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 7: Between Things

When the funeral pyre of Charlie went out, the rest of us went to sleep for a few hours. We'd been up all night, literally. I woke mid-afternoon and found that most of the people who had come to campus specially for the service had gone. Either they had declined our offer to camp on our grounds or they and woken before I did--of course many had gone to sleep, or even left, before the service was over. I found campus quiet, lonely, almost normal and yet so very not.

I walked out to where the fire had been and found a great pile of ash and a few pieces of charred wood that hadn't burned completely, as well as the little iron tables Charlie's body had lain on. The fire had rendered them empty.

I found Rick there.

He was down on the ground with his hands in the ashes, head bowed. I watch the angle of his head shift as he heard me walk up. He knew who he was without looking--either he recognized my step or he could smell me, like an animal. Rick is aware of his surroundings the same way Charlie was.

"Damn bastard," he said, his voice thick, "this wouldn't hurt so much if he hadn't made me care."

As you may recall, Charlie's assignment to Rick was to learn to love, so Charlie had not made him care, as in the love song, by being so lovable, nor by any form of seduction, but by an entirely prosaic form of benign force; Rick wouldn't have earned his ring otherwise.

"Do you regret it?" I asked.

"No." Rick sat up a little and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He got ash on his face, wood-ash, mostly, but maybe some Charlie-ash, too. "I'm not...distant from you humans because I'm trying to hide from feelings. Mostly I just don't have the feelings you people do. Today, I have some of them. Regretting that would...undo my commitment to him, and my vow is either permanent or it was never real in the first place. Even now that he's dead it holds. I will spend my life fighting for the things, people, places that were important to him. I don't mind--my life is deeper because I care about something other than myself. But God dammit, I wish it didn't have to hurt so much."

I knelt beside him. Rick wouldn't look at me but I could see his face, see his tears making clean tracks through the ash on his skin. I wondered, not for the first time whether Charlie had anticipated that the assignment would work quite as deeply as it did, and whether Rick had not only learned to love but had actually fallen in love with the man. Does the fact that Rick is gay have anything to do with his devotion? Does the fact that I'm not have anything to do with mine?

I put my hand out, palm flat against the ash. It was still warm.

Before Rick and I could speak further, Raven G. arrived with several members of the grounds keeping team. Rick and I stood up to give them room to work, but before any of the others did anything, Raven moved the tables out of the way and combed through the ashes with a rake.

The pieces of wood she set aside, but she also found a few recognizable pieces of charred bone.

"I thought so," she said. "Jason, hand me the brick, please?" and, with us standing there, she pounded those bones to unrecognizable splinters. I heard somewhere that professional crematoria also crush any surviving bones to powder in order to produce less obviously macabre ashes to scatter, but avoiding the macabre had never been Charlie's thing, and it wasn't ours. We had a different reason. We had to make sure that no outsider would ever find human remains and start asking questions.

Bones crushed, Raven returned the resulting powder to the pile and stirred it in to the rest with her rake. Then she and the others raked up the ash and shoveled most of it into wooden buckets--there was a lot of it, mostly from the wood we'd burned, and I knew she planned to dig it into the soil elsewhere and plant trees in it. The rest they raked out flat across the burn area and into the grass, breaking up the burned, bare soil where the fire had been so they could mix in the ash a little there, make it less obvious. Soon, with rain and growth and the tracks of humans and other animals, Charlie's ashes, already indistinguishable from that of the wood, would become indivisible from the ground of campus, consummating a marriage he'd made long ago.

All of this shoveling and raking looked very utilitarian, just a work crew doing their thing.

Later that week, we re-started classes, with me teaching the full load that Charlie traditionally had. I had to fight against the urge to try to mimic him, to repeat the phrases I remembered him using, even to grumble and growl like he did, which isn't really my thing at all. I had to fight the urge to try to replace him, not only because it was hard not to feel like someone should, but because I could almost do it. I'd seen him teach the same things over and over enough times to know he didn't vary his classes much. He used the same phrases, the same trick questions, even the same jokes, quips, and grumbles almost every time. He stuck to what worked. And I remember what worked for him, to the point that I could enact those memories, play them with my voice and body like a recording, show these new students who had never known him the way it was supposed to be.

But my job was not to keep the school from changing; my job was to be the agent of change. My job was not to be a pale imitation of Charlie but to be Daniel and to find out what that meant and would mean.

I didn't expect that it would mean I'd have a full-time job at the school forever. There was a vacancy in the Six, and it would be filled eventually. While there was no guarantee Charlie's successor would teach all the same classes (our staff positions have always been defined by those who occupy them, not the other way around), I thought it overwhelmingly likely he or she would take some of them. Natural history, and particularly ecology, were too central to our community's overall identity not to be represented within the Six.

I thought perhaps Raven would get the nod. Of our six areas of mastery, Charlie had been primarily responsible for craft, so unless the Six reorganized their responsibilities entirely, the new member would be the new Craft Master, and Raven had the skill to not only take that position but to take over as chief groundskeeper, too. I didn't say so to her, though. Maybe I was afraid she'd say I should get it, though the thought never surfaced consciously. I did ask Rick if he thought perhaps he might get it, since he, too, could take on craft, and his dedication made him ideally suited to look after Charlie's legacy. He just laughed and said "Kretzman, you keep forgetting; I don't like people." For a while I thought Breathwalker might get it. I wasn't sure he could be Craft Master, but since meeting him I'd been impressed by his depth--he had an inner peace combined with a grumpy exterior that I thought suitably masterly, and anyway he seemed more like a real grown-up, being much older than Raven, Rick, and I.

The actual Six (all five of them) did not meet to discuss filling the vacancy, so far as I knew. I asked Allen about it once and he said it was too soon, that they'd probably figure it out over the winter break in time for the new person to start at Brigid. Kit would not talk about it with me at all, and Greg said only that it was time to wait and listen. Perhaps they felt the need to find out more about what the school would be without Charlie, before they could determine what it might need to go forward.

I thought about the history of the school, which I had learned in some detail while seeking my own green ring. People tend to stay in the Six a long time, so not many had ever held the honor and not many vacancies had needed to be filled, but there had been departures and arrivals--the original Six were long gone. I met some of them at Charlie's service, an odd experience to meet people whose names and stories I had already learned but only as part of history. Sally, the original Magic Master, and Ray, the original Athletics Master, who had helped found the community but then decided they didn't want to live inside  a counterculture their lives long. Once the school got accredited, they left, and the others quickly hired Charlie and Greg to round out the Six. Of course, that still left the positions of magic and athletics open, so the following year they hired a witch named Maggie and a rock climber named Jane Spider. Maggie left only a few years later, and Allen talked himself into a job in her absence. Tom, the original Craft Master, had a debilitating stroke and retired, living in the Herbarium because he couldn't manage the stairs, as Charlie did so many years later. When Tom died, Ruby, the last of the originals, left. She had been in love with him, and he was never interested. Free at last, she and Jane Spider became a couple and left to explore the world. Shrimp and Jim had already been killed together in a car accident, as I've described.

I met some of those people. I met Sally and Ray. Ray looked like an aging hippy and Sally wears heavy eye make-up and lots of crystals. Ruby is a tiny woman originally from Barbados, with deeply wrinkled blackish skin soft as velvet and a fluid physical grace. Jane could not come, but they are still together. Nobody has heard from Maggie in years, but Sally thinks she would hear if Maggie died. These people are still alive. They left by design, and gave proper notice. Even Tom, who isn't, resigned. He didn't die in the saddle, so to speak, and he was around to supervise the transition away from himself. Before Charlie, only Jim and Shrimp died while in office, and they died together a generation ago. I thought a lot about what that must have been like, to suddenly lose a third of the school's core faculty, what an awful morning announcement that must have been, and how the community put itself back together then, hiring both Kit and Joy. And I thought about how Charlie's choice to stay on the job literally until he died left the rest of us to make it up as we went along.

Beltane had been somewhat neglected--we were distracted by the beginning of Charlie's final decline and danced the Maypole without much conviction--but when Litha rolled around we threw ourselves into it, hosting our traditional giant picnic and dancing all night as the wicker figure burned.A week later, Rick succeeded in sourcing the trees we'd hoped to plant in the soil enriched with Charlie's ashes--a small group of blight-resistant American chestnuts saplings. We arranged for a small plaque bearing Charlie's name and dates to sit beneath what we hoped would become a nut orchard, and more than a nut orchard, in time.

A shift had occurred. We were all looking toward the future, if not necessarily forward to it. I, at least, expected the future to more or less resemble the past--it would be a warped and altered normal, but a normal none-the-less. Charlie was a big part of the school, but he wasn't the whole thing, and we would go on.

I was wrong.

Afterword: Post 3: The Sword Dance

After Charlie’s diagnosis, I made an effort to come to campus more often than I had in months. Partly I wanted to get to know the new students so that I would not seem a stranger when I began teaching the next year, but of course I wanted to spend time with Charlie while I could. He resisted my attempts, saying he didn’t need my neediness to remind him he was dying. A fair point, especially as I saw plenty of other people seeking his attention for the same reason, but I’m embarrassed to admit he had to tell me more than once.

On one of those occasions, in a rare moment of more obvious kindness, he explained to me that what I was trying to do wouldn’t work anyway.

“What I’m trying to do?”

“Yeah, you’re trying to save me up for later. But there is no saving up for later, just as there is no making up for lost time in the past. There is only only this moment we’re in now.”

Eventually we returned to our old habit of lunch once a week, most weeks.

Being on campus often also allowed me to spend more time with the other masters and to check in with Steve, who was then on track to claim his ring next Brigid—and I could see why. He seemed, not wiser in any definable way, but happier, more up-beat, more solid. Even his sadness, his anger, his fear, had developed a relaxed clarity.

I had no particular role on campus, so I spent a lot of time wandering around, exploring the progress of the autumn, and bumping into people and chatting. Often, Rick and Raven G. would be there also, bringing themselves up to speed to take over Charlie’s forestry, hunting, and landscaping duties. In fact, Rick had taken over hunting already. The three of us, too, would have lunch once a week.

From the others, from Allen and Kit, Greg and Joy (Karen and I continued to barely talk, though there has never been anything acrimonious between us), I heard stories. I learned that Joy had been the one to insist Charlie go to the doctor when she noticed him turn yellow—the first major metastasis was in his liver, which is typical for pancreatic cancer. I also learned that Greg, who, remember, no longer had any classes, had volunteered to take Charlie to all his appointments and treatments and so forth. It perpetually surprised me that Greg could drive (past-tense now only because Greg doesn’t drive anymore—he’s still with us), he’s so all but literally monastic, but Charlie’s driving was bad at the best of times and he needed company.

Allen told me of coming upon Greg and Charlie just as they were coming home from the first of these outings, seeing Greg drop Charlie off near the front of the Mansion before taking the car back to its lot. Allen hurried up to ask how things had gone and found Charlie in something of an emotional tizzy. They started to talk before Charlie realized that somebody might be able to over-hear him.

“Get me out of here!” he pleaded, so Allen took him out to the Edge of the World, where there is no cover behind which someone might lurk unseen without meaning to. But once out there, he wouldn’t unburden himself either, insisting that he had no time left for self-pity. Allen disagreed.

“This is grief,” he explained, bluntly, “and grief is a necessary form of psychological adjustment. Under the circumstances, I’d say you have no time left to avoid it.”

Charlie stopped quite still.

“I’m glad,” he said, “that my best friend is a psychologist and can think for me.” They had been walking slowly along, and Charlie started walking again, but Allen didn’t. After a moment, Charlie looked back at him.

“I didn’t realize I was your best friend,” Allen said.

“You’re not. I meant some other psychologist around here,” Charlie grumped, and Allen laughed and they walked on together. But Allen—what he told me later was:

“I really didn’t know. I should have. We work together, we all but live together—I don’t think we’ve gone more than a day without talking since sometime in 1987—he’s helped raise my kids—of course I’m his best friend, me and Greg, and he’s mine, along with Kit and Lo. But I didn’t think about it because I didn’t have to think about it. He was always just there. And now?”

Allen could be of no help to the rest of us in our grief processes. He needed us to help him instead.

Another person joined the team in those months—Nora. I don’t mean my friend, Nora, the bee-keeping witch, I mean Nora the medical student. I’ve mentioned her, back when she was a novice. She was close with Charlie then, which I noticed and puzzled at, as she wasn’t his student, but she and I had never really talked much. In the years since, she had graduated, first from our program and then from medical school. Midway through the residency process, though, she had stopped, saying she was exhausted and something was missing. She had returned as a candidate in order to find out what that “something might be. She had come as Joy’s student, but Joy was not giving her much in the way of direction, having decided that Nora’s own ideas for her future needed to be allowed to bubble up. Charlie disagreed.

Nora had been talking to Charlie about her ideas and her options when he suddenly said “I think you need to lose a patient.”

It took her, she told me, about a minute to realize what he was talking about. Pedagogically, he meant that she needed to go through the trauma of seeing a patient in her care die, and she needed to do it within the caring environment of the school so that the experience could be transformable rather than merely survivable. She would be set up to fail, much as Eddie had been. Practically and personally, of course, Charlie meant himself as her patient.

She did not become his doctor—she’s not an oncologist, for one thing—but she became his primary caregiver. She learned of all aspects of his treatment and kept track of his progress, asked questions of his doctors that he didn’t know to ask, made sure the efforts of the entire team stayed coordinated and sensible, and fought his insurance provider when he was too tired to do it himself. What home nursing care he ended up needing, she agreed to provide. She learned a holistic approach to healing, not in terms of methodology (she tends still to refer to most forms of alternative medicine as “woo”) but in terms of treating the patient as a whole person, an entire organism, a system, rather than as a collection of inter-related and sometimes broken parts.

And Charlie talked with her about his experience as I believe he talked to no one else. He had to, to help her, and I think that made it easier for him.

For the rest of October and into November, Charlie seemed normal, albeit physically weak and easily tired. Those who had been around him over the summer said he actually seemed healthier—he was no longer yellow, for one thing, and when he wasn’t fresh from a treatment he seemed more energetic, more focused, even happier. He felt better, clearly.

Around the middle of December, though, he started to slide ever so slightly. He started losing weight again and complained of strange pains. He said he could not sleep well. A yearling told me she’d heard a noise on her way in to the Mansion through the Green Room and found Charlie sitting on the stairs looking surprised. She wondered if he had fallen. He never said anything about it to anyone.

We heard that his chemo had stopped working. They switched him to a different chemotherapy agent and he sprang back, but not to where he’d been before.

I missed Samhain on campus—June and I had a small celebration on our own—but I made a point of attending at Yule, and for the first time joined the all-night party up on the masters’ floor. By chance, I was the only one up there who wasn’t either of the Six or immediate family of the same. Even the various non-teaching masters all had somewhere else to be, though they all planned to join us the next day. It was a very cozy gathering. I’d always wondered what those Yule parties were like, and I wasn’t disappointed, though mostly it was pretty low-key. There was a lot of good food, good drink (most of it non-alcoholic), and music, some of it recorded, much of it live. Mostly we sat around and talked or played Pictionary. They had a little Yule tree up there, a live balsam fir in a pot that I learned spent most of the winter outside in a little courtyard garden they have. Its ornaments were a mix of beloved holiday heirlooms from the families of the masters themselves.

As the night began to shift from late to early, though, Charlie stood up and everyone got quiet. I remembered having heard that he made it a practice to go out to greet the dawn much earlier than the others—the Six are always up on the mountain before the students get there, and it is they who play “Here Comes the Sun” over and over and over as the sun comes up, but dawn comes in stages and sun-up is only the final stage. The gradual lightening starts much earlier, and the first stage has already begun by the time most begin their climb—most of the Six don’t arrive more than a few minutes before the students do. But Charlie had made it his practice to go up much earlier, to be in place before the beginning of “astronomical twilight,” which is when the stars barely start to dim before the coming sun—which won’t be up for almost another two hours. And since Charlie wanted to be in place before that, he’d go out even earlier, leaving the Mansion to climb the mountain sometime around five A.M.

Only—and this was clear in the sudden silence—no one was sure he was strong enough to climb a mountain in the dark and the cold, nobody liked the idea of his attempting to do so alone, and no one had any idea what to say to him about it.

Except me.

I opened my mouth and said the first thing that came to me; “Charlie, can I come with you? I want to see what it’s like.”

And I did. I was still in some sense his student and maybe I’ll always be. If he was going somewhere, I wanted to follow. And while I had another motive for asking, and I saw in his face that he knew it and understood what I was trying to do, but I was not being disingenuous. And so he accepted and let me look after both his person and his pride.

“It’ll be silence after we leave this room,” he warned me.

“I figured. I just need to change my clothes.”

Before we could make our way out of the little group of couches and people, though, Kit stood up. I had been peripherally aware that she’d been breathing heavily and staring fixedly into space ever since Charlie stood, like someone trying to nerve themselves up to do something scary. Now, she stood up abruptly, violin in hand, and Charlie and I both sat down, expectant.

She played “The Sword Dance,” the musical component of a Morris dance associated with the winter solstice. It’s on the “Christmas Revels” album, which despite the name is mostly about Yule, and it’s an album all of us were thoroughly familiar with, since we on campus play the recording often and perform selections from it more often than that. And we all knew that the tune is preceded on the album by a few spoken lines:

“First comes Christmas, then comes spring;

Like winter I must die.

Then to life again, like spring!

Dance, men, the Sword Dance now for me!”

It’s a curious thing, this Sword Dance, since it ends with a simulated decapitation, a voluntary sacrifice presumably meant to identify the tribal chief with the cycles of the Earth and Sun, thing thing that dies and yet comes back, and in dying and coming back lives forever. In playing the song, Kit suggested the lyric and with it a whole complex of metaphysical ideas and emotional association that none of us needed to have explained—we all knew it. The experience was as immediate for us as if a Christian preacher had held aloft a Cross, meaning to invoke everything the Cross represents.

The dance involves the clashing of swords, heard on the recording as periods of rhythmic percussion. We spontaneously added that sound by clapping in time at the correct points. None of us said anything, we all just clapped along, and Charlie did nothing at all except listen and look slightly stunned.

When we were done, he stood, looked at Kit and then the rest of us.

“Thank you,” he said.

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 7: Brigid

The day dawns when everything changes: Brigid.

I woke the morning before Brigid--what would be the morning of Brigid except that our holidays begin with the evening, as do those of Jews--feeling very odd. The sunlight was very bright in my room, I'd slept late, but June was sleeping still later, so I lay there alone beside her in a kind of well-lit, exalted terror, without thinking much of anything, aware only of the Total Now.

The Total Now, of course, doesn't last very long. You think "ah, here is the Total Now," and then, just like that, it isn't. Thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, creep in. I'm not enlightened. I'm not even all that different from the doofus who came to this school so many years ago, with no clear plan but a vague desire to belong to a place that looked like a scene from Harry Potter. And yet much has shifted since then, and I knew without doubt that I'd earned the ring I'd be getting later that day. It was simply the enormity of a day longed for, worked for, daydreamed about for so long finally arriving that weirded me out.


As you may have noticed, I can talk myself into a state very easily.

June woke up. I can't tell you how I knew she woke up, as she didn't move, but I did know, as so I said "Today is The Day."

"So is every other day," she reminded me. "Have we missed breakfast? Is there coffee?"

We hadn't missed breakfast completely, but it was well in progress by the time we got down to it and some people were already trickling out, finished, which was just as well because the morning before Brigid is always very crowded--almost the entire campus has returned from winter break, but we're still eating in the Great Hall, all of us except the masters and, of course, the graduating novices. They, the ones graduating, are all in the utter, timeless blackness of the individual cells of The Ordeal, a fact which nobody ever notices until their own Ordeal begins. Once one knows about the Ordeal, the sudden absence of twenty or so people for three days is obvious, but those who don't know to look never see. I've often wondered whether that curious obliviousness is cured by training for mastery, if our ability to see things that were once invisible--and, for some of us, to become invisible ourselves--translates into an ability to see what we're actually seeing instead of only what we're looking for. Perhaps it doesn't, but as they don't play such mind games with candidates I don't really know. Anyway, breakfast was crowded.

After breakfast, June and I went for a very long walk together. It hasn't snowed in over a week, and there's been some melting, so there were plenty of trampled paths almost everywhere we wanted to go, and even elsewhere, up in the woods, the snow was not deep. The air temperature hovered around freezing, warm for this time of year. The sun flitted between quickly-moving, fleecy clouds.

Do you know, I can't think of a time anyone here has ever remarked on whether Punxsutawney Phill has seen his shadow?

We got back to the Mansion around two and had lunch. Then I left June to her own devices for the rest of the day, took a shower, and put on my uniform. By three I was waiting in the Great Hall with the other graduating candidates, as instructed.

"We're supposed to go up, now," said Raven, "as long as no one can see us go."

No one else was in the Great Hall at the moment, so we climbed the stairs, up one flight, two flights, three flights, and then, after looking around one more time to assure ourselves of having no witnesses, we climbed the fourth flight up to the Masters' floor and Raven knocked on the door.

Allen answered, and bowed us inside.

I hadn't been up there since my first year, when I was on the janitorial team. The others had never been on that team, so they had never been up there at all. It looked about as I remembered it--quiet, simple, and somewhat cramped, but every object a work of art, and most of them gifts from students over the years. The interior lights were off, and only a little indirect sunlight drifted into the hallway from one or two open suit doors. No one seemed to be about. Allen gestured for silence and directed us into a side room I'd never seen before. It had always been closed when I'd come up to clean.

The room had no windows. It was entirely interior. Inside it were narrow shelves along the walls of evidently symbolic knick-knacks, tall, heavy vases set on the floor filled with dry plant stems and other items, a small round table, much candle-light, and the Six.

A seventh master stood around the table also, a woman I didn't know, an ally

We hadn't been coached on the contents of the ritual, only its purpose, so we all stood in a clump by the door and waited to be told what to do. Allen closed the door behind us and went to join the others, all six of them standing in a ring around the table, but a step  or two back from it.

"Here is where we make masters," said Kit. "Enter the Circle, if you wish."

We all stepped between the masters and made a smaller ring around the table within theirs. On the table lay various ritual implements and symbolic objects, several of the candles lighting the room, five brown cloth belts each rolled in a tight spiral, and a small bowl containing five green rings. I couldn't take my eyes from that bowl until Kit again began to speak. Then I looked at her.

"Identify yourselves vocally--who are you?" she asked.

We each said our names.

"You know who we are," she said, but then said her name anyway, and each of the others said theirs. The ally named herself as Mia. Ebony now knew not only who was in the room but where each person stood in relation to her, just as we knew. Details can be important in rituals, but they are only important if you know what they are.

"What do you want?" Kit asked.

"Our rings," we chorused in clumsy, unrehearsed unison.

"We have them for you," she acknowledged, "but there are things that must be said and done first." She then made a speech about the reason for the ritual and the meaning of the ring and the purposes of the school, all of which we had known already--just as they had known our names already--but the speech served a second purpose; Kit wove into it a detailed description of how the room looked. Ebony smiled.

"If you take these rings," Kit continued, "you must first swear to uphold the values of our community, the welfare of the school, and the welfare of the students, to the best of your ability forever. This step is not one you take for yourselves but for others. You can use what we gave you freely and anywhere, but if you accept the ring it will be because you wish to serve the community and its students. Do you swear?"

I think we all paused a little, just to be sure--it does not do to take major vows by rote--but we all swore. Then Mia spoke up.

"There is another vow you must make if you want the rings," she said, "but the Six can't ask it of you because it is to serve them, not as your masters, for we are all equals, but as your wards. They give their lives to this community, giving up the possibility of outside careers and achievements commensurate with their skills, and they are the only ones who make this sacrifice--even the non-teaching masters can put their work here on their resumes and leave at any time. Our job, yours and mine, is to make sure they never have cause to regret it. Should this school ever close, or should one of the Six have to leave us for any reason, we others who wear the Ring are responsible, individually and collectively, for making sure no one who has been of the Six will ever go hungry or suffer neglect. Do you swear?"

Again, after a pause, we all swore. I had expected the first vow, though I hadn't known the wording, but I had not thought about the second. It felt odd to make that vow, to imagine each of these people, as well as those few who had been of the Six but had left and were still alive, ill or infirm and in need, and what I might do to fulfill my vow. A quiet sense of responsibility settled on me--and a strange, new tenderness.

"We will each of us bless your rings," explained Kit, leaning forward to pick up the bowl. They passed it around the outer circle, each of the Six taking a  moment to place a hand over the rings and concentrate before passing the bowl along.

"You're all of different ring sizes," Kit said, "so you shouldn't have any trouble finding the one that's yours. Take your rings, but don't put them on. Daniel, you're biggest, why don't you go first?"

I took the bowl and sorted through the rings, found the largest of them, and took it. Then I looked around, trying to sort out who was next-biggest. It would be Raven or Veery, I knew. Both Ebony and Eddie have little hands. Raven waved as though volunteering, to I handed her the bowl. It took her longer to find her ring--she had to lay them out in a row on the table--because she's closer in size to the others than I am. She put the other three back in the bowl still in a line and passed the bowl to Veery, who took it and passed it to Eddie, who laughed silently and took the smallest ring, then passed the bowl to Ebony who has slightly bigger hands than he does.

Looking at least of them in turn like that, I felt a tremendous pride to be doing this with such a remarkable group of people, as well as an amused awareness that I stood in a circle with not one but two of my ex-girlfriends. I thought about Joanna and wondered how she was doing. Well, I hope.

We each held our rings. Mine felt cool and smooth and surprisingly light in my hands.

"Bless your rings however you will--make them yours" Kit instructed, "and then hand your ring to the master who will present to you."

I handed mine across the table to Charlie, who took it without comment or overt expression, then nodded slightly. I nodded back, though I'm not sure why.

Raven handed hers to Charlie, and Veery handed hers to Allen. Eddie handed his to Joy, who smiled warmly at him. Ebony seemed a little lost--she has poor spatial awareness and had probably forgotten where in the circle Allen was.

"Put out your hand, Ebony," he said, and she did and he took her hand and so she gave him her ring.

"There," said Kit. "Now is when you change--your belts, I mean."

You may or may not remember, but the color of our clothing has significance, here. Novices where white uniforms with black cloaks, and everybody else wears brown uniforms with brown cloaks, except that the masters have brown cloth belts while the candidates (and other graduates without rings, when they visit) wear white belts.

Each of us reached out and took the belt in front of us, removed our white belts and tied the brown ones on. The belts are just like those you'd wear in a martial arts class, only perhaps a little narrower, and in martial arts classes when you switch belts you turn away from your teacher--or at least, that's what Karen had us do. Something about not changing your clothes in full view. Now, though, with our teachers surrounding us in a ring, there was no turning away. I felt a little self-conscious about that.

Now, for the first time, Greg spoke up, saying "come to Chapel Hall like normal, and sit in the front row. You'll come up on stage, as you recall--Charlie's students, then Allen's, then Joy's. If you have any questions about that, stay back and ask. Otherwise you're free to go, but you're between things right now, with brown belts but without your rings, and the ritual won't be closed until tonight. So I suggest you avoid mixing with the others or attempting anything psychologically strenuous. Good luck."

Allen spoke a kind of benediction over us, saying "Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." It sounds very Zen and ancient, but it's actually lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song.

We filed out. The masters came out after us. Kit extinguished the candles. Once we were out of the room, I caught Charlie.

"Which of us will go first?" I asked him. Raven heard and came over, also curious.

"Which of you wants to?" he asked. She and I looked at each other and shrugged.

"I can," I said.

"Good. You remember what to say?"

"Yes."

"OK. Raven, you want to say anything different, or does the standard work for you?"

There's a dialogue that people getting their rings go through, and the first one who does it every year must always do it the same way. The others can improvise. Raven chose not to improvise.

It was almost four by then. I occupied myself for two hours by wandering around the lesser-used parts of campus and up into the woods again. The temperature was dropping. The sky was growing a high, thickening haze.

At dusk I went to the Chapel and sat down in the front row. Eddie was already there. The others came in a few minutes later. We all sat together bit did not speak. The room filled up behind us.

The ceremony went as it had before. This post is already plenty long enough, so I won't give a full description. When it was time, Charlie stood at center stage and waited. I joined him.

"What do you seek?" he asked me.

"I seek my Mastery," I told him.

"Why do you seek it?"

"Because it is mine."

"Take then this ring from my hand. It is already yours. Congratulations." And he handed me my ring. I put it on. That was it, the heart of the matter. He shook my hand, the other heart of the matter, and I took my seat on the stage among the other masters and looked out at the audience, the students, and I let them look at me.

Everything changes every day. It is always today. It is always Brigid.

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 3: Poetry and Prose

I'm back on campus now. June and I spent Christmas and New Years at her parents', then she went back to work and I spent a few days with my parents--and so did she, simply commuting to work from my parents' house, rather than from campus. We just got back to school this afternoon.

We're doing an odd thing, June and I, over the next few weeks; we're going apartment-hunting.

For all that I've been working for the past three years to become a master, there's no reason to believe there's going to be an opening. It's not that none of the Six are likely to retire--for one thing, Greg is semi-retired already, and while I think he may choose to stay on until he dies, he also could choose to retire wholly at any time--or a medical problem could force the issue. The non-teaching masters also come and go somewhat faster, or the Master's Group could decide to expand. But I am not qualified to replace Greg, there is no obvious place for me among the non-teaching masters, and no reason to expand the group. Realistically, I'd only get hired if Charlie retired, and that he will, quite obviously, never do. In any case, I'm sure Rick or Raven would be a better match for the role than I am. So I'm going to remain an ally--in more standard terms, an adjunct--for the time being. And allies don't get on-campus housing.

So, we're looking for something affordable within biking distance from campus, probably a mother-in-law apartment off the back of somebody's house. We're thinking about renter's insurance and transportation, furnished vs. unfurnished, accessibility to shopping. Shopping? I haven't bought a load of groceries for three years. All of it seems so banal, so mundane. So normal. It's bizarrely disappointing, but I suppose it has to be done.

And we're all going through it--Eddie, Raven, Ebony, Veery, and I, putting together the circumstances of our lives out in the real world. It's melancholy. I think all of us have thrown around the idea of all getting a house together, but it doesn't seem quite right somehow and we're not taking the idea seriously. There's no avoiding what comes next in this strange trip of ours--leaving, and, in a way, leaving for good.

But at the moment, there are no such errands to run, no practical steps on the hunting of houses to take. And I have no classes to take or to teach, no votes to secure, no madcap challenges from Charlie to tackle (except that one, and it is well in hand and needs no action today). There is nothing to do.

And so I sit at the table by the window in the Great Hall all alone, watching the sun turn the snowy world golden.

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 2: Puppy

Happy Veteran's Day, I suppose.

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

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

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

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

And yet Eddie has a puppy.

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

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

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

"That's that," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now Eddie has a puppy.

Mastery Year 3: 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 2: Part 7: Post 6: Making More Magic

I'd glad I have a good memory!

Last night, June asked me whether I wanted to help decorate the Great Hall for Yule. I thought she meant whether I wanted to joint the groundskeeping crew and the other volunteers who put up the tree and the other decorations all in one night as a surprise for the yearlings. I did it a few times as a novice, and really liked it, but last year I had a different assignment. I was supposed to distract my wife--she was a yearling at the time, and Charlie thought she couldn't be relied on to be oblivious (high praise, from him) so he asked me to step in.

Yes, I distracted her exactly the way you're imagining I did, and in the morning I told her that the newly-decorated Great Hall was a product of the magic we made.

And yes, this year when I said yes, I wanted to decorate the Great Hall, she said "good--I'll clear my schedule and take a shower." And I am a very lucky man that I didn't have to ask what she was talking about.

Except I really had wanted to join the groundskeeping crew for the night. It's not that I don't enjoy, um, decorating by magic, it's that, not to brag, but I get to do that fairly often. There's only one chance a year to be an elf making the holiday happen, and I miss being one of the groundskeepers here. But I didn't feel comfortable saying no to June. I didn't want to offend her.

I should say that yes, we've talked through what was bothering her over Thanksgiving. She is, as I suspected she might, getting resentful of how fully we've moved into "my" world, leaving hers behind. Which is not what we did, and she knows it's not what we did, which is why she didn't want to talk with me about it, but she felt that way anyway, and I think I can understand why.

So I suggested we spend Christmas with her family, since she gets a long enough break from work so she can travel, and while I'm pretty sure the issue is going to blow up again later, for now she's happy with me and, yes, wanted to magically decorate the Great Hall with me.

So, no, I did not want to beg off.

I was a little worried about developing some resentment of my own, though, and I didn't see how I could possibly be a very good lover if I was thinking something else I'd rather be doing. But one of the great things about this place is how accepting they are about sex. I mean, you can actually talk about it and the conversation doesn't feel crude or puerile. So, when I was brushing my teeth before bed, I bumped into Raven (she lives in a different dorm, but she's been seeing someone in my dorm and was visiting) and she asked me whether I was going to join the group downstairs, I told her my problem. She took it seriously.

"Well, we'll be working all night, why don't you just join us afterwards?"

"I don't know," I told her, "that feels...selfish, or something."

"That's because you're being selfish. You're thinking first we'll do your thing, then we'll do what I really want to do. Don't think that way. Think about how both can be for both of you."

"She was saying she felt a bit like an outsider, here, like being at school is my thing."

"Did she? Well, make her an elf. Tell her being a Yule-elf is like being a were-wolf and bite her or something."

No, I didn't tell June elfhood is contagious, but we did work something out, and the Great Hall was well-decorated by morning.

Mastery Year 2: Part 5: Post 3: Priesthood?

"What is a priest?" asked Apple Blossom at breakfast.

For some reason, the entire candidate's group, except Veery, and Oak, had ending up sitting at the same table with Apple, a single yearling, and she had been using the opportunity to pick our brains. Halfway through the meal, Nel excused herself because she had spotted someone she'd been meaning to talk with, and switched tables with Greg, but Apple continued prompting discussion.

"A priest is a male priestess," said Ebony, and took a big bite of eggs. She was just giving Apple a hard time.

"A priest/ess," Apple amended, making a motion with her hand to indicate the slash. "What is a priest/ess? What is it you're all trying to do?"

"I'm trying to be a good person," said Olli.

"That's not what I mean," said Apple. She has learned how to be persistent. "I'm asking in the abstract."

"That depends on whom you ask," said Greg, and we all looked at him because he had not spoken earlier. "What?" he asked, "is this a candidate's-only interview?"

"Not formally," I assured him.

"I'm asking you, anyway," said Apple. "You and them. What's a priest? ess?"

"No," said Greg, thoughtfully. "I didn't mean it's a matter of opinion, I mean that different systems have different kinds of priests, especially if you include clerics and ministers and monks and shamans in the category. Which I suppose we do, here."

"There's a difference between a priest and a minister, though," interjected Olli, "and between a priest and a monk. Christianity has all three, and they are distinct."

"Granted," said Greg.

"But what is it?" persisted Apple. "What's the larger category?"

"Well, I'm a minister," said Ollie. "That means I serve the people, but I don't have any special power, not like a Catholic priest."

"That's like a rabbi," commented Ebony, who was raised Jewish. "They're, like, religious experts, not religious authorities."

"I think most of us are ministers, then," said Steve, looking around. "We all serve."

"Raven and I are witches," Ebony corrected him. "We do have special powers."

"But not authority," said Raven.

"No, not authority, unless we have a leadership position in our own coven," Ebony agreed.

"But aside from Kit's teaching coven, we're both solitaries," added Raven.

"And yet you are also both priestesses, yes?" Greg pointed out. "If a priest has special authority, in what sense are you priestesses as solitaries?"

"We stand as intersessionaries between humanity and the, the Everything," explained Raven. As an animist, she doesn't exactly have a god concept. She frowned.

"Ministers do that, too," said Steve, "but we're not priests."

"I didn't know you're a minister," said Ollie.

"I'm a Quaker. We're all ministers."

"I think I'm a priest and a minister," suggested Eddie. "My priesthood is between me and the Goddess. My ministry is to animals and the humans who need them."

"What about you, Daniel?" asked Apple. I had been characteristically quiet.

"I don't know," I told her, slowly. "I don't think of myself as a priest. I don't know that Charlie is a priest. I guess I'm becoming whatever it is he is." A man who has married the land? Is not that a kind of intersessionary? But it doesn't do to speak of such things, and I didn't know the word for it anyway.

And Rick said nothing at all.

Mastery Year 2: Part 4:Post 2: Dancing in the Dark

Of course, now June is more or less missing.

She's still on campus, but is entirely involved in the children's camp. She's been increasingly wrapped up in it for weeks, but now that the campers are actually here, I think she's working 15-hour days. I had wondered how she got a year's room and board and a stipend paid for out of a couple of months of work. Now I know. She simply takes no time off except to sleep.

The camp has never had a full-time director before. Before last year, when June was part-time, it had never had a real director, but was run entirely by an ever-changing collection of student volunteers. I'm not sure what-all June is doing, but she says a lot of it should have been being done the whole time and wasn't.

I'm teaching some children's workshops for the campers, too--mostly tracking, though I've done some plant ID walks and some sensory awareness exercises--and I like what I'm doing, but last week's thoughts about being a master someday and what that would be like and helping to lead the school have all evaporated. I feel like a peon.

I don't want to be the kind of man who minds being out-ranked by his wife, and I tell myself I'm not, and that I'm grumpy and dejected now for other reasons. And indeed it is ridiculously hot, I'm working hard on many different projects, and very little that I'm doing has much in the way of satisfying pay-off. It's mostly long long-term stuff, and though the workshops for campers or students are short-term, the participants all seem to assume they'll go well, so nobody compliments me when they do. It's all sufficient to explain my mood. And yet.

The other day I did take a bit of a break. Raven and I were walking around together for no special reason, just walking through the gathering dusk, when we came upon Rick in the field near the grape arbor. We watched him for a minute or so, and saw that he was catching fireflies--he'd catch one, examine it closely, let it go and wait until it flew away, then catch another. All of his movements, catching and releasing, looked graceful, precise, and effortless. He was wearing his uniform, probably because he didn't expect to go back and change before Dead Poets' Society, and his cape swirled around him as he moved.

"Looks like fun," whispered Raven.

"I know," I replied.

"I kind of want to join him," she said.

"Me, too," I whispered back, "but he might not like it."

"I can hear you," said Rick, still dancing. "Catch them if you want to, it's a free country."

And so we joined in, the three of us catching fireflies and releasing them, none of us able to see clearly, and none of us, except Rick, having much luck. And then I realized there were four of us.

"Charlie!" I said, "when did you get here?"

"If you're not observant enough to notice when I show up, I'm not going to fill you in."

"Alright, why did you get here?"

"You looked like you were having fun."

And so we were, and so we continued. Charlie, too, had the trick of catching the insects in complete darkness, and at one point he assembled a collection of a dozen or so of them. Then he opened and spread his hands before his face and the insects slowly crawled out along his fingers, lighting his hands and his features intermittently as they went, until they flew away, and he was grinning the whole time.

And then it was almost ten o'clock and the others began to come in, collecting at the grape arbor for Dead Poet's Society, lighting candles and so forth. Raven and I ran back to the Mansion to change as quickly as we could. And then, just before the sprouts showed up with this week's miscreant campers (who think they are breaking the rules by coming) and the no prose-talking rule went into effect, Charlie pulled me aside.

"You think you can be Elven King tonight?" he asked. He meant would I lead the meeting. He'd never asked me before, nor had I ever known him to ask anyone else.

"Me?" I said, unable to help it, and Charlie rolled his eyes. "I don't know how to be mysterious and everything!"

"Neither do I!" he confessed, with a bit of his old growl. "If you think I'm mysterious, that's not me, that's something you bring to me. I try to make things make more sense." But then he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "If having a mysterious teacher is important, you're going to have to trust that they'll bring that to you, too. Be yourself."

And so I did it, I lead the meeting. It wasn't that different from leading a workshop or performing some of my poetry at Callaloo, or some similar event, but with my hood up and the candle-light casting shadows on my face and me being as tall and skinny as I am, I suspect I did seem suitably mysterious to our young guests. I hope so, anyway.

Afterwards, when I'd said good night to Raven and Charlie and the others and taken a quick shower, I slid into bed, tired, and there was June, waiting for me, her body all long and cool and smooth and asleep. She'd left the balcony door open, and the evening had cooled enough so that we could snuggle under the thin, pilling sheet. And so I wrapped myself around her, big spoon to her little spoon, and she made a comfortable little "nff" sound, and we slept.

Mastery Year 2: Part 1: Brigid

Happy Brigid! A new year, a new group of yearlings, several newly-awarded Green Rings, and, best of all, I think my wife is going to talk to me again!

I exaggerate; June never stopped talking to me, but I think she considered it. She's still angry.

She's angry with me, of course, for not telling her about the Ordeal which, in case you have forgotten, involves an about-to-graduate student being more or less kidnapped and stuck in a dark room alone for three days. Of course I didn't tell her; for the Ordeal to work, it has to be a surprise.

It's not hazing, it's the thing that hazing is a debased echo of--an initiatory experience. The word "experience" here is key. It's not an initiatory ritual or an initiatory event, it's an experience, and the experience does not occur if you're not in the right head-space for it. Not all forms of initiation require surprise, but many do. You can't be braced against the change you're about to experience.

Then, too, you have to decide real fast whether you trust your teachers when one of them pops a black-out bag over your head.

The thing that separates what we do from what many college fraternities and such do is that our initiation is not meant to be unpleasant or degrading. The person undergoing initiation is always reminded that they are free to quit, and they are encouraged to do so if they run into any sort of physical or mental trouble. They are closely monitored, offered plenty of food and water and opportunity to sleep. They are asked to trust, never to submit.

And yet being taken out of your day-to-day life and hidden away for an undetermined about of time is no joke. And to have it done by the masters--who have always obviously been up to something, that's part of the point--while to realize that your spouse is complicit is something else again.

She must be wondering whose side I'm on. She'll realize eventually that I am on the side of the masters and that now, so is she--that's what the initiation experience is for.

It's not as if I wasn't worried. It's one thing to go through the Ordeal yourself and afterwards to know that it doesn't hurt, it isn't scary (except for that first startling moment under the black-out bag, in the seconds before you hear their reassurances). It's not actually all that much different than a long trip on a Greyhound bus, except there's no view and the toilet doesn't stink. But it's quite another thing to watch your wife leave your dorm-room to go to a meeting and to know she thinks she's coming back in an hour--and she's wrong. And you don't say anything. To spend those three days, however you spend them and whatever you're doing, periodically casting your attention to your wife, knowing that at that very moment she is in the dark, sworn not to speak, and she doesn't know where she is or when she's getting out. To spend all the hours of that final day constantly looking at your watch thinking ok, now they're going to get her. Now she's seeing daylight again for the first time in the wing of the stage in the Chapel. Now the sun has set and she's still in the wing with all the other new initiates, in the dark again, waiting for the ceremony to start.

It's warm down in the basement, where the Ordeal rooms are, but it's cold in the wing of the Chapel.

Then I was back in the audience, sitting in a cold, metal folding chair in a dim room that smelled of wool and honey, and the little bell was ringing, ding! ding! ding! as the masters processed in carrying their as yet unlit candles. I was sitting with Ebony and Eddie and Aidan (it was his seventh birthday), as I often have before, but for only the second time in my experience of Brigid in that hall, Kayla wasn't sitting with me. She was waiting in the wing with June to graduate.

Was the Ordeal a surprise for Kayla? She certainly knew the rooms were down there, because that's where she went to be out of the way when she thought she was dying but was actually giving birth to Aidan when she was twelve. Did she know what those rooms were used for? She learned a lot of the school's secrets, just being a kid on campus, and of course secrecy is mostly maintained using the principles of stage magic--and when you're not part of the target audience, frequently the illusion does not work. I never once saw anyone being escorted to their Ordeal the whole time I was a novice, but this year, not being the target of the illusion anymore, I saw three of them without even trying to look. So, I imagine Kayla had seen some of them, too, over the years, and probably asked questions about them. Direct questions always receive honest (though sometimes legalistically narrow) answers around here. So maybe she knew.

On the other hand, would she really have asked all the right questions? Might the masters have evaded her, at least partly, in case she grew up to want to join the school? I don't know.

In any case, watching that twenty-year-old woman walk across the stage, a young but not prodigious college graduate, and thinking about where she was and why eight years earlier, was quite something. Almost as big a deal to me as watching June walk across the stage and knowing that the period of our being on different sides of a divide, of it being part of my job to keep secrets from her and hold distance from her, was over. We're both initiates, now, both entitled to wear the brown uniform, and I knew that starting that night, and from here on in, we'd share the same room.

The thing about uniforms--of course, novices wear white uniforms with black cloaks, candidates and allies without the Green Ring wear brown except for white belts, and people with the Ring wear all brown. So the symbolism of dress is important, here. When you graduate, one of the masters takes off your cloak and underneath is the outfit you choose to symbolize your life after the school. At least one person almost every year is naked and everybody laughs, and otherwise you get everything from suits to graduation gowns to jeans. When it was my turn I wore cargo pants, a turtleneck, and a flannel, which was my guess as to what I might be wearing in grad school (a good guess, as it happened). June hadn't told me her plans. She ended up wearing the same brown uniform she'll be entitled to wear every other day she spends on campus, unless and until she gets her ring.

"Because I don't think I'm leaving," she explained, later.

Afterwards, we watched Andy and Veronica receive their rings--I found Andy's graduation very moving, too, considering where he started and how far he has come--and then the masters processed away again, to do whatever it is they do on Brigid Night.

But I hadn't gotten a good look when the newly arrived candidates stood to introduce themselves at the beginning of the ceremony. I was sitting fr back and couldn't see or hear them well, I could only gather that there were two of them, a man and a woman. Afterwards, I sought them out to see who it was and found that the returnees are Raven G. and Steve.

Steve Bees is back.

Mastery Year 1: Part 1: Post 5: Finding Love

Almost the first month down. The yearlings are getting the hang of the place now, June's starting to make friends with some of the other students, my two classes have each met at least once, now...and I still have no clear idea what I'm doing. I still spend my days mostly wandering around, hanging out, taking in a workshop or two, my most serious intellectual or spiritual challenge my efforts to get my fiance alone someplace private. And we still haven't managed that.

The others who started with me seem well on their way, now. Ollie, for example, who wants to deepen his practice as a Christian therapist and pastor, is now more or less Allen's full-time apprentice. Not that Allen is Christian (or a pastor, though he does have one of those mail-order ordinations, so he can perform weddings and so forth), but he is a phenomenal therapist. Besides his work here as a psychology professor and group therapist, he sees individual clients in his home office one or two days a week. There's always more people who want to see him than he can take on, so he recommended some of the others to Ollie, and now, as of last week, Ollie has something like ten clients--whom he sees at Allen's house. He's basically living there three days a week, now.

It sounds pretty intense, living with your teacher. I know that they talk about Ollie's cases and sometimes observe each other's work (with the client's permission, of course), though of course Ollie can't tell me any details. I wonder what that's like for Allen? He must suddenly have almost no time off.

Rick has just gotten his assignment, now, too, though, being from Charlie, it's not nearly so straight-forward. Or, rather, it is straight-forward, but Rick doesn't know how to get started. He talked to me about it this morning as we were getting ready to go out.

"I am supposed to care for a human being," he said, as though the duty sounded strange and onerous to him.
"Care for?" I asked. "Does he mean like babysitting or nursing care, or does he mean, basically, give a shit about somebody?"
"Give a shit," he confirmed. "I think it's a little more than that. I think I'm supposed to devote, you know, like Eddie does with Kit...or like Greg's Cat with Greg. Something transformative. But, basically, yeah, I've got to give a shit about somebody."
"And don't you?" I asked.

We were standing in the Green Room, putting on our layers of clothing, but I stopped and he stopped, too, and looked at me with an odd expression. I think he had just realized he might hurt my feelings if he wasn't careful. That sort of thing rarely occurs to him, though he never actually means to hurt anybody.

"I like you," he said, slowly. "I like some people. I enjoy you. I wish you well. If you needed something, I would give it. But I don't love you. I don't love anyone, I don't think. I never have." He seemed puzzled, puzzled by love.

"Do you love anything?" I asked. I'm not shocked, or even surprised, by Rick's distance. I know him, and that's just the way he is. I just thought I knew what Charlie was up to. Rick had asked for his help learning to work with humans better, without being so irritated by us. I remember that once, when I was out in public with Charlie on a field trip, some stranger's baby was crying loudly nearby, and someone said something about how annoying the sound was, asking Charlie, rhetorically, whether he was irritated. He rather famously can't stand loud, discordant noises. But he shook his head.

"No, I'm not irritated, I'm sad. That baby is a human being. He's having a bad day. Or a bad five minutes--long enough, when you're a baby."

Charlie sees children as people. He's sympathetic to them, so they don't bother him, the way they bother some. I think he wanted to teach Rick that humans are people, so that he would develop an equivalent patience. And he wanted to teach patience for all people by asking him to love one person. Only Rick doesn't know how. I thought that if he loves something, that might offer him a starting point. I was trying to help.

As we spoke, I faced the large picture windows. He faced me, and must have seen the coat rack over my shoulder, but over his I could see the snowy garden and the hedge and part of the sky. It was growing very gray out there.

"Do you love anything?"
"Sure," he told me, and held up the inside of his forearm for me to see--where he had a small smudge of a tattoo, just like mine.
"I thought I was the only one Charlie took through that ritual," I said, though I really had no reason to think so. He wouldn't mention the ritual to anyone. It's not the sort of thing one chats about. I had told Rick and I'd told June. No one else. For all I knew, Charlie took all his students through it. I know he gave some of the others deer knives--Rick has one, as does Raven G. And yet I thought no one else had tattoos. I hoped no one else did. I wanted to be the only one.
"You are," Rick, though I have no idea how he came by such authority. "You told me about it, so I performed the ritual myself, alone."
"Where?" I asked, meaning what place had he consecrated himself to. What place did he love?
"I won't tell you," he said. Of course, he wouldn't.
"How did you find it?"
Silence.
"When Charlie told me to find a favorite place on the Island," I told him, "I looked all over, I explored lots of places, but none stood out to me as the best one. Until I just chose a place. I decided it was my favorite. And it was. I've been there since. It feels like mine. I care about it. It's my favorite. Maybe you can do that with a person?"
"You think loving a person works the same way as loving a place?"
"Love is love, isn't it?" I said. "Anyway, the process Charlie took me through to earn to love the land is the same thing I did learning to be in relationship with June."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I showed up regularly, I paid attention, I learned everything I could about what she needs and likes, I abandoned my own pre-conceived ideas and wishful thinking...I did that several times, I have to keep doing it...."
"And that worked?"
"I'm engaged, aren't I?"

"Crap." That was me, again. It had started snowing. Rick followed my gaze and turned and looked out the window. The flakes were coming down hard already. There would be no tracking for another couple of days.

"Well, that's that," said Rick, after a few seconds. "I have some reading to do." He nodded at me politely, and walked back inside. It was an abrupt end to an intense conversation, and I felt strange, emotionally hyped up with nowhere to go, psychologically. I decided to go for a walk in the snow.

I love walking in the snow. I like tracking, and you can't track in falling snow, but I like the snow more. I live the smell of it, the silence of it, the otherworldly sense of it, and yet somehow the falling, swirling flakes are calming. Even when I was living outside, first for Charlie's assignment, and then on the Trail, I could never mind the snow, though I could appreciate the inconvenience and the danger of it.

This day, the temperature wasn't even that low, maybe just below freezing. I walked around campus with my hood down, letting the flakes build up in my hair. They were just starting to melt and run down behind my ears--and I was just starting to get cold, when Allen crossed my path. He, too, had snow in his hair, even on his eyelashes. He kept blinking his eyes, because of the snow falling on his face, but I know he does not feel the cold.

"Oh, I'm glad I found you, Daniel," he said. "I wanted to tell you, when you're trying to solve a problem--any problem--sometimes there's no key, because there aren't any locks."

"Huh?"

"The key to your problem is that there is no key because there are no locks. Think about it."

"Allen, why do you so often speak in riddles?"

"Because I like watching you solve them. And I know you're capable of it." And he clapped me on the shoulder and went on his way.

Aren't any locks, huh?

A few minutes later, I stood in front of the door to Chapel Hall. I tried the door. It opened. There was no lock. Come to think of it, I don't think there are any locks on any doors on campus--I've never noticed any, I've never had to use a key, I've never heard of anyone else having to use a key or find a key or get a key. No keys, no locks. The building is closed right now, and I'd just assumed that meant I couldn't go in it, but that's not the sort of thing we really have rules about around here. A closed building just means it's not heated or cleaned and nothing is scheduled there. No one has to go there, just like no one has to go in certain parts of the Mansion basement, or lots of other places around campus. That doesn't mean you can't. There are no locks.

How did Allen know I was looking for this sort of information? I certainly didn't tell him. June wouldn't have. Maybe it's just that Allen was once a mastery candidate with a fiance, too.

Anyway, I'm thinking of the storage place on the fourth floor, the one Charlie popped out of that one day to play a prank on Allen. It can't have much stuff in it, or he couldn't have moved around in there so easily. Yes, Chapel Hall is probably about twenty degrees right now, but I have a sleeping bag. So does June. And they zip together.