarah Grimm was the farm manager and Sarah Kelly is Steve's wife. They get along fairly well, incidentally.

-best, D

Mastery Year 1: Interlude 8

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here.

So, later this week is Brigid, the day we traditionally started a new school year. I'll write the Brigid post next week, after the fact. In the here and now, I'm busily helping to prepare for our community's Brigid celebration the first full one we've held since the school closed.

What I mean by "full" is that all the students will assemble for the induction of new students. Yes, we have students again--twenty of them, five new this year. It's not like it used to be. Aside from not having a residential campus, we're not an accredited school, so rather than teaching a lot of courses ourselves, we direct students in meeting their requirements for us through other schools. That's part of why we have fewer students--we simply have less to offer.

As I may have mentioned, most of what we do now is give public workshops and talks. Only a small minority of our regular attendees realize we have something more and pass the entrance test, but some do. And so, we, as a community, are growing again.

Since the election, we have gotten very serious about maintaining a community where certain things are important, so that none of us get burnt out or complacent.

So, to wrap up the catching -up process I've spent this January on, I want to talk about the candidates' group.

Candidates, you may recall, were (and someday, will be again) those students who have graduated, completed Absence, and returned to become masters. Not all masters ever have a leadership role in the school, but only masters can. The mastery program isn't accredited, and indeed a lot of us spent our Absence getting masters' degrees elsewhere--I did, Rick did, Ollie did, Ebony did--you don't need a masters' degree to be a master, but you need to take mastery seriously. If the area of your mastery in healing, you need to go to med school, or its equivalent. You can't just be a master because you say so.

The candidates form a distinct group because there are only ever a few at a time, because they have so much in common, and because they all take two main classes together, Candidate's Seminar and Chaplain's Seminar, every semester. So we get pretty close.

Except that I never got especially close with Oak (though I liked and respected him) or Veronica, and Veery and I continued to have nothing to say to each other, despite having dated for several weeks, years earlier, and in fact I did not talk to any of the three, except in an incidental way ("please pass the salt") the entire year, outside of our shared classes.

Jasmine and I started to become friends, years ago, when we partnered to win to Ostar egg hunt, and I started teaching her about birds and she started teaching me about photography. But somehow our incipient friendship fizzled, and we drifted apart. When I returned for my candidacy (she had returned the year before), we picked up where we had left off, as I started attending her photography classes (as did Ebony) and, once I started teaching, she attended my classes in natural history and so forth. It was (and, to a lesser extent, remains) an exchange of skills, not a deep friendship, but we get along with.

And then there's Eddie, who returned in order to deepen his work with therapy dogs into some kind of spiritual practice and ministry.

It wasn't immediately clear to anyone--even his master, Joy--how he was supposed to accomplish that deepening. Usually, you develop competency in several areas as a novice, then as a candidate, pick one area to get really, really good. Developing that aspect of mastery--skill and the ability to teach--then serves as a focus for developing those other aspect of mastery that are harder to define. But Eddie was already very, very good at training and placing therapy dogs. He wanted more. But what?

He spent the first four or five months of his candidacy teaching workshops on campus and volunteering at area animal shelters. Then Joy started helping him design and market a series of classes for outside participants and their dogs, such as basic obedience, behavior correction, and agility training. During his Absence, Eddie had worked as a dog groomer and a vet tech (he's always done most of his work with therapy dogs for free), and Joy wanted him to have more professional options. She also helped him start the process of getting professional certification as a trainer, which isn't required but does help. But all of that was secondary to what he'd come back to do.

I think it was in early November--after Samhain--when Joy finally gave Eddie two directly relevant long-term assignments.

The first was to do a series of six-week studies on people who have diagnoses consistent with having therapy dogs or some other kind of service animal, like a seeing eye dog. The idea was a kind of sociological study of the need for service animals, though I think it was obvious from the beginning that the scholarly nature of the assignment was a cover--yes, he had to do the study, but Eddie was actually being assigned to get to know potential clients on a deeper, more personal level, and the idea of doing research simply gave him a socially appropriate context through which to get to know people.

At the beginning of the study the person had to be considering getting a service animal of some kind, but not have one yet. Eddie had to spend at least five days with each research target over the course of the study, had to conduct at least two formal interviews, and write a report. In payment for the person's willingness to be a research subject, Eddie also had to devote at least six days to doing some sort of service for the person that didn't directly involve dogs.

He found his first several participants by talking to local vets, animal shelters, and doctors and therapists for humans. His first "subject" was a middle-aged man who had gone blind as a complication of mismanaged diabetes. Eddie simply became the man's driver. By Brigid, Eddie had begun his second study, working with an artist who had debilitating anxiety. For her, he ran errands and did yard work, service that had nothing to do with her disability, she just appreciated the help.

Joy's other assignment for Eddie sounded harder--it was designed to sound impossible, actually.

He had to fully train at least one therapy dog who, in Eddie's expert opinion, initially seemed completely ill-suited to therapy work or actually wholly untrainable. That is, he had to go look for hopeless dogs, try to train them anyway, and succeed at least once, before earning his ring.

The tallness of the order, its sheer craziness, made him grin.

By Brigid, he had begun looking for hopeless dogs, but had not yet begun to train any.

There. I think we are all caught up now.

Mastery Year 1: 8th Interlude

Happy New Year, both past and present! Daniel of 2017, here, though it may well be 2018 by the time you read this. Usually I do an interlude before the sabbat, but since very little of note happened on campus in January of 2008, I'm going to take my traditional narrative break, and it seemed silly to put to or three posts in Part 8 before the break when I could just continue Part 7 instead.

I'm going to continue posting in January, but I'll use those posts to wrap up some loose ends. The problem is that I didn't originally plan to write about my years as a candidate, so I didn't think carefully about how I was going to tell the story--and then I launched my way into it, still not thinking. The result was a disjointed narrative that left some important threads out. What I should have done was to use June's yearling experience as the basic framework for the entire year, with our marriage, my work as a candidate, and the tension that developed between me and Charlie as important sub-themes.

I should also have introduced several of the yearlings, and several of the senior students who arrived during my Absence as characters, and followed the development of my fellow candidates more closely. Most especially, I should have talked more about Ebony, not only because she is my friend and her presence very much mattered to me, but also because there was some initial tension between her and June that I should have explored. It was not that either was jealous over me, they both knew better, but neither quite knew what their relationship with each other should be. It took them some months to really work that out.

All this is water under the bridge, of course, as I can't fix the past, but going on into the future, I'd like to cover some things for which the aforementioned missing stories provide needed background. Hence, the posts of January.

What were June and I doing in January of 2008? She attended Zazen daily and group therapy weekly and finished up some things for her masters to ensure she had everybody's votes to graduate. She also worked closely with Sharon to begin the process of accepting enrollments for the children's summer camp, which she would direct as an ally. I visited my special spot in the woods daily and wrote my poetry and caught up on editing and re-editing my earlier poems. I had long discussions with Sharon about what workshops I might offer over the first month and a half of the coming year, and by the end of the January I had a full slate of workshops designed and turned into her for addition to the schedule. I also did a lot of reading and a lot of wandering around contemplatively. I spent several long weekends at home with my parents.

And, of course, I generally avoided telling June about the Ordeal. That was hard, but I managed. With certain repercussions, which we worked through.

What did we do New Years' Eve?

New Years' Eve we had our traditional low-key party, just most people on campus collecting in the Great Hall for drinks after dinner. That year, we also had some great cookies, bourbon balls, fruit cake (I like fruit cake!) and assorted other munches that many of us, me included, ate way too much of. Some of the masters wandered in and out, but none stayed very long. As usual, Greg spend the most time with us, almost an hour. Nobody got drunk, and none of us got entertainingly goofy with exhaustion, either. We did not go outside and have a parade, as we did my first year, which was just as well as the night was very cold.

Maybe twenty minutes before midnight, I went upstairs to look for something, I forget what--it may have been a copy of one of my poems that I wanted to share--and couldn't find it. I went rifling through my books and papers and drawers and boxes and piles to no avail, and I lost track of time.

Finally, June appeared at my door and got my attention by flicking off the light. I looked up to see her almost silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. She had a glass of hard cider in each hand.

"It's almost midnight," she said.
"How almost?" I asked.
"I don't know. I don't have a watch."

So, we stepped out onto my balcony and waited. The night was still and crystalline and salted with stars. We got colder and colder, and wrapped our cloaks about each other like the wings of a pair of bats. After perhaps five minutes, noise bloomed along the horizon, distant cheers, celebratory gunshots, and a few fire crackers. We could not hear anything from downstairs, the building being very well insulated. Of course we'd closed the door behind us.

We toasted each other and the new year, there on my balcony, in the starlit dark.

Mastery Year 1: Interlude 7

Hi, all, this is Daniel-of-2017, and I am genuinely curious how I only got through four posts between sabbats this time. Wasn't it just Mabon a few weeks ago?

It's not just that time seems to be flying, though that happens, too. It's that there are six weeks between sabbats, so why did I only get four weekly posts in? The problem must be that I posted for Mabon late, whereas I'm posting a little early for Samhain. I don't want to simply pass the organizational buck to the next season, after all. I want to prepare for this holiday early.

Samhain is harder to forget about than Mabon or Lunasadh, or several of the others, because it coincides with a mainstream holiday, Halloween. It's funny, I know a lot of Wiccans who really like Halloween, who see it as very much an extension of Samhain, but as I started noticing my first year on campus, the two holidays are very different. Samhain honors and celebrates the dead as beings who are still part of our lives, people who are welcome to come have dinner with us, if they can. The symbols of fruit (pumpkins, apples, pomegranates) and seeds (corn, acorns) and gorgeous fall leaves (rather delayed, in the case of this year--our area has been well above normal in temperature for weeks, now) all hint at sweetness, fullness, and the promise of regeneration. Samhain is about the thing that does not die at death. In contrast, Halloween, with its symbols of bones and blood, tombstones, and scavenging rats, focuses very much on the things that die.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with celebrating Halloween, but it's not really my thing, especially since there's no rule that says you can't celebrate Samhain and eat Halloween candy at the same time. But I am kind of surprised that so many people like both holidays--something about being "witchy."

I'm not sure what else to say. I'd planned to spend a few more weeks talking about the end of June's school year and the progress my fellow candidates were making, but then again, I also planned to talk about some of the novices I met that year, especially the yearlings who made up most of June's new friends, and here I realize I've introduced NONE of them as characters...most of what I plan doesn't happen, but then things I didn't plan do happen, and that's usually better.

In any case, I do remember being sad about the annual eclipse of the faculty--the masters mostly leave campus after Samhain, and those who remain are not generally available to talk to students. I was, at the time, in a difficult middle position where I was genuinely friends with some of them, even close friends, and yet when they distanced themselves from students in order to take a break from working, they distanced themselves from me, too. Too, I had spent so much of the summer and early fall feeling angry and rebellious at Charlie, and as a result, he'd become angry at me, and it felt like just as we were starting to get along again when he went away.

Of course, that's the one scary thing about Samhain and all it represents--however early you start preparing, in some sense it is always a surprise. There is never enough time

Mastery Year 1: 6th Interlude

Hi,

Daniel-of-2017, here.

Mabon snuck up on me. Once again, not the holiday itself, but simply the fact that I would have to post about it. Poor organization on my part.

It's also Rosh Hashana. I wish I had a post available to honor the holiday with, but I don't actually remember any related stories from my time as a student. The few observant Jews at school generally left campus to see family and to attend services, so there was no on-campus holiday event. Some years I would miss it entirely, other years someone would say something and I'd remember, but none of those exchanges were interesting enough to write about or, really, remember.

And in 2007, the year the current posts are set, Rosh Hashana occurred several weeks earlier than the equinox, so it wasn't on anyone's mind during Mabon.

Really, I do wish I could acknowledge Jewish holidays more, but they were a very minor note at school.Obviously, our years were organized around the pagan holidays--the Wiccans, most of the unaffiliated pagans, and most of the heathens (those who follow Norse-derived practices) all used that calendar and comprised the vast majority of the student body, so it made sense to treat those holidays as the official ones of the school. The Christian and secular holidays occupied a distant second position. Some people celebrated Jewish or Buddhist holidays, or sometimes others, but those were always private celebrations. Even Greg, who could have led campus Buddhist celebrations, and often called attention to historical events, never drew attention to Buddhism. I don't know how it was decided which holidays to celebrate and which to ignore, but we didn't generally question it.

I said I'd talk about the eclipse. A group of us did, indeed, go see it. But, curiously, it isn't really something I want to get into. perhaps because each of us reacted differently and some of those reactions seem like they ought to remain private.

-best, D.