Mastery Year 1: Part 5: Lammas

Happy (belated) Lammas. Or Lughnasadh. "Lammas" is short for loaf-mas, suggesting a Christian version of the holiday that I've never otherwise heard of, and "Lughnasadh" means "mourning for Lugh," Lugh being a Celtic deity associated with agriculture. There is a story in which he and another figure compete for the same woman, killing each other and then reviving in turn. The story is an allegory for the alternation of summer and winter, or something like that. I forget if I've ever explained that before.

It's curious that we have a holiday called "Mourning for Lugh," even though nobody on campus mentioned Lugh at any other time, except occasionally at storytelling events, and nobody mentions him much even on Lughnasadh. I mean, it's not like anybody on campus that I know of is actually a devotee of that particular god, so why do we have a holiday mourning him? And why don't we spend it in mourning?

There was one year when all the songs they played were about loss, and I've heard last year, when I wasn't here, also had loss as a major theme. I think loss gets into it both because we can start to see the end of summer approaching, which is kind of sad, especially if you really like summer, and out of the recognition that it's a harvest festival, and in order to harvest something, even a plant, you need to kill it (or, in some cases, wait for it to die). But it's not, overall, a day of mourning for us, no.

And this year the weather was horribly, almost frighteningly hot, and has been for a week, so nobody in their right mind would feel sad at all about the prospect of summer ending.

I have heard that one of Lugh's names is Lugh of the Skillful Hand, and that he won acceptance from the other gods and goddesses because while each of his skills was something one or another of the other deities could already do, he didn't offer anything wholly new, none of them could do everything that he could. So that may explain the theme for the day--people showing off what they do well.

The feast, of course, shows off Sarah's skill as a farmer and Sadie's skill as a chef and baker. That happens every year, and it's fantastic. Some years there are tasting contests for various fruits and vegetables, usually so we can have a voice in what will be planted next year. This year instead there was a tasting for varieties of honey, all bought from different regional farmers, plus honeys from our own hives gathered at different times of the year. Wholly impractical--we would stick with our honey even if some farmer in the next county had something we all liked better--but delicious. There were also tastings for different zucchini breast recipes and different kinds of jelly, and those will have an impact on what we get in the dining hall over the nest year.

And there were not one but two performances. The first, in the big tent on the Central Field as we ate, was a combination magic and juggling show. Ten different acts, mostly students, each had five or ten minutes to wow and entertain the crowd. One of the acts, a pair of talented yearlings, enlisted Greg, apparently as a volunteer, but he ended up quite clearly being involved in a planned slight-of-hand sequence that none of us had known he could do. That was awesome. June is a magic student as well, but she didn't perform. Ebony did. I had seen Ebony do magic before, of course, but this was the first time I saw her do a full performance. She had one of the longest acts, full of professional prattle and schtick, based largely on a series of "mistakes," by which she set up the audience (those few who didn't know any better) to feel bad for the poor little blind girl, before objects reappeared in improbable places, apparently out-of-control accidents resulted in the impossible occurring, and people who appeared eager to help her in a condescending way suddenly found trained ferrets or homing pigeons inside their clothing or under their hats.

"One of these days," I whispered to June, "she'll run out of people who underestimate her and she'll need a new shtick."

"What makes you think you're not still underestimating her?" June whispered back. And interesting comment, as I don't think they know each other well, but they do magic together in class, so I suppose knows Ebony has something else up her sleeve.

Anyway, the final magician on stage was Allen, blooming out of another act's magic to thunderous applause.

Specifically, six students had taken turns pulling progressively more improbable things out of a black top hat resting on a wooden stool in the middle of the stage. Then the seventh reached in and could not find anything. The group acted as though the magic hat were "broken," clustering around it and trying various things to "fix" it and eliciting weird noises, bad odors, or unpleasant objects (a realistic-looking plastic scorpion, an apparently literal hot potato) instead, until one of them pulled out what appeared to be a lit cherry bomb!

All of them ran around the stage with this thing for a few seconds, before they dropped it in the middle of the stage near the stool and cowered. The thing burst, producing a large billow of smoke instead of the dangerous explosion of a real cherry bomb, and when the smoke cleared, there was Allen, sitting on the stool and wearing the top-hat.

I've thought about how he could have done that--there was no tap door, no possibility of a wire to be lowered on, nothing nearby to hide behind...I think he simply walked on stage while we were all distracted by watching the cherry bomb. It's like the gorilla experiment, in which you don't even see someone in a gorilla suit because you're busy counting the number of times people throw a ball.

Anyway, the others left the stage to him, and he performed for about ten minutes and he was wonderful. Of course.

Then, because it was so hot, we all left the tent and had a water-gun fight until we were all soaked. Then we went back into the tent, where the buffet had been re-set with a feast of dessert, and for once, Charlie performed. He read a series of poems, mostly his and all excellent, before yielding the stage to a poetry slam, where several students performed spoken word pieces and we indicated by the loudness of our clapping which we thought best.

But by the time the slam was over, the masters were all gone, as were Chuck and Joe and Malachi, all of whom were visiting for the day. All vanished just like every year. As usual, nobody seemed to notice. The rest of us milled around and ate desert and chatted, and after a while a few people went to the Mansion and brought back their instruments and we danced until we drifted off to bed (the dining hall staff did put away the food, and the janitor team put away the tent and everything else the next day).

I almost asked one of the musicians if he'd seen the masters, but of course they would be upstairs on the fourth floor where we can't go, with their unannounced guests, doing whatever it is we can't know about.

I'm getting really tired of designed ignorance. I don't find it fun anymore.

Mastery Year 1: Part 4: Post 5: I Don't Understand It Myself

I've been so busy mostly talking about June and our wedding and everything related that I forgot to mention an important piece of news--remember Carrie? She was a candidate when I was a novice. We were friends, though never close, and I wrote about her once or twice. Anyway, she's back--in the master's group, now.

She's not one of the Six (they haven't changed), she's in the non-teaching staff, in charge of heavy maintenance and IT. The position did not exist when I was here before--there's been some rearranging. Chuck, the maintenance head has left, as has Joe, the head of the janitor team, and Security Joe is still here, but completely retired. I think I mentioned all that before. So, now they've folded cleaning in with light maintenance (meaning replacing light bulbs and so forth) and security, meaning that there's a team of people whose general responsibility is to look over campus regularly ad make sure nothing is wrong. That's now the responsibility of a woman named Waverlee. Heavy maintenance means anything you need to be a mechanic or a carpenter or a plumber to do, and that's Carrie's responsibility, as is anything to do with the computers, email system, website, etc.

When I was here before, IT just sort of seemed to get taken care of. It was one of the miracles of the place--I assume the work was being done by an ally, and that there wasn't enough of it to require the attention of anyone on campus very often. Now, as the campus belatedly joins the twenty-first century, there are more machines, and hence more going wrong with machines, and the topic has been elevated to part of an actual job.

Anyway, so Carrie is back. We haven't spoken to each other a lot, though she was at my wedding. She's the first person I knew as a student to come back and work as a master. It's kind of odd.

In the meantime, I've been writing a poem a day, as per Charlie's instruction, mostly about my spot in the woods, and always inspired by it. And he keeps marking them up with red pen. His red pen is not kind. Whole stanzas are crossed out. Marginal notes include things like "what does this even mean?" and "why are you calling this poetry?"

At first I thought these were just rhetorical devices for criticizing me, code for "this means nothing" and "this isn't poetry," but I should have known better. Charlie uses language as precisely as Allen, maybe more so, and if he wants to make a statement, he makes a statement. If he asks a question, he means he wants an answer. So, finally I started sending back answers, along with the new poetry. He sent back a note, "I was wondering when you'd start replying. I'm not talking to myself, you know."

And you know, the funny thing is that most of the time when he asks me to explain something, I realize I don't really understand myself?

Year 4: Part 7: Post 3: Interruption 2

I'm doing a three-part post this week on our community's reaction to the recent  election, rather than an ordinary post. These events are important, and it seems important to say something about it using the forum I have. This is the second of the series.

On Friday, the Six got together, as we often do, to have dinner and to discuss community business. As usual, there were more than six of us, in part because some of our “allies” were in attendance. Now that we’re teaching classes again (mostly public workshops, we’re not officially a school these days), we have allies. David, Allen’s son, was there, for example, since he teaches some of the science workshops when he’s in town (I teach most of them). There were eleven of us at the meeting, in total.

We were at Allen and Lo's place, since we rotate meeting places, so of course Lo and Alexis joined us for the meal (Julie lives in another state and does not plan to visit until Thanksgiving), and we all had a good time, but they left us alone for our meeting.

We drew our chairs into a circle on Allen’s patio and almost immediately the conviviality of dinner bled away. It had been a few days since the election, and we can forget about it for minutes or hours at a time, but then the knowledge comes back. We grew glum and sat around, sighing in silence, not looking at each other.

“My heart hurts,” said Joy, finally. She really liked Hillary Clinton, felt an almost personal connection with her. There were grunts and twitches of agreement.

“My heart would be hurting anyway,” said Karen. “Not everyone here wanted Hillary to win.” She had written in Bernie Sanders.

“I know,” said Joy. “And I don’t understand it. You’re as much of a feminist as I am.”

“I didn’t want to be bullied by my gender into voting for the first female major-party candidate who comes along,” Karen explained. “She’s a political insider and a corporate war-monger. We can do better.” She was holding tightly to the seat of her chair, not looking at us. Karen is still painfully shy, even among friends, and she expected us to disagree with her. Kit fulfilled expectations.

“She’s a politician,” Kit announced. “They’re all like that. Anyone who hasn’t made compromises hasn’t been in government yet. They either learn to compromise or they fail to do the job. Who did you want for President, Lady Isis? The Goddess Athena?” Isis, in Egyptian myth, helps her brother/husband, Osiris create civilization. Athena, of course, is the Greek goddess of statecraft, as well as wisdom, war, and craft in general. In other words, literally divinely perfect stateswomen. Karen gripped her chair even harder, looked at Kit, and said nothing for a long moment.

"You didn't like her, either," she said, at last.

"Well, not at first," Kit acknowledged. "I picked her because she was the best candidate available. It just gets me that this country can't elect a woman yet. Like, oh my god, is a vagina so terrible that you have to elect Trump to avoid one? What kind of country elects a rapist, an extortionist, and a liar rather than a perfectly good female policy wonk? I just...this isn't how it was supposed to turn out. I thought we had this one. I thought it was going to happen."

"It sounds like you're upset that the future you imagined did not happen," observed Greg.

"But it's my job to make the future I imagine happen!" she protested, and I thought about my daughter, who drew a bird to help Hillary win and could not understand why that didn't work,

"You said that kind of magic doesn't always work," I said, and Kit smiled at me in an embarrassed, lopsided way. She remembered her comment, too.

"But I wanted it to work!" She admitted. "We deserved for this to work! The amount of suffering he is going to cause...." She choked on her words and Allen rubbed her back.

"I know," I told her. "I'm thinking about climate change. With Clinton, we had a chance. Now, I'm not sure that we do."

"With Jill Stein we would have had a chance," said Chuck, who is not Charlie. He was our chief of maintenance while I was a novice, but left while I was in Absence. Lately, he's been helping Sadie with the plumbing and electrical work for her restaurant. He doesn't think much about Clinton as an environmentalist, a topic he and I have argued about.

"That was never going to work," Rick said, dismissively. "Jill Stein was never going to get elected."

"She might have if everyone who said that voted," replied Chuck, somewhat accusatory. "Almost half of the eligible voters didn't vote."

"It's not like Jill Stein is Lady Isis, either," pointed out Kit, and we all started talking at once, arguing politics, and sounding very mundane about it, except for the occasional reference to Greek myth or to the ethics of attempting magic to influence a supposedly free and fair election.

“We never used to talk about any of this,” commented Greg, quietly, and we all stopped talking to listen to him. “When Reagan was re-elected…I don’t even know how any of the others voted. Campus was a refuge, a bubble, from the political.”

That was 1984, and while I understand the school did not get accredited until the following year, the campus already existed and the faculty and some students were living together on it.

"I remember we didn't talk about the election in 2000, either," I said. "I was in grad school when Bush was re-elected. We talked about it there...."

"But not here," acknowledged Greg. "Until you and David and Steve started pushing, silence on the subject was almost a point of pride for us." By 'Steve,' he meant Steve Bees. Greg seldom uses that nickname.

“We were just beginning to get closer to the real world,” said Allen, sadly, his head resting on his fist. “And now it seems like the real world has gotten further away.”

“The point is, why are we talking about this?” Greg asked. “Is this community business, or is this chit-chat?” His question wasn’t rhetorical. Greg has a habit of asking questions that open up new lines of thought.

We thought.

“Our is the world,” I said, finally, thinking about Cecilly and Joya, and also about climate change. "We can't draw a line around our little bubble and keep the world out, because where would we draw the line? Do we include sprouts? Do we include partners or parents? What about family of partners? Partners of sprouts? What if Joya can't become a citizen this year because she's not white? Is she outside our community or in? What about Julie? She isn't here, she doesn't involve herself with us, but she's one of us. What if--" I was thinking of her vulnerability as a young woman in an age when the President of the United States happily boasts about grabbing pussies. But I didn't say it. I looked at Allen and he looked back at me, his eyes wide with fear. "We can't keep the world out because it won't stay out," I finished. "Neither injustice nor climate change obeys property lines."

It was my turn to hold on to my chair and breathe hard for a bit. I hardly ever talk, and I think that was the longest, most impassioned speech I've made yet at any of our meetings. The others looked at me, shocked, I suppose.

"You're right," said Greg. "The United States attempted isolationism once. Our appeasement of Hitler, our silence, did not prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor." An attack he remembers hearing about the day it happened.

"Alright, so what do we do?" asked Kit. "If we Six serve our community, and our community is the world, how do we serve it now?"

But none of us had an answer. We were all silent, for a bit, looking at each other. And then Allen began to sing.

Hello Darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
left its seeds while I was sleeping....

Allen has always loved to sing. That he is not very good at it has always encouraged, rather than irritated me--it is his implicit insistence that one need not be very good at things to enjoy doing them and to enjoy them publicly. He's not bad, his voice is quite pleasant, it just goes slightly off-key, now and then. And he has a very narrow range.

But usually when he sings, he either sings to himself or he performs small concerts, strumming his guitar and doing a couple of songs at parties and community events, singing for all the normal reasons that people sing. This was the first time I've ever heard him use song instead of speech, as if he lived in a musical play, or something, singing to say something he could not speak.

And indeed I had heard him say very little since he announced "It's over," acknowledging Trump's triumph three days earlier. He's not usually that quiet, but he had seemed preoccupied, disturbed. He'd said only that he had nothing helpful to say.

Now he sang on, through the whole song, as the darkness of night deepened and the temperature around us dropped, sang about a vision of isolation, of people "talking without speaking, hearing without listening," of hands rejected and calls to action left unheard, of loneliness and helplessness in the neon glare of a cold and rainy night. The nature of the problem that needs fixing, the location of the lock that now requires a key.

Allen is many things, but I've never thought of him as a visionary--and yet I believe he has had a vision, one that frightened him deeply but that he feels to be very important, but it was something he either could not say or did not believe he could say in a helpful way on his own.

And listening to him sing, then, it came to me that Allen is a deeply empathetic person, but he does not inspire empathy, not beyond the immediate circle of those who know and love him. That is why so many people think of him as purely intellectual, as distant, as odd and awkward, when he is, in fact, none of those things. As one musical string vibrates when another, laid near it, is struck, he resonates keenly for others but somehow the music inside him cannot reach anyone else, not even, usually, us, except in an intellectual way.

And so, having something  something well beyond the intellect to impart, he had decided to try something new--he borrowed someone else's music. Paul Simon's.

And when he was done, Allen would not look at us but looked down and to the right. Suddenly, he looked very small, barely visible in the faint yellow glow from the kitchen window. He sat curled over, rocking slightly, hugging himself against the chill of the evening. Even the crickets had fallen silent as the temperature fell.

Except Allen does not get cold.

This is how we communicate. We discuss, we explain, we argue, we vote, just like any other group of people, but when the big decisions need to be made, when the great thoughts need to be transmitted, we seldom use ordinary, prosaic words. Instead we evoke story, we evoke song, we locate ourselves in myth. We arrive together in a place where ordinary words do not take us.

And then we act from that joint place.

Year 3: Eighth Interlude

This is my last of the non-narrative posts for this batch. Next week I'll post on Brigid as my twenty-two-year-old self, making this the Interlude, more or less. Really, all of January has been an interlude.

In my narrative, I talk about the classes I take, but I seldom mention the classes other people take, let alone the variety of workshops and classes available. Since I naturally focused on those classes and events that suited my interests and credit requirements, I worry that I've given a somewhat lopsided view of the school, focused disproportionately on science, when actually science was something of a sideline for most people.

I don't have a record of every single class, workshop, and talk offered during the four years I was a novice, but I've been able to cobble together a list of most of them. I've asked around, and this list is pretty representative of the variety that most of us can remember from that period--in more recent years, the curriculum was slightly different.

I am leaving out the few classes and events specifically aimed at candidates, since we novices were hardly aware of them at the time.

Allen

Classes
 
Dark Waters (a psychopathology survey course)
Intro to Psychology
Gender Studies (team taught with Kit)
Tricks of the Trade (stage magic)
Psychology of Magic
Lies, Statistics, and Illusions
Healer's Health (self-care for clergy)

Extra-curriculars and mini-classes/events

Group Therapy (weekly)
Philosopher's Stone Soup (weekly)
Stage Magic (workshop for those considering training)
Advanced Stage Magic (workshop restricted to those already in training)
Juggling (introductory workshop)
Playing (workshop on the Island--does consist of fun)

Charlie

Classes

Intro to Ecology
Science Literature (how to find and understand professional science papers) 
Messing Around Outdoors
Literature of the Land (reading nature writing)
Creating Campus (wildlife-friendly landscaping)
Environmentalism for Dummies

Extra-curriculars and mini-classes/events

Dead Poet's Society (weekly)
Paleolithic Dinner (weekly)
Horticulture Training (weekly)
Chainsaw Safety and Maintenance (workshop)
Axe Work and Sharpening (workshop)
Tracking (introductory workshop)
Tracking Spring (botany/plant ecology workshop)
Inside a Woodchuck (workshop--dissecting woodchucks)
Tanning and Leatherwork (workshop)
Art and Craft of Woodwork (workshop)
Art and Craft of Bone and Antler (workshop)
Natural History of the Island (workshop) 

Greg

Classes

American Minority Perspectives
Intro to History
Sacred Threads: American Religious History
American History of Dissent
World History: Africa
World History: The Americas
World History: Asia
World History: India
Intro to Buddhism
The Art of Listening and Love

Extra-curriculars and Mini-classes/Events

Zazen Meditation (daily)
Alchemy (monthly, if students show strong interest)
American History Talks (in observance of days of historical importance, such as Pearl Harbor Day)
Islamic History Talks (lots of these after 9/11)
Other Talks (mostly on religious history and Buddhism)


Joy 

Classes

Beginning Horsemanship
Advanced Beginner Horsemanship
Healing Horsemanship (helping horses with physical and behavioral problems)

Extra-curriculars and Mini classes/Events

Reiki Workshop (weekly)
Manifestation Workshop (monthly)
Animals in Service (talk)
History of Animal Labor (workshop on the Island)
That Good Night (workshop on veterinary end of life issues)
Veterinary First Aid (workshop)
Veterinary Nursing Care (workshop)
Bedside Manner/Working with a Patient's family (workshop)
Magic Talks (topics include pendulum use, visualization, astral projection and perception, animal communication)

Karen 

Classes

Personal Safety and Fitness
Sword
Intermediate Martial Arts
Energy, Ethics, and Honor (includes martial arts-related occult skills)
Advanced Martial Arts and Healing
Sword and Empty Hand Sparring
Reiki
Zen Flower Arrangement


Extra-curricular and Mini classes/Events

Calisthenics (daily)
Zazen on the Island (workshop)
Advanced Flower Arrangement (workshop)
Advanced Reiki (workshop)
History of Asian Martial Arts (seminar)
Buddhism in America (seminar)
Zen and Art (seminar)
Women in Buddhism (seminar)

Kit 

Classes

Intro to Sacred Dance
Intro to Wiccan Magic
Intro to Wiccan Ritual and Myth
Gender Studies (team taught with Allen)
Music Theory and Practice
The Spirit of Music (music in magic and spiritual practice)
Herbal Magic and the Allies of the Land
Intro to Anthropology

Extra-curriculars and Mini classes/Events

Thursday Night Jam (weekly musical jam session)
Callalloo (occasional open mike event)
Storyteller's Circle (occasional)
Practical Yoga (daily)
Sacred Dance and Movement (talk)
Island Workshops (workshop)
Teaching Coven (meets for sabbats and esbats)
Tools of the Craft (talk)
Time and Direction in Wicca (talk) 
Magic Talks (topics include trance induction/extraction, dreaming, intention, and visualization)

Other Instructors (allies and student-instructors)

Classes

Recognizing Rocks, Crystals, and Gems (basic minerology plus introductory crystal magic)
Earth and Water (introductory earth science course)
Moving Earth: Geological Processes
Everyday Physics (introduction to Newtonian physics)
Physics and Fiction (exploring physics through speculative fiction)
Einstein and Atom (introduction to Einsteinian and subatomic physics)
Earth Science Literacy (includes climatology)
Weather Magic
Spirit and Magic of Sex (theory only)
Farm Training (taught by Sarah)
Campus Systems (taught by Chuck)
Latin (taught by Charlie but not every year)
Greek (taught by Charlie but not every year)
Spanish (taught by Charlie but not every year)
Hebrew (when there's interest)
Kabbalah Studies (only offered to students fluent in Hebrew)
Aramaic (when there's interest)
Cooking (taught by Sadie)
Advanced Math (taught by Malachai, when there's interest)

Mini-classes

First Aid/CPR
First Responder Certification
Introduction to Bee Keeping (workshop)
Personal Health (workshops, seminars, and talks)
Shearing, Dyeing, and Spinning (workshop)
Weaving (workshop)
Knitting (workshop)
Crochet (workshop)
Biblical History (workshop)
Incense Blending and Aroma Therapy (workshop)
Candle Magic (seminar)
Energy Self-Defense (seminar)
Personal Security (workshop taught by Security Joe)

I could probably go on. I keep remembering more. But that gives you the picture.



   

Year 2: Part 8: Post 4: Other Staff

I'm continuing with a serious of informative rather than narrative posts. Here, I describe the non-teaching staff. I very rarely write about any of these people, but they were an important presence on campus. Some, like Aaron, I spoke to several times a week when I was a student, though rarely about anything that makes a good story. Others, like Malachi, I hardly ever saw and did not actually meet until I'd been at school for months. Again, the ages are how old they were in 2000.

I'm not including profiles on the allies, people who worked for the school but weren't formally part of the masters' group. Some taught classes, others helped care for campus. Some were paid and some were not. A few never even came to campus, like the woman who sewed our uniforms for us. Without allies, the campus could not have functioned. Some even served as masters to individual students, like Nora's friend the bee keeper, who became her most important teacher. But few of us knew any of the allies well and many of them came and went very quickly, helping out for a few weeks and then not again for years. I may someday do profiles on them, but not today.

Among the masters themselves, there wasn't actually a hard-and-fast line between the teaching and non-teaching staff. They all wore the green ring and all helped run the school more or less as equals (there was no separate administrative staff). Some of the so-called non-teaching staff did an awful lot of teaching, while the jobs of some of the professors included tasks one might expect to done by staff--Charlie was groundskeeper and Joy was staff veterinarian. People at school always wore titles like staffmember or professor very lightly--indeed, the practice was to hire someone worth working with and then design the job around them, not the other way around.

The real distinction was between the Six and the masters who were not among the Six. The community always has the Six, and has it still, but when campus closed the non-teaching staff were laid off (since the community has no income now, we Six do not get paid either).

The non-teaching staff always turned over faster than the Six did. When I returned to begin my candidacy, four out of the eight (Chuck, both Joes, and Malachi) had moved on and been succeeded by people with completely different job descriptions. But these are the people I started out with, as they were when I first met them.

Aaron

Aaron is the head librarian. By training, he is a research librarian, but he also supervises a team of student circulation librarians. He not only answers student questions, he also teaches workshops on how to look for information, how to evaluate sources, and how to document and cite research. He actively encourages an ethic of scholarship and careful, reflective reading. He was raised Jewish and retains a sense that spirituality and literature are intertwined.

Aaron is 47 years old, very short and slight--he could almost pass for a child. His hair is medium brown and short and he wears glasses. He can identify and find virtually any book ("I'm looking for a book about horses in Australia, the author's name began with a B and the cover's green?"), usually within a within a few minutes, he does not whisper even in the library, and while he is usually cheerful, he often gets frustrated with technology and utters highly creative maledictions. He has a pet scarlet macaw named Ahab whom he occasionally brings to work with him.


Chuck

Chuck is the head mechanic. He is responsible for our cars, bicycles, and appliances. The campus has a lot of larger mechanical systems too, some of them unique--the composting toilets, the solar and wind power systems, and so on. He and his team of students are in charge of all of them. He is 35 years old, medium height, with light brown hair and a very stocky build. He enjoys mechanics, treating it as a "way in" to personal development and spirituality.

Joe

Joe is the head of the janitorial team. While he is personally fastidious, he has no real interest in cleaning per se--it's just a job to him, which he keeps because he cares about the school and because it means he can pursue his real passion without worrying about his own upkeep. His passion is dance, and he has his own dance company off campus, though he rarely accepts on-campus students because he does not teach beginners.

He is 45 years old, tall and slim. His body language is quite effeminate, but he does not self-identify as gay--or straight. His private life is utterly private.

Malachi 

Malachi is the school comptroller and quartermaster. That is, not only does he handle money, he also handles the purchasing and storage of all supplies, from recycled-paper notebooks (which are resold to students at cost) to laundry powder, to animal feed. He also serves as a kind of unofficial campus lawyer--he knows enough about the law to offer the school good advice and he knows when a real lawyer is needed. He leads a small team of student assistants.

He is a little taller than average, thinly built, with dark hair and relatively dark skin. He looks part Indian or possibly Arab. He rarely interacts with students, except for those who work with him. His personal passion is mathematics. He is 46.

Sarah

Sarah is the campus farm manager and trains and supervises a large team of student farmers. She is tall, slim, and muscular, with long light brown hair that she usually wears tied up in a bandanna. She's 36 years old and lives most of the year on campus with her husband (who builds stringed instruments) and their children. She is Catholic, the only master who is a practicing member of a mainline Christian denomination.She is often uncomfortable with the school's general pagannness. She converted during her candidacy for mastery. She stayed at school, and continues to stay, largely because of her unspoken devotion to Charlie. 

Security Joe 

Security Joe is, indeed, head of campus security. He is a retired police officer and he trains and supervises a student security team. Crime is not a serious concern on campus, but the team is an important precaution. Occasionally, they do find people on campus who shouldn't be, and their periodic sweeps of campus mean that if someone has a medical emergency while alone they'll be found quickly.


Security Joe is 55 years old and very short, for a man, with narrow shoulders and small, strong hands. His hair is dark brown and his complexion is dark olive. Despite his stature, few people guess that he is transgendered because his self-presentation is so unambiguously male. Only when he sings--which is rare--does his voice sound androgynous or feminine. He lives on campus with his husband, Cuppa Joe, who is a grocery manager at a nearby supermarket.

Sharon

Sharon's role does not correspond exactly to any standard job description. She is office manager, head receptionist, head of admissions, facilities manager, scheduling coordinator, and more. When in doubt, call Sharon. She seems to know everything that happens on campus. She heads a team of student assistants and is the first person at the school most prospective students meet. She is 50 years old, of medium height and somewhat stocky, for a woman, with short, dark, curly hair. No one knows where she goes or what she does when she leaves campus.

Sadie

 Sadie is head cook and supervises everyone involved in food service on campus. She teaches a lot of students to cook. She is 53 years old and lives on campus with her daughter, Kayla, and her grandson, Aidan, whom she is raising with Kayla's help. She is tall, strong, and curvy, with long, dark brown curly hair.

Part 8: Post 5: To Be Merry Another Year

Happy New Year! We had a nice little party, and as soon as our bedroom windows get fixed we can go back to being at least halfway warm at night.

I should explain.

There wasn't any official New Years Eve celebration, but of course we had a party and Kit and her husband turned up, as did Security Joe and Cuppa Joe, and, surprisingly, Greg. I don't think any students came in who weren't here anyway, but it's sometimes hard to tell, since people have been coming and going a lot.

It was pretty low-key, actually, especially at first. After dinner we just turned on the tree and broke out the booze and the leftover holiday cookies and sat around talking.

"So, where's my flying car?" asked Arther at one point. "Weren't we supposed to have flying cars by this point? It's 2001, for crying out loud!"

"If we did have flying cars, we'd crash them," pointed out Andy. "Three-dimensional traffic jams? I'd kind of hoped we'd be done with cars by now, actually."

"We'd all switch to bicycles?" asked one of the Ravens, teasing him. Andy colored, but recovered his dignity.

"Well, yes. Or walking. Walking's lovely," he said, quietly.

"It's not like nothing's changed since we were boys, for better or worse," pointed out Greg.

"That's true," Arther conceded. "Consumer electronics, the moon landing, nuclear power, plastic everything, a lot of pollution...and civil rights, and the repeal of Britain's anti-witchcraft laws. I rather appreciate that one."

"Free love and The Pill?" asked Greg, with half a smile.

"That, too," conceded Arther. "Viva La Revolution!" and he took a swig of something. I don't know what was in that bottle, it never got around to me. Willa giggled and Ollie, his hand in hers, looked at her oddly.

"Flying cars and video phones are just consumer interest issues," declared Ollie. "We could have them if enough people wanted them, the technology's there. But we don't have intelligent computers or the Cavradyne drive."

"Cavradyne drive?" asked Arther.

"The propulsion system of Discovery One, in 2001: A Space Odyssey," supplied Rick, before the answer could make its way out of Ollie's open mouth. Willa giggled again and Ollie frowned at her. "The book, I mean," continued Rick, not appearing to notice. "You want to bet that movie is on at least one TV station tonight?"

"Too bad we don't have a TV," said Andy.

"Oh, hang on," interjected Greg, and went upstairs. He came down a few minutes later with a copy of the book and we took turns reading passages from it. I've seen the movie a few times, but I'd never read the book. We didn't get through all of it, obviously, so I think I'm going to have to read it myself at some point. The language is wonderful.

More often than not the ship would reverberate to the tunes of the harpsichord, frozen thoughts of a mind that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Anyway, along around 11, Andy giggled.

"Did you know you're slurring your words?" he asked Arther, who was, just slightly. "It's neat to be the only sober one in the room. You're all very entertaining."

"You're not the only sober one," I told him, which was quite true--I'd poured  myself one cupful of hard cider, and tasted some of the new applejack (you make that by letting hard cider freeze; the alcoholic fraction stays liquid, so you pour that off and it ends up about as strong as brandy), but after that I'd switched to cocoa. I was on a sugar high, if anything. But I got the hiccups right after I was done speaking, which kind of ruined the effect. Everybody laughed at me. What is it with hiccups? The few times I have been drunk I didn't hiccup.

"If you're going to be drunk, though," continued Andy "you might as well do it up right, right? Be Really fun to watch? This is New Years."

"What" hic! "do you" hic! "have in mind?" hic! "Damnit," I said.

hic!

hic!

hic!

"BOO!" cried Arther. I jumped half out of my chair, spilling my cocoa.


"That never works!" I complained, and hiccuped again. Everybody laughed at me, again. But after we'd gotten the spilled cocoa cleaned up the party at last started to pick up. Except for Arther, I think most of us were sober, or nearly so, but we were tired and sometimes that's almost the same thing. Once we started getting goofy we couldn't really stop. Along about midnight somebody said we should have a parade, so we all ran outside and tromped around in the snow playing "When the Saints Come Marching In" on kazoos on the big flat pasture out by the Edge of the World while fireworks and shotguns went off in the distance. The sky was clear, but the snow was fresh and I realized that the next day the field would bear tracks like the invasion of a giant and slightly tipsy centipede.

The next day was pretty normal for winter around here, except that I fell asleep during zazen, which I normally don't do, and Kit hung around happily lecturing anyone who would listen on the history of the Philadelphia Mummers tradition. As the afternoon wore on a storm blew in, but I didn't care much because I had nowhere I needed to be. It was a bad storm, though, and the wind was still getting stronger when I went to bed just before ten.

That night--which was last night--something like an explosion woke me. Everyone else was awake, too, and everything was confusion. Eventually we figured out that the wind lashing the branches of the elm tree at the corner had broken a couple of windows. Even as we talked about it we could hear more windows breaking. My room is ok, it's nowhere near the corner, but there was snow and broken glass in a couple of different rooms, and with the wind still blowing more windows could break.

Chuck--who, if you'll remember, isn't Charlie, but the head of maintenance, came down to look at the broken windows.

"We can't fix this tonight," he proclaimed, "and I doubt anyone will sleep well wondering if their window's about to break. Some of our windows broke, too--in the breakfast room? Why don't we all move down to the Great Hall? It'll be easier to keep warm than this Swiss cheese up here."

He was right; the temperature in the dorms had already dropped ten degrees and was falling fast.

So, that's what we did. There's a curtain rod running the width of the Great Hall, I think they used to use half of the room for performances or something, so we took the evergreen garlands down from the rod and tied a line of blankets up there to keep the heat in and then carried our own bedding down.

The masters came down, too, mostly half asleep. Kit's hair stuck up every which way, like a giant red Afro, but she seemed bright-eyed enough. I tried to see where she went, but I lost her in the crowd. Greg still wore his school uniform--I've never seen him in anything else, I don't suppose he has much else in the way of clothes. Allen wasn't there--I've heard a rumor he's in the Florida Keys with his family for a few weeks. Joy wasn't there, nor was Karen. I don't know where Karen was. Joe, my boss from the janitor crew came down, looking odd in a pair of boxer shorts and a truly ugly sweater. Sarah and her family were not there, and neither were Sadie and her family. Sharon never seemed to be anywhere except when she works in the office. She's a complete mystery. But Aaron, and of course, Chuck both showed up. I hadn't known Aaron was on campus. Charlie came downstairs in a flannel nightshirt and shearling slippers. He's let his hair grow out a little since classes finished and it's long enough now to give him a definite case of bed-head. He didn't look like anyone's guru, he looked like an old man shuffling around looking for his bed.

Eventually, we all settled down on the couches or on the floor, and someone turned out the lights. Except, we were all probably still too jazzed up to sleep. I was. Finally someone said it.

"I can't sleep," complained a voice.

"Do you want a lullaby?" another voice jeered. But someone took the suggestion seriously.

There is a castle on a cloud
I like to go there in my sleep
Nobody shouts or talks too loud
not in my castle on a cloud.

It was Kit's voice, from somewhere near the fireplace. When she was finished, someone said "encore!" and we all laughed. Someone else sang, not Kit, I don't know who, but a woman's voice. "Hey Jealousy," I think?  Song, after song. I'm not sure everyone wanted to stay up singing, but no one complained.

Finally, I heard an odd voice--I couldn't figure out who it was, but I almost recognized it.

Did you come here for forgiveness?
Did you come to raise the dead?
Did you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?

I looked around. We'd left the tree lights on, so anyone who had to get to the bathroom could navigate without shining a flashlight all over, and I worked out that the voice was coming from near Cuppa Joe. I could see his head silhouetted against the lit tree. But he wasn't singing. Presumably, Security Joe was.

You act like you never had love
and you want me to go without.

Was it only a pretty song to him? I wonder about Security Joe, what it's like to be him. He does not talk about his life to me, and I do not ask. What is it like to have the legal part of your marriage evaporate like sublimating snow? Or, maybe it was just a song to him. It is pretty.

We were all quiet for a while. Then, I heard Willa's voice.

Sometimes in our lives
We all have pain, we all have sorrow.
But, if we are wise, we know that there's
always tomorrow.

I heard Ollie join in beside her. Then another voice. Then I joined in. Then Kit--I'd know her voice anywhere. Then other voices. Soon, we were all singing.


Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For, it won't be long
Till I'm going to need somebody to lean on.

I don't think we were singing to Joe specifically. He wouldn't have appreciated it, for one thing. People who don't share their troubles tend to not want a lot of public sympathy. I'm not even sure how many people in the room knew Joe might have had private meaning to his song--or knew him well enough to know whether he meant it that way or not. But the song felt right, no matter who it was for. Dozens of people, singing together, in a damaged mansion with the wind still howling outside.


You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand.
We all need somebody to lean on.
I just might have a problem that you'd understand
We all need somebody to lean on.

Exactly.

Part 4: Post 5: Nora and the Bees

 Nora seems to have a thing about bees now. I forget if I’ve mentioned it, but there are beehives on campus. That’s where we get all our honey and the wax for our candles. The beekeeper is an ally who comes in a couple of times a week. For the last month or two, maybe, Nora has been tagging along with her as much as possible, helping out and talking. Now, she can’t stop talking about it to us.

 I suppose Nora hanging out with the beekeeper is not all that different from me tagging along with Charlie when he works, except that I don't go on and on about it. Nora does have more time to tag along than I do, though, because she's not working and because she's only taking half as many credits. I forget if I've mentioned it, but Nora is on a six year track, because she hasn't finished high school yet. 

It’s not that she’s not smart enough, of course, it’s that there are some assignments here that require skills she doesn't have yet, so she takes a lot longer to finish her homework. But not all of her homework assignments are like that, so she often has a lot of free time. She's using it to hang out with the beekeeper and also with Kit. I expect she'll choose both of them as masters, if she hasn't done it yet. She's reading up on bees, she got her own bee suit for her birthday, and she's particularly interested in the wax. She made last week's batch of candles by herself, and now she's trying to figure out how to make scented candles. The wax belongs to the school, so she has to find someone willing to use scented candles for some legitimate school-related purpose before she actually makes them. Kit just said she'd use the scented candles in one of her classes, and this is why Nora is talking non-stop about bees and candles today.

She seems really young, talking on and on excitedly like this. Sometimes I forget she's really a high schooler. Other times, she says or does something, and it's like she might as well be twelve. But then, I probably sound about the same to a lot of the older students.

Nora doesn’t need to choose masters yet, even though she seems to be doing so. They set the deadlines for such things based on when you’re supposed to be done, not based on how long you’ve been here, so the longer you’re here the longer you can wait to choose. Arthur had to choose in his first couple weeks, because he only has one year here. Of course, he only had to choose one master, because he tested out of everything. For full-course students, you have to choose both your spirit master and your athletics master by the beginning of your first fall semester, but the others can wait a year or two. I think those are first because they usually take longer.

As I’ve said, I chose Charlie as my spirit master. I didn’t need an athletics master, but I now have him for that, too, at his suggestion. I’ll probably choose him for craft master, too. I don’t need an art master, and as far as I know Charlie doesn’t teach healing or magic, so I’ll have to choose somebody else for those. Most of the other yearlings have already chosen at least some of their masters, too; the leanings, the hints, I noticed a month or two ago, when we argued about who of our teachers was Dumbledore, have developed, crystallized out, into real choices.

Andy has organized his studies around something he calls “radical Christianity,” although, oddly enough, his spirit master is Greg, who isn’t Christian. I think he’s going to ask Kit to be his athletics master, so he can study yoga. He still sometimes gets almost manically excited about things, and he came back to the dorm a few weeks ago after a workshop Kit taught (“Beyond the Asanas,” I think it was called) just blown away by the idea that yoga is not just a series of stretches but also a way of living that includes kindness and generosity. He’s also adopted the care of all the campus bicycles, studying bicycle maintenance with Chuck, the maintenance man. I had thought that his interest in the bicycles seemed unhealthy—remember that he first came to campus in order to steal one of our bicycles, which he returned after he got clean. It was like he couldn’t let go of that guilt. But he seems really happy fixing bicycles, and he’s really good at it. He says that sometimes a debt that cannot be paid, a wound that cannot be healed, is a gift.

“Fixing bicycles makes me real,” he said. I don’t know what he meant.

Joanna is studying both Wicca and yoga with Kit, and stays out late on full and new moon nights in order to meet in ritual with Kit’s teaching coven. She’s already making ritual objects with Kit, that’s her craft, and she says she’s going to ask Charlie to teach her leatherwork and beading. I usually don’t think of him as an artist in that way, most of the time, though of course writing and landscape design are both arts, but I’ve seen his quiver, simple and practical but fringed at the top and bottom by rows of large, unique beads threaded through with leather thongs, and he made it himself.

Three of the women named Raven are working mostly with Kit, three are working mostly with Allen, and one with Charlie. I’m really going to have to come up with a way to differentiate them in writing—we use context, for the most part, or last names, which I don’t want to share. Dan, who shares my name and my age, is studying Zen Buddhism with Karen and music and dance with Kit. One woman, Sally, is studying New Age spirituality and horsemanship with Joy. And on and on.

I’m starting not to really understand what my fellow students are saying. We used to all have these great conversations together, and I still get to have conversations like that, but not with the same people as often. We’re all doing different things and getting excited about different ideas. It’s like we don’t even share the same language all the time now.

A few months ago, when we argued about who was Dumbledore, I thought that maybe we were really arguing about which teacher was most central to our experience of the school. We disagreed because we each saw the school differently. I said, at the time, that it was like we were each going to a different school, in a way. Now, it seems I was more right than I thought I was. And I wish I wasn’t.

[Next Post: Friday, July 5th: Fireworks]