Mastery Year 3: Part 4: Litha

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

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

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

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

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

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

The room went silent. We all looked at him.

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

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

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

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

"Should we?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Psuedo-religious?"

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 3

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

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

Life complicates art, I suppose.

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

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

-best, -D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So like me and yet so different.

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

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

Note

Sorry—some things have gotten difficult and complicated this week, so I’ve been unable to post. They remain difficult and complicated. I’ll try to post next week.

--D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 3: Baseline

I’ve been on the island with Steve Bees for over a week, now. We’ll head home, soon. I do so like it here.

I served again as Charlie’s assistant, though not alone, and not quite as before. Traditionally, Charlie divides the yearlings into two groups because the workshop he leads involves a lot of hiking over mountains, including over some sensitive terrain, and larger groups are much harder to corral into Leave No Trace habits if those habits aren’t ingrained yet. He takes one group and his assistant takes the other, but for the intertidal portion of the program, the groups combine and he leads the whole thing himself. The group is so big this year, though, that he actually divided it into thirds for the mountain hike—the man he uses when I’m not available took the third group—and in half for the intertidal exploration. I led the other half for intertidal, so my role was much greater than it has been in the past.

In fact, we left it up to the students to decide which group they would join, and to my astonishment some chose me for both the hike and intertidal, so they never had Charlie at all. It’s not that they made a mistake, either, because some of my loyalists had attended workshops I led on campus. They knew me. And liked me, I guess.

And I can actually sort of see why. I hadn’t assisted Charlie on the Island since I was a novice, and I’ve been to grad school since. I’ve also done a lot of reading on natural history, including that of this island (I do like this place), and I have a lot more experience teaching. I feel less like a fraud reciting somebody else’s lecture, and more like an actual adjunct college professor with something to offer. It was nice.

Steve, meanwhile, was doing nothing at all. I mean, he did a lot of hiking, I made sure of that, and while I was busy leading the workshops (that took two days), David, Allen’s son, took him adventuring. But he wasn’t responsible for learning anything or doing anything in particular, and when it rained for three days and Steve got too cold to enjoy much, I let him spend that third day in a coffee shop in town reading and drinking coffee.

There was method to my madness. I’ve only recently really articulated to myself what I’m doing with him, and what it is is that I’m teaching Steve to leave his work behind when he’s not working by taking refuge in field and forest—eventually, I hope he’ll learn to bring field and forest with him to work. So my plan was to give him a week and a half, mostly outdoors, with no responsibility at all—no clients, no causes, no baby, no sick wife—so he could wholly decompress and use the way he feels at the end of it as a kind of internal baseline, so he knows what being relaxed actually feels like.

The only assignment I gave him was the same one Charlie gave me some years ago—to identify a favorite place on the Island. Once he’s discovered it, we’ll spend our final full day on the Island there.

I don’t know why Charlie gave me that assignment, but I gave it to Steve because I want him self-aware, paying attention to how he feels in each place we go.

It’s no good establishing a baseline if he doesn’t remember it.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 2: Needs

So, last week I walked up to Steve Bees and told him to pack his bags because we were going to the Island. I figure if I am acting in some sense as his master—under the supervision of Charlie, his actual master—I’m entitled to make abrupt, inscrutable demands. You know, do the whole Yoda thing.

My resolve lasted only as long as it took Steve to ask “what the hell?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I made arrangements for us to join the Island trip. Because you need a vacation in the woods. Charlie agrees. It’s really last-minute for me, too.”

“Was this you’re idea or his?”

“Both. I had the idea, ran it by Charlie, and he said he’d already thought about it.”

“Huh,” said Steve.

“Is it OK? I know you work, and there’s your baby, and everything….”

“Oh, yeah, it’s fine,” he assured me. “I cleared my schedule, I talked to Sarah, she says the Joes can help her with Sean for the week, and I’m already packed.”

“Charlie told you?”

“No, I knew you were going to ask me. You’re getting so much like the masters, you’re predictable in the same way.”

Well, then.

When I was a yearling, we traveled to the Island in two veggie-diesel-adapted vans. But the yearling group was 29 people, then. Now, it’s 41. It’s not that the school is trending larger—its size fluctuates, and this is simply a big year—but it does make travel difficult. Perhaps fortuitously, though, one of the other vans is starting to show signs of needing replacement soon, so the masters decided to go ahead and buy the replacement preemptively. We might get another year or two out of the old one, but we’ll be ready when it goes, and in the meantime we’ve got three vans, enough to getting everybody to the Island.

Which is all a long-winded way of explaining why Steve and I found ourselves riding in a 17-passenger van with Allen’s family (they join him for the trip), Allen himself, Charlie, Karen, and seven yearlings, instead of catching a ride in the Chapman’s minivan like I did in the past. Allen and Karen took turns driving. Charlie is a terrible driver. When it was Karen’s turn to drive, Charlie and Allen sat next to each other and chatted and joked or pointed at things out the window and laughed like boys.

The thing to remember is that this Island trip isn’t just a retreat for the students—an organized group bonding experience for the yearlings—it’s also a retreat for the faculty. All of them but Greg go, and except for the day or two each of them spends with the yearlings, they pretty much ignore and avoid the students the whole time. Charlie and Allen were on vacation.

Steve and I couldn’t stay with the yearlings (they’re on a private retreat), and I had anticipated that. We couldn’t stay with the masters (they’re on a private retreat, too), and I had anticipated that, also. What I hadn’t anticipated was that Steve would be invited to camp illegally with Charlie, while I stay with Lo and the kids again. During the day, I show Steve the Island, and at night he receives wisdom by osmosis from Charlie, or something. I camped with Charlie once, years ago, and it’s an education, though it’s hard to say what it’s an education in, exactly. I’ve never known anyone else o be invited to camp with him, but this year Steve was and I wasn’t. I am insanely jealous. I am trying not to let Charlie or Steve know.

Not that I’m unhappy to stay with the Chapmans. I feel as welcomed by them as ever, and I love it. I’ve missed them.

Allen camps with the other masters, not with us, but spends quite a bit of time with his family—more than the last time I camped with them, actually. Usually they all stay on together and have a family vacation afterwards, but I guess this year they’re not doing that, because of the van thing. It’s funny seeing him, then, because he’s totally out of teacher-mode, and he’s still friendly with me, but he’s friendly in a different way.

The other night he came up to me as I lay in my hammock, reading. Steve had gone off to join Charlie at their illegal camp, and I was huddled in my sleeping bag (May can be quite cold, here) with my book, trying to decide whether to get my flashlight out or just go sleep. I was feeling kind of morose and...stretched, somehow. I can’t explain it. Maybe the feeling is a kind of loneliness. Anyway, Allen came to stand beside me. I looked up at him to see what he would say.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“Am I that obvious?” I asked. There was no need to ask who he was talking about.

“I have no idea, I’m a psychologist, not a mind reader. Why are you trying to hide it?”

“I don’t know. I feel stupid, I guess. I know I’m not being slighted. I know Charlie can’t pay attention to me all the time, he has other students. But I’m like a needy little kid anyway.”

“Needy is a funny word,” Allen asserted. “Almost a pejorative. If Charlie has noticed, I don’t imagine he thinks less of you for it.”

“I guess not.”

“The impracticality of getting a thing does not invalidate the need. You can need without pursuit. There can just be need. It’s OK.” And then he was gone, off to join the other masters, off to join his wife in her tent, off somewhere, but gone as though he had evaporated into the air.

Of course, Allen is the magician.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 1: Beltane

Happy belated Beltane, everyone! The holiday was a few days ago and I am, rather unexpectedly, off to the Island.

Let me tell you about the holiday, first.

This year the first of May came very cold—there was actually a frost the previous night, and in the morning a cold, wet, fitful wind blew. If the clouds had loosed anything it would have been snow. But they held their peace, and the wind blew the sky clear by lunch, leaving an incredibly blue sky and a cheerful, warming sun.

We held the Maypole Dance in the afternoon, followed by most of the other festivities, and pushed ndinner back late into the evening to leave enough time. As Charlie acknowledges reluctantly, modern technology has some advantages, and somewhat accurate weather prediction is one of them.

I didn’t dance but sang and banged away on a tambourine and watched the pattern of the dancers and their ribbons, thinking about how by the next May Day I’ll be actually barred from joining them. I’ll have my green ring, technically a faculty member, and no more able to do this sexual metaphor of a dance with a student than to literally have sex with one. I’ll dance with the masters, I suppose. If they dance. This year, once again, whatever dance they did was private.

As to our other festivities, Kit’s tide seems to be rising again now, though she was actually not very involved. May Day here is largely a project of Sarah and Kit, except their ideas of how to celebrate it are more or less mutually exclusive. Kit favors sexy, bawdy, very adult celebrations that Sarah finds frankly offensive. Sarah favors an event focused on child-friendly activities organized around farming and nature. Kit likes those, but finds them somewhat euphamistic. And so the tension between the two generates a gradual oscillation in the event as first one and then the other gains ascendancy from year to year.

This year saw a return of the concert of slightly bawdy love songs, but Kit wasn’t in evidence except as an audience member. Instead, Eddie was everywhere—and Eddie, too, organized the blessing of the animals and the petting zoo, and a kind of amateur talent show for dogs and their trainers. Eddie in his person embodies both poles of the day, Eddie the incurable flirt, lover and fan of all women, and the devotee of dogs.

Eddie sang most of the songs, either alone or in duet, backed up with a gradually shifting band of students and masters, but the one song that sticks in my mind was the one for which he yielded the stage utterly—to Hawk.

As you may recall, Hawk is a transwoman still mid-transition. If she’s on hormones, they have not yet done much to transform her look. She still dresses like a man when she leaves campus without one of us for company—she says she feels safer that way. But on campus she’s been relaxing into her new identity, developing her style, and generally exploring herself. And it turns out she can sing.

Her voice, of course, is quite deep, and she has not yet learned to adjust it for speaking—I don’t know whether she plans to. But Kit has been coaching her in the use of her falsetto, and she’s at the point now where, as she puts it, she “sounds like herself.”

Hawk sang “Fever,” and she did it with a voluptuousness of soul that brought the house down.

Afterwards, while we were milling around, waiting for the people who had danced to finish setting up the Dining Hall, Charlie approached me.

“You didn’t dance,” he stated.

“No.”

“You didn’t try, did you?”

“No,” I admitted. “I danced more years than not. I figure it’s other people’s turn.”

He looked at me a moment, seeing, probably, my regret and my sadness.

“It’s first-come, first served, not rationed,” he pointed out. I said nothing. “Daniel, when you want something, try to get it. The worst that can happen is you won’t get it.”

I know a Teaching when I hear one, a principle I am supposed to remember.

“In that case,” I asked, “can I come with you to the Island?” I half expected him to say no. I knew he knew I wanted to go, and I knew him perfectly capable of encouraging me to ask for something I couldn’t have, just as an exercise. And I knew I couldn’t expect his attention and company forever. As with the dance, other people deserved their turn.

“Yes, you can,” he told me. “But why?”

“Why?” I echoed. Should I feel hurt?

“No, not why do you want to come, that’s obvious—why is coming to the Island this year part of your education? Make up something plausible.”

“Um, so that I can bring Steve? He needs an intensive exploration of a beautiful place unconnected with his daily life. It’s a sort of test for him.”

“Tell Steve to pack his bags. Talk to Sharon about arranging rides and campsites.”

“Uh, Charlie?”

“Hmm?”

“How ethical is it to draw Steve into this?”

“It’s fine. Because you’re right—he needs to go to the Island.” I must have given him a funny look, because he continued, “Daniel, make the thing you want the solution to other problems.”

And that, too, I realized, was a Teaching.