Mastery Year 2: Part 3 : Post 5: Why Natural History?

I went on a walk with Steve today. We do this a lot. I think my work with Steve is much more labor-intensive that Charlie's has been with me. He'd take 30 seconds to tell me to do something, and then I'd go and spend hours and hours doing it....Though, come to think of it, the growing ears exercise took as much of his time as mine, and the whole adventure where he was unlabeling trees as fast as I could label them must have been pretty time-consuming on his part, too. So maybe what I'm doing isn't more labor-intensive. But it certainly seems more social.

It's not just that Steve is less motivated, it's that I'm less experienced. If I'm not there when he reacts to something, I won't know how he reacts. And, also, maybe I'm more social. I like taking walks and talking to people. I won't be able to do this much one-on-one when I'm a master, though. Not with dozens of students at once.

Wait, did I just say that? "When" I'm a master?

Anyway, so Steve asked me what the point of learning all this natural history stuff is. This from a man who isn't learning a tenth of what I had do. Mostly we're just working on experiencing and noticing things.

"What do you think the point is?" I asked.

"Oh, no, don't pull that mystical stuff with me, your belt is the same color mine is." We both wear white belts with brown uniforms, rather than brown belts like the masters do. "I'm not some yearling."

"Too bad for you, yearlings have it made," I replied. "Well, what's the point of learning all that stuff you know, history and politics and everything?"

"It helps me be a better person."

"How?" I asked.

"Do you think we shouldn't learn history?"

"I said nothing about should or shouldn't. I want to know how it works."

He had to think for a bit about that. Finally:

"Knowing the historical context of events helps me avoid hurting others so much. And it makes me feel like what I'm doing matters."

"Well," I said, "same with ecological context."

He had to think about that one, too.

Honestly, folks, I'm making this stuff up as I go along, but I seem to hit upon the right thing to say, at least sometimes.

Mastery Year 2: Part 3: Post 4: Time

They're ba-ack!

The yearlings, I mean. They spent two weeks on the Island, as they do every year, bonding and learning about the place. I suppose it's our equivalent of the freshman orientation trips a lot of colleges do, except we wait a couple of months to give them time to get properly...indoctrinated...first.

That doesn't sound right. Seriously, every time I try to talk about our process of creating a campus culture I end up making it sound like some nefarious cult. It isn't like that. It's just that people come here because they want to live in a certain type of community and be a certain type of person, and that doesn't happen by accident.

Anyway.

The masters were gone, too, all except Greg, who took the opportunity to sleep a lot, and the campus seemed strange without them. They each teach on the Island for a day or three, and spend the rest of their time there on vacation.

I did not go, though I've helped Charlie teach his segment in years past. I wasn't prohibited from going, like I was last year, and in fact I had intended to go, but then the list of workshops I was supposed to teach on campus simply got too long and I ended up not even asking. Plus, Steve is supposed to be my student and clearly couldn't be left to his own devices (since he isn't very motivated at present), and June is going to be working hard to get ready for the children's camp all next month, so I wanted to spend time with her now, while she still has time to spend with me.

Is this what being a master is going to be like? Or do I get more control of my schedule again later, somehow?

Mastery Year 2: Part 3: Post 3: Growing a Heart

I asked Rick how he's coming along with loving and he shrugged.

As you may remember, Rick's primary assignment as a mastery candidate is to learn to love one person--Charlie, specifically. The issue is that he doesn't really like humans, so working with us, as he must to make any sort of difference in the world, is both unpleasant and difficult for him. So the thinking is that if he learns to really care about one of us, he might be more patient with the rest of us. Charlie volunteered himself because obviously he knows about the assignment and won't be confused or offended by Rick acting weird around him as he figures out this love thing.

Anyway, so I asked Rick how it's going and he shrugged.

"I'm treating him well," he said. "Everything I do, I think will this help Charlie? What will Charlie think? I get up in the morning and I plan my day around the man. I guess I'm used to it, now. But I'm not sure it's love."

"How does it feel?" I asked I know Charlie generally defines love as an action, not a feeling, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around that one.

Rick gave me an odd smile, an I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know-you-can-do-better smile, just for a moment.

"I don't mind acting this way, believe it or not," he admitted. "If anybody deserves to be the center of anyone's day, that man does. But I don't know what else I'm supposed to do."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, can I graduate yet? And if not, when can I? What am I supposed to do? It's not like I'm likely to wake up one morning feeling all oogly. This is me, this is what I am, I don't get the warm fuzzies."

"You're growing a heart," I said.

"What, now?"

So I told him about the growing ears exercise Charlie had me go through as a novice, making me count the number of bird species I could hear at any given moment, over and over, essentially constantly, until he judged that my ears had become sensitized to bird song.

"I think he'll tell you when you're done," I added. "Or, maybe he'll test you somehow." I'd already told Rick how Charlie tested my love for the land by pretending there was a logging operation planned.

"Test me? What's he going to do, threaten to jump off a bridge to see if I mind?"

"Don't say that so loud," I said. "He might hear you and think it's a good idea." 

Mastery Year 2: Part 3: Post 2: No Sure Thing

The warm, almost summery weather of the beginning of May has dissipated, and while we haven't reverted to snow, the days have been gray, cool, and rainy more often than not. A cold, thick fog descends and the ridgeline above campus is hidden by low-hanging fog. Crows call to each other in weather like this, two, three, or four caws in succession, and then the same number repeated by another crow. They never do it in any other weather. I don't know why.

I've been having a hard time convincing Steve Bees to study with me. He doesn't see the point in it. Right now, he sees that the problem is his wife's illness, period, and unless a solution applies directly to that problem, he isn't into it. I can understand why. Her situation must seem like such an all-consuming emergency that dealing with anything else feels like a waste of time. And yet, there is nothing that Steve can really do for Sarah, right now, because she's in the hospital and he isn't. He's already doing everything he can do, and in the meantime other problems continue to exist, including the one he came back here to solve--his inability to manage his justified anger over injustice and the waste of energy and the problems in his marriage that anger caused.

And he's not leaving. He could mope around somewhere else, if he wanted to mope. He could even teach a couple of college courses elsewhere, if he wanted to do that. But he's here. It's like he wants to do or learn or be something more, and he wants us to push him to do it.

So, I'm pushing.

I'm not exactly teaching him the same things Charlie taught me. I've decided not to push him into plant ID so much. Frankly, I don't think he needs to become an expert on natural history, he's already an expert on other things. I'm not sure what he does need, but I have a feeling that in my impulse to get him to listen to and sniff the snow the other week I was on to something. In some way, for some reason, he should spend more time outside and observing.

So, that's what we've been doing.

I have him counting bird voices, since it's spring, except I don't really have the clout to threaten him into compliance the way Charlie did me. For one thing, Steve didn't ask to be my student, so I can't play the demanding Yoda-like figure with him. So we're making a game of it. I quiz him every time I see him outdoors, and sometimes I tell him he's right and sometimes I don't. As I've learned, even ornithologists don't hear every single bird, and the point is to get him to keep trying, to notice more, not to accurately assess his performance for its own sake. We've also worked with visual recognition. I've had him sorting grass stems, feathers, seeds, twigs, photographs of insects....not trying to identify them, just trying to notice the differences among them.

But mostly we just sit outside or walk around for a half hour or an hour every day, and I ask him questions to get him to notice things. If we spot an animal, we watch it doing its thing for as long as it will let us. I want to get him into tracking, but I haven't decided yet whether to introduce it to him now, or wait until next year's snow.

I don't know if I'm doing this right. I don't know what he needs from me, or if he needs anything, or if I can give him what he needs.

I asked Charlie, the other day, how he knew how to put together a plan for me. He grinned at me an instant, and I grinned back, but I don't know what that grin meant. Then his expression changed and he looked away.

"If you're looking for a guarantee, there isn't one," he said, almost growling.

Mastery Year 2: Part 3: Beltane

Note: I'm doubling up this week so I can post about Beltane on Beltane, and so that I don't fall behind.-D.

Happy Beltane, our day of music, love, and the Maypole. Except this year, for the first time, I didn't get to do the Maypole Dance. I had to content myself with helping to make music, which, by the way, I don't really know how to do. I banged away on a skin drum, despite having no sense of rhythm, and at least nobody made fun of me for it.

I'd intended to dance, and I'd been looking forward to it, but there just weren't enough ribbons. Participants each hold a ribbon and everyone weaves the ribbons around the pole as they dance. And there are more students than ribbons. The yearlings get first dibs on the ribbons, and after that it's first come, first served, and I came too late to be served a ribbon at all. I suppose I've had my share, and more than my share, to have danced for so many years running, and that it is someone else's turn, now, but I was still disappointed.

The day was warm and breezy, though clouds mostly obscured the sun until late in the day. A little over a week ago, it was snowing, but today felt legitimately like the first day of some species of summer. Most of the leaves, while not quite full-size, are large enough that the forests are turning green, and the puddles that formed and then subsided in the weekend's rain left a greenish coating of pollen in the low spots of the driveways of campus.

The trees are having a merry May Day, anyway.

Each Beltane is a little different, I find. It's the most variable, the least traditional, of our holidays here. Some years there are two, or even three dances, so different groups of people can get involved. Some years there are concerts or mystery plays. This year, we had only the one dance, though the masters seemed to have partnered up for the day, so I assume they had their own Maypole Dance in private, earlier--as you may recall, the dance is always used to randomly assign partners for the chores to get ready for the feast. The sprouts did not dance at all, but they were present and they were involved. They had, of all things, a mini-science fair, a series of displays they made themselves on the reproduction of various farm animals. Like last year, the music, aside from the Dance itself, took the form of a children's concert. Sarah is still in her ascendancy.

But some things are always the same. There is always the blessing of the animals (by a Catholic priest), and there is always the feast at the end of the day, held out of doors as the sun sets and the night deepens, capped by the various partners all taking a moment to publicly appreciate each other, and then couples dancing afterwards.

I'd really been looking forward to the appreciation thing. You have to figure out something good to say about your partner, even though you might hardly know them at all. Or, if you do know the well, you have to say the kind things you were thinking, but maybe were too shy to say. Since I'm often too shy, I appreciate being pushed a bit. But since I hadn't danced, I had no partner for the day, so I had no place in the appreciation ritual.

I felt ready to pop with all the things I suddenly wasn't being forced to say.

"You can say nice things about people anyway," said June, while we were dancing. I hadn't said anything to her about it, she just knew.

"No, I can't," I said. "I'd look silly."

"You look silly anyway."

"That's true."

"You can say nice things to me," she prompted.

"Always and forever," I said.