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.

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 5: Thanksgiving

Happy (Belated) Thanksgiving.

As per our usual, we went to my parents' house. We'll go to June's parents for Christmas and New Years, she got enough time off for that. I've always kind of wanted to stay on campus for Thanksgiving, just to see what it's like (I understand that, as with Christmas, there's nothing formal planned, but sometimes there are informal gatherings), but it appears that won't happen. Every year when I have the choice, I choose to do something else.

My brother and his wife and kids came too, and all the various aunts and uncles, and all in all it was a fairly mundane good time. Nobody comments on my weird school anymore--in fact, I'm not sure my aunts and uncles know I'm still a student, since I'm not in a degree program anymore. When they ask what I'm up to, I explain I'm working part-time for a landscaping company while teaching a few courses as an adjunct at my old school. It's not un-true, and while it's not the whole and complete truth, it gives them a more accurate picture than the complete truth would. I've gotten much better, more graceful at explaining myself, just as Allen said I would. My immediate family knows the whole picture, and they've gotten pretty graceful about it, too.

So we ate and played and cooked and cleaned (not in that order), and not much that's specifically memorable happened.

Except.

Towards the end of the evening, after the aunts and uncles left (I mean the older aunts and uncles; June and I and Cecilly were all still present) and before the dishes and such started, the kids talked us all into playing hide and seek. Not that I needed much persuasion; I always liked hide and seek as a kid, and the only reason I don't enjoy it more now is that I've gotten so tall that it's hard to fit myself into any decent hiding space.

Anyway, I ended up seeking the first round, so I didn't need to hide anywhere. I expected to find my brother first, because he's bigger than I am and has the same problem but worse. Instead, I found him next-to-last. Where was he?

He was standing in a corner on a bucket facing the wall. I'd walked right by him dozens of times.

I've gotten fairly used to feeling stupid over my obliviousness at school, but I hadn't thought it would follow me home. I thought I was on vacation from that particular kind of mortification. I'd thought wrong.

Curiously, one of my nephews tried a very similar trick, standing still in a corner behind a bookshelf. He hadn't known where his dad was hiding, so I guess maybe it's genetic? But I found the kid instantly upon walking into the room where he was.

What was the man doing that the boy wasn't?

Answer; my brother wasn't behind anything. He was in a place where it was literally impossible to hide, and so I hadn't bothered to look there. That is, he was using Charlie's trick of being where nobody was looking, but he was doing it in a circumstance-specific way. Had I not been looking for anyone, and therefore focused narrowly on the kinds of places where it is possible to hide, I would have seen my brother.

Hmmmm.

Mastery Year 3: Part 4: Post 3: Fourth of July

Note: I'm writing this as though today were after the Fourth, not before it. Also, please remember this whole thing is set ten years ago. -D.

Why do we have Independence Day Observed? What's wrong with celebrating the Fourth of July on the July 4th, on Saturday? I suppose it has something to do with giving people who have the weekends off an extra day out of work, but plenty of people work on the weekends, so the relocation of the holiday must do nothing for them. That July 4th isn't the day independence was actually declared--July 2nd was--makes the whole thing seem ironic to me.

Anyway, we here on campus don't take off for Independence Day to begin with, so we just went ahead and celebrated on the 4th, an advantage because it meant my brother could bring the kids over for the day. Of course, the fireworks were still on Friday, we don't have any control over that, but I don't really care about fireworks anymore anyway. I do care about spending time with my family and I find I do care about American history.

I had some free time in the morning, so we found Charlie and got him to give us a project we could do with my brother's kids. He assigned us beetling, of course (more accurately, de-beetling--you go around and knock Japanese beetles off plants and into coffee cans of soapy water), but surprised me by choosing to prune hedges nearby. He didn't talk to us much, but I could tell he was being companionable. We all talked less because of his silence. Then I taught a workshop in the afternoon--unrelated to the holiday, I'm sorry to say--and then met up with my family again for dinner.

After dinner, as usual, Greg read the Declaration of Independence in the long evening. No particular discussion or lesson developed, we just all gathered to listen and it was nice. A couple of students played an instrumental version of the Star Spangled Banner, and my niece, Ruthie, who is seven now, melted my heart by singing along with her hand over her chest. It's a very pretty song, really.

"What did you do this afternoon?" I thought to ask, after the song, while everyone was dispersing. She didn't answer at first, then gasped and started talking very fast--she'd forgotten she had news for me.

"We went to Steve Bees' workshop--that's called auditing, did you know that? And it was all about the Founding Fathers, and this was the last day of it and they did a play that they'd practiced by reading and stuff and so everyone in the workshop played a different Founding Father and there wasn't a script, they just knew their parts and made it up as they went along--that's called improv, did you know that? And they all, all the Founders, got into a big fight, they were all yelling at each other, and my favorite were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson because they were friends and they died today except years and years ago, did you know that? We didn't know about the play, we just happened upon it by accident and it was SO MUCH FUN! Did you know there was going to be a play, Uncle Daniel?"

No, I did not. I hadn't thought to ask. Some people have all the luck. 

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 3

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

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

Life complicates art, I suppose.

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

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

-best, -D.

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 2

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, happy early Beltane.

-D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Post 4: Easter Greenery

Note: In 2009, when this is set, Easter had already occurred by April 17th, and Passover was in progress. -D.

Happy Easter! June and I went to my parents' place for the weekend after I swore up and down that we'd make an extended visit to her parents sometime this year. The problem--the reason why this is an issue--is that her parents live so far away that we can't really make it a trip of less than a week, but June and I almost never have a week off at the same time. After I earn my ring, we won't have this problem. And in the meantime her parents are coming here to visit for a week sometime this summer.

Anyway. Yes, Easter. Nothing unusual happened except that I severely wished I'd stayed home on campus. Not that I wasn't glad to see my family, and Easter is a traditional time for us all to gather now, so I really couldn't miss it, but I've only really been on campus for Easter once and it was lovely. I wish I could do that again--and it suddenly occurred to me, right there in church, that now I never will, not as a student, anyway.

I could almost have wept.

It's a very strange thing to be charging forward to complete something that I don't entirely want to end.

We were able to attend a seder this year on campus, my second one. We're not Jewish, but we have friends who are, and we were invited. It's curious--far more of the campus community were raised Christian than Jewish, and very few remain monotheists of any stripe here. Depending on what definition you use, we don't actually have any practicing Jews, and yet the Passover seder is well-attended, as are several other Jewish holiday gatherings over the year. The non-practicing Christian component doesn't do anything like that. Most like to pretend that they don't even know when the Christian holidays are. I get people asking whether I go to church, though I've been going openly and regularly the whole time I've been here, as if they're hoping I'm going to tell them I've stopped. It's like all religions are OK but that one, and people want to forget they ever belonged to it. Our Jewish pagans want to remember their origins, though, and so they hold seders.

In other news, the forest turned green this morning. The leaves aren't really out, yet, of course, most of the trees are still quite skeletal, and those that aren't have flowers, not leaves. But the leaf buds are bursting, and the tiny tips of the newborn leaves poking out cast a kind of green mist over proceedings. It literally just happened this morning, or possibly over night. I noticed it on my morning walk with Steve.

Steve didn't notice at first, and I didn't say anything because I wanted to see when he'd figure it out. It's a strange thing to be an expert, however relative, because there's this constant temptation to lord it over the less-knowledgeable in one way or another, and there are so many ways. Was I waiting for him to figure it out--or fail to figure it out--so I could say "gotcha, I already know"? I wasn't even sure myself and it bothered me, but on the other hand I really did think giving him a chance to notice the green on his own was the best thing to do.

He didn't say anything. He seemed to be in a good mood, which didn't surprise me because the morning was gorgeous--cool and dew-kissed, with the sunlight on everything a clear, bright sort of apricot just past dawn, and a wonderful smell in the air of flowers and damp earth and growing things--but he didn't say anything. We just walked and looked around.

I was beginning to think he wouldn't say anything, and I was wondering whether I should, and how to do it without coming off like an ass, when we came up the the magnolia on our way back--it's just starting to flower now--and there was Charlie examining one of the unfolding flowers. We greeted him and I asked him what he was looking at, so he gave some smart-assed reply the way he does, and I had to decide whether to argue back or not--and then Steve spoke up.

"Hey, Charlie," he said, "you must be happy, it really feels like spring today!"

And Charlie looked at me, and I looked back at him, and I felt bizarrely as though my teacher had complimented me somehow.

Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Post 1: Ostar

Note: I'm posting this a day before actual Ostar, but it's written as though it were after. Since the holiday fell on the 20th that year, a Friday, so I suppose I'm pretending that it's the 23rd, now.-D.

Happy Ostar!

This year, for the first time that I know of, we had an Ostar activity involving artificially colored eggs hidden by humans. It was Steve's doing, though I helped.

The issue is that little Sean lives here now, and while he's too young to really care one way or the other, his parents wanted a kid-friendly holiday activity and the rest of us decided to make it happen. It's not like their little family gets much in the way of light-hearted normality.

We invited all the sprouts--Ostar fell on a Friday, so the older ones had to take off school to come, but most of them did, including my nephews and niece (my brother and sister-in-law are really getting quite enlightened about this sort of thing). In fact, the only ones who didn't come were Alexis and Billie (Sarah Grimm's youngest), since they're both twelve and say they're getting too old for this sort of thing. And then, Ostar morning, while Charlie's egg-hunt (a search for the nests of actual breeding animals) went on as normal, the sprouts and their associated adults (including me) did our own thing.

It didn't seem right to me to just hide and then seek pastel-dyed chicken eggs, not on campus, and not in this company--there needed to be some kind of improvisation on the theme, some way of bringing more natural history into it. In fact, I'd initially approached Charlie about including the kids in the adult hunt, but he just growled that I must want the privacy of the birds invaded by dozens of squealing children. Which seemed a little unfair and most of them are either his relatives or mine, and I like to think we teach our families how to act, but perhaps he had a point.

"Anyway," he added, "I thought the whole point was to do something Sean can enjoy?"

So, what we did was to make mock-ups, using wood and paint, of the eggs of six different locally breeding birds (most of which are not breeding yet), a dozen eggs of each. "We," in this case, means me, Steve, Alexis, Billie, Aidan, and J.T., who is the grandson of John Crain, the new treasurer I don't think I've talked about yet. We did it last Sunday, made a little egg-assembly-line, while John himself, who is a fair artist, painted wooden cut-outs of each bird species standing near a nest of eggs and labeled with its name in large lettering. He also made another set of bird cut-outs without eggs.

Then, Ostar morning, we hid all the eggs in the garden and lawn in front of the Mansion and set up both sets of cut-outs--the ones without eggs pictured we attached next to buckets and the ones with eggs we set up in a line out of sight of the first group.

The idea was that the children should not only find the eggs but also put each found egg in the bucket for the right species. They could consult the other set of cut-outs for reference, but had to remember which egg went with which bird at least long enough to run from the reference to the buckets.

So, first they ran around finding the eggs (Sean had a good deal of coaching from his mother, and he held her hand because he has only just started walking and is not steady on his feet) with baskets in hand, and then, in a second stage, they sorted their finds into buckets (Sean didn't really do that part) and then they all got candy and then we all went to lunch.

The weather was warm and somewhat gray, the first Ostar I've had here when there was no snow, nor hint of snow, nor remnants of snow, but actual, springlike, warmth.

Lunch was a giant feast organized mostly around eggs and also the last of last year's potatoes, for the vegans. And afterwards we had actual, springlike, drizzling rain all afternoon, and we all gathered in the Great Hall for the slide show of the pictures from Charlie's egg-hunt and the awarding of the prizes (this time a pair of three-dimensional wooden puzzles that, when fully assembled, formed giant eggs--and when partially disassembled revealed that the chicks in question were velociraptors).

And I felt really torn. On the one hand, I had a lot of fun, planning and executing the children's hunt, and sitting watching the slide show with my niece, Ruthie, in my lap was pure, heart-bursting, sweetness. On the other hand....

After the slide show, I stayed behind with some of the novices to help Charlie clean up, and he approached me.

"So, how did it go?" he asked. I shrugged.

"It went well," I told him. "The kids had a lot of fun, and the egg-sorting thing worked. I'm really pleased by how it all went. But.... I wish I could have helped with the main egg-hunt. I guess I miss it."

Charlie looked at me for a few seconds.

"If it helps," he said, "remember that whenever you do something you learned from me, I'm with you."

Mastery Year 2: Part 7: Post 4: Feeling Gray

I don't feel like doing anything today.

The weather is gray and rainy, and the lovely snow we got two days ago--our first major snowfall of the year--has turned to gray, dirty slush. There are times, in weather like this, that I feel cozy, even contemplative, but today I just feel blah. I'd like to melt into slush myself, and perhaps I will.

It would probably help if I had something definite to do today, but instead I have nothing scheduled, no deadlines, and a long list of things I ought to do sooner or later and no idea which to do first.

We've just had Thanksgiving, usually a happy time, and I guess I enjoyed it, but my memory of the evening is somewhat marred for me because of the tremendous argument June and I had afterwards. We usually don't fight, so I suppose we don't have much practice fighting well.

We had a good time, so far as I can tell, helping to cook the meal a my parent's house, playing with our nephews and niece, and mildly stuffing our faces with good food. Then, as has become traditional, Allen and Kit--and this time, Lo--came over for dessert and coffee and a small dance-party erupted. Allen, I should say, is not a skilled dancer, but he makes his attempts with such unabashed joy that he might as well be. Kit spent much of her time dancing with Ruthie, my niece, not only having a good time but also showing her some moves.

The problem was that on the ride home--back to campus, I mean, June went oddly silent. Her few responses to me, and even the others, seemed distracted, clipped. I think the others noticed--Allen and Lo are both psychologists, after all--and they dropped us off with a rather perfunctory good-night. Allen gave me a significant look, which I didn't understand until later.

For the rest of the evening, as we put away our share of the left-overs and gradually got ready for bed, June kept picking on me. I know I should write out the whole scene (showing, not telling, as a good writer should), and probably would if I felt better, but suffice it to say I couldn't do anything right, and when I finally got tired of it and demanded she tell me what's going on, she said something that didn't make any sense:

"We always go to your parents' for the holidays!"

Which is, first, not literally true, and second, hardly my fault. Her parents live much farther away, and June's new job pretty much ensures that we can't take off enough time to go visit them very often.

I argued back, but that wasn't right, either, and we ended up shouting at each other and I still don't really know why.

"You're blaming me for things I didn't even do!" I shouted, finally.

"I know!" she yelled back, as if this, too, were my fault.

We went to bed soon after, unable to resolve anything, and slept on opposite edges of our narrow bed.

Sometime in the middle of the night, though, without saying anything, she rolled over and wrapped her long, warm arms and legs, and her cold feet around me. In the morning, we enjoyed each other, and then I slept again. When I woke next, she had already left for work and the rain had started.

Mastery Year 2: Part 4: Post 3: 4th of July

This post is for the 4^th of July. Odd circumstances prevented my posting it as scheduled.-D.

Today, Greg read the Declaration of Independence aloud. No big surprise there, he usually does a historical talk on the Fourth. Then he asked whether we believed the birthday of the country deserves to be celebrated. Instant intellectual pandemonium.

It’s not that everyone began talking at once, they didn’t, it’s that the answers came quickly, were many, varied, and in most cases assumed to be self-evident by their advocates.

“Of course it does, this is the greatest country on Earth.”

“Of course it doesn’t, the whole thing was a lie from the get-go. Thomas Jefferson owned people.”

“Adams and Franklin didn’t. They wrote the Declaration, too.”

“Whatever. Slavery was legal. Women couldn’t vote.”

“But signing the Declaration created the harmonic potential that manifested in universal adult franchise.”

“That doesn’t begin to pay off the karmic debt of owning people.”

“Or annihilating Native American groups.”

“Native Americans are still here.”

“Not all of them.”

“Or re-enslaving black people through the prison system.”

“Or discriminating against women or LGBT people.”

“Nobody has ever been denied the right to vote for being gay.”

“You can’t vote if you can’t live.”

“That’s a different issue.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Right or wrong, the founding of our country was still a Big Deal. It deserves to be observed.”

“Yeah, but as what, though? The country we pretend to be, or the one we actually are?”

“The country we pretend to be is also the country we are. Both are true.”

“That’s completely illogical.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“When it was founded, this country was the free-est in the world. You have to look at it in historical context.”

“No, it wasn’t. The Iroquois Confederacy was.”

“It’s still the free-est country in the world. We have our faults, but so does everybody else.”

“Some countries have fewer faults than we do.”

“Have you ever lived in any of these supposedly free-er countries? They’re socialist.”

“Have you ever lived in them?”

“Wasn’t the United States founded mostly by Freemasons? How many other countries can say that? George Washington himself was a weather witch.”

“He was not.”

“He had to have been.”

“He owned slaves, too.”

While all of these ideas were flurrying about, Greg stood still and upright, his hands behind his back, his iron-grey hair clumped to his scalp by sweat because he still wore his long-sleeved full uniform while standing in the sun. Steve sat off to the side, equally attentive, looking less like a recalcitrant student and more like the teacher he can be.

When the flurry simmered down, Greg looked at Steve, and Steve spoke up.

“The tradition of patriotic, principled resistance that the Founders enshrined is what we still use to fight against the wrongs they took for granted,” he said.

My nephew, Paul, who had wandered over from one of the camp activities to stand by me, tugged on my shirt.

“Why do we have fireworks in July?” he asked. “The days are so long, it takes forever to get dark.”

“Sometimes they have fireworks in December, too,” I reminded him. “For New Year’s Eve.”

“That is a much better idea,” he said.

Mastery Year 2: Litha

Happy Litha!

Lately it’s been seeming like my favorite holiday is whichever one we’re having at the time you ask. Each has its own things to like. What I like best about Litha is the giant picnic of it, seeing faculty and students in the context of their families—this whole extra part of the school community we hardly ever see otherwise.

Mine came over, of course, and here I mean my brother and his wife and children, not my parents or sister. Their kids, Paul, Ruthie, and Chris (can you tell we’re Christian?) are full-on sprouts, now, six, five, and three years old, respectively, so almost as soon as they arrived they all vanished into some world of the sprouts’ creation, and we didn’t get more than a glimpse of them for the rest of the evening.

“I remember when mine were like that,” commented Allen, nostalgically.

“One of yours still is,” I reminded him, since Alexis is 11 and still a sprout in good standing.

“I pluralized my nostalgia,” he reminded me, a little sternly. Allen is always very precise with his language. Then he smiled a little and I laughed.

We picnicked with Allen and Lo, as usual, since they seem to have adopted me, and Ebony, whose mother I have still never met. Apparently, she and Allen have largely repaired their relationship—I still sense a kind of mutual cautiousness that I never noticed before, but also a kind of deliberateness, as though they are building something together. Today, she actually laid her head on his thigh, an extraordinary gesture of affection which made Allen visibly uncomfortable for a few seconds, since that is not normally any way to treat one’s professor. I think she was trying things, to see what would happen, and what happened was that after a few seconds, Allen seemed to make up is mind to go with it. He relaxed a little and, cautiously at first, then with a more absent-minded air, stroked her hair.

The day was incredibly hot, and the Central Field where we picnicked had filled with bees, attracted both to the clover and dandelions in the grass and to the foods and drinks and desserts scattered among the picnic blankets of well over a hundred families. After we ate, my brother John and I left June and the others and took a walk, largely to be social. We dipped in and out of conversations, exchanged benign gossip, and I introduced John to some of the people he hadn’t known, yet. A lot of them knew him only as “Paul and Ruthie’s father,” which surprised him but not me.

Apple Blossom, a yearling, wanted to know why it’s called “Litha,” not “Solstice,” and Aimee, who is also a yearling and was sharing her picnic blanket, asked “well, then, why Apple Blossom?” in tones suggesting that names are just weird around here and ought not to be questioned.

“Because I’m pretty and sweet,” explained Apple Blossom. “Everything does have a reason.”

But I didn’t know the reason for “Litha,” and neither did John, though he wondered aloud if perhaps it had to do with the river, Leith, in Ireland. We moved on.

John spent a while talking about alchemy with Acorn and then debating—yes, debating—religion with Samara and Edna, and then Aaron, the librarian, whose picnic spot was nearby, snagged our attention by remarking that John and I do look so much alike. Half a dozen people were clustered around Aaron, most of whom I’d never seen before—his family, I suppose, though I’d never thought of him as having a family, apart from us, but there they were. Aaron explained that they lived in Florida and rarely got to visit. One picnicker I did recognize—Ahab, Aaron’s pet scarlet macaw. He wore a long leash, tied to his right ankle (his wings are not clipped) but otherwise seemed able to do what he wanted, and was busy demolishing a big pile of strawberries.

“I know you are, but what am I?” he said, clearly, when he saw me looking at him. Aaron laughed.

Mason and Jay, two more yearlings, neither of whom had invited family (like me my first year, they had not realized family could be invited) had camped out with Aaron and his family, possibly because Jay is Aaron’s student.

“What do you think of this place?” John asked them.

“It’s cool,” asserted Mason. With the non-committal vaguary I’d expect of a teenager.

“Weird as hell, but I like it,” said Jay, with enthusiam.

“How weird is Hell?” asked Aaron, and Jay, laughing, told him to shut up. Which is not how you treat your professor, either, but Aaron, nonplussed at first, shrugged and seemed to go with it.

We moved on.

At Charlie’s complex of blankets, I found the expected complex of relatives and in-laws. Charlie himself was deep in conversation with his sister, Mary, when we walked up and looked at me, briefly but did not speak. Mary’s son, Justice, and her daughter, June were there (Obviously a different June than my wife of the same name), along with their respective spouses—Mary’s other daughter, Maggie, wasn’t, but Maggie’s kids aren’t sprouts anymore. The sprouts themselves weren’t present, but June’s 15-year-old twins were, plus the boyfriend of one of the twins, plus Paul, Charlie’s nephew through his late brother, and Paul’s grown son, Jason. All of them, except Charlie and Mary, welcomed me and John into their picnic and their conversation, which quite typically was intellectual, convoluted, and jolly.

On the Silanos’ blankets, too, sat Steve Bees and his son, Sean. They were both fairly quiet, very obviously on the fringes of things. Steve looked a little uncomfortable, but then, he often does, these days.

“He’s being adopted,” explained June, seeing me look at Steve. Steve himself smiled nervously at me.

While we’d been walking and talking, the sky had started to cloud up, and since John and I had been talking with the Silano clan, the temperature had begun to drop, just a little. Charlie looked over at me and raised his eye-brows. I cleared my throat. The others looked at me.

“It’s going to rain,” I said. “Storm, actually. We have about fifteen minutes.”

“We should tell the others,” said Mary, starting to gather her things. I don’t know whether she trusts me so implicitly, or if she knew Charlie had prompted me and therefore shared my opinion. Either way, that a person could give an accurate weather prediction simply based on the feeling of the air she clearly took for granted.

I looked around and saw a shift in the movement of the picnickers all across the field, the way you can see a shift if you approach one of those puddles of massed ants (which I’ve always been told are ant wars, but I’ve never seen the ants in the mass actually fighting) and blow on it.

“They know,” I reported. “They’re packing up.”

“Where are we going to go?” asked Mary, though she sounded unconcerned.

“Chapel Hall, I imagine,” said Charlie, with a bit of an unexplained growl. “Or the Dinning Hall. They’re the only two places big enough. We’ll see where the self-organizing process takes us.” He was referring to a characteristic of complex systems, the idea being that the whole mass of us would exhibit a kind of herd consciousness and make a collective decision without any individual leadership. And so we did. Being tall, I could watch the process, to some extent. Groups of people initially milled about in multiple directions, appearing indecisive, until a general momentum built in the direction of the Dining Hall. Once that momentum became established, even those picnickers heading towards the Chapel turned around and came to the Dining Hall.

“I would have preferred the Chapel,” grumped Charlie.

“The ants go marching one by one…” I sang, and he glanced at me and smirked.

“You know too much to be entirely polite anymore, Daniel,” he told me.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but fortunately most people don’t know enough to understand what I’m talking about.”

“Be careful,” he warned me, “I have students all over here. So do you.”

And at almost precisely 15 minutes after I’d issued my warning, it began to pour. We could hear it on the Dining Hall roof. More importantly, about five minutes after that, a huge peal of thunder let me know we’d been right to come inside. I, for one, could have a picnic in the rain, though wet food can be a bit of a drag, but I draw the line at being struck by lightning.

The storm was a big one, the first really satisfying electrical storm of the year, and afterwards, well past sunset, we all went outside again and found somebody had managed to cover the Man (an effigy of straw and various invasive exotics Charlie wants to burn) with a tarp. We un-tarped it and set it on fire without much trouble, and as distant peals of thunder moved off towards the east, we danced the sun up, as per tradition.

As I start to really take seriously my ambition of maybe spending my life here, it occurs to me that what makes this school different from other schools is not that we study magic or any of the rest of it, but simply this. That at other schools, the main point is to prepare students for life in the wider world, and any sense of community within the institution is either an educational technique or an incidental byproduct of the collective effort at education. Here, the main point is to create the community.

Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 7: Yule

Please note that Yule took place the night of Friday, the21st into Saturday, the 22^nd,, so I’m writing this post a few days ahead of time. Hanuka had already completed a week earlier, which is why I don’t mention the holiday in the post, despite it being Hanuka now. So, happy Hanuka.

June had never celebrated Yule before, a strange thought, given how she’s embraced the particular brand of paganism popular here. I sometimes forget, now, that there are still things about this place and its culture she doesn’t know. Ironically, that makes it a little easier for me to keep the casual secrecy that renders so much around here a delightful surprise—I just assume she already knows what’s coming.

And so, June not only got to experience Yule for the first time, she got to do it without any warning from me about what it would be like. And I got to watch.

Yule dinner, as usual, was a quiet affair, there being only about thirty-five of us on campus this time of year, and ten of those 35 weren’t at dinner because Kit had scheduled her teaching coven’s ritual at the same time. Perhaps because Kit wasn’t there, Charlie showed up. We all sat together at the long, dark table in the Bird Room and he and Greg presided over the meal like the fathers of some very large family.

It was an odd meal, and not just because of Charlie’s company, but because we actually had Boar’s Head, a famously difficult thing to cook—it’s the Dish of Kings because only kings could afford to have it made. But Sadie can handle it, and had. She’d made us the dish once before, for Yule, but it’s not a common thing. It’s not simply the roasted head of a pig—it’s the skin of the head, with some of the facial bones for shape, stuffed with a mixture of pork, lamb, various organ meats, and, indeed, bays and rosemary, and then the whole thing roasted. It’s delicious.

Sadie didn’t eat with us—I imagine she was at the masters’ party upstairs—but, as I said, Greg and Charlie did, and when the dish was brought out, Charlie, who was in an unusually high-spirited mood, sang the Boar’s Head Carol in a rich, strong voice none of us had ever heard before. I’d heard him sing once, years ago, but then he’d been singing quietly, respectfully, not this boisterous celebration.

Afterwards, we all sat out by the lit tree and around the fire place and drank hot chocolate and mulled cider and talked in small groups. Charlie took his whistle out and played a few tunes, all of them seasonal and ancient sounding.

Then Kit and her people swept in, bearing the lit Yule Candle, and Charlie put his whistle away as though he’d never had it out. More than ten students had come in with Kit, as the coven had members who hadn’t been on campus earlier in the day. The pace of the party picked up. Someone unpacked a fiddle. More people started trickling in, hanging up cloaks on pegs to drip from the wet, sleety snow falling outside.

“I thought we were going to bed early so we could watch the sunrise, or something?” asked June.

“You can go to bed, if you want,” I said.

“Not a chance,” she replied, and went to go pour herself some eggnog that had appeared from somewhere while nobody was looking.

I spotted Charlie sitting off by himself, looking as though he worried it might rain on his head. I joined him.

“Getting a bit noisy for you, isn’t it?” I asked.

“These things were more fun back when I was drinking,” he said, with a trace of his old growl.

“I do not drink...wine,” I said, in my best Dracula accent. He laughed.

“I suppose there are compulsions worse than mine,” he admitted. “I suppose I would have gotten tired of partying by now, anyway, even if I were still drinking. If I’d lasted this long.”

“Do you miss drinking?” I asked, amazed to find him so willing to talk.

“I miss being young,” he replied. “Being a young drunk has its perks. Being an old drunk….I doubt I’d like it.”

“Charlie, I can’t picture you as a young man, going to parties.”

“I used to do a lot of things you’ve never seen me do, Daniel.” He winced as the volume of the music increased.

“Why are you at this party,” I asked. “I mean, I’m glad to see you, but….”

“Occupational hazard of living in a community, Daniel. I like people, contrary to popular opinion. I like some social contact. But around here, when I find any people, there’s usually a whole pile of them.”

A pile of people was right, for they kept coming. Senior students and candidates and recent graduates, many of them carrying instruments. We pushed the furniture back and the evening evolved into a dance party. I saw Charlie talking to a few other people, enjoying himself, in his own way, even laughing, but after a while I didn’t see him anymore. He’d slipped out while nobody was looking. I remember June, slightly tipsy, laughing hysterically, I’m not sure what about. Was I tipsy, too? I can’t remember. Is that a bad sign? Maybe I was just tired and silly. I wasn’t drinking that much.

Around three AM, the snow stopped. We could hear the wind whistling around the corners on the Mansion and the branches of the elm on the east side. Rick came in from a walk (he doesn’t like piles of people, either) and reported that the temperature was dropping.

“We’re going to dance the sun up, aren’t we?” asked June.

“That depends,” I told her. “Do you want to dance?”

She laughed and threw her arms around my neck and I really liked that. We danced for a while.

Around six in the morning—the world outside the window still looking as dark as ever—some of the senior students took charge of organizing the trip up the mountain in silence to see the sunrise. How were these students chosen? When I was a senior novice, no one ever asked me if I wanted to perform that duty.

“I thought we were dancing the sun up?” said June.

“You can dance your way up the mountain,” I told her.

She didn’t, especially. We actually got separated in the dark, on the way up, the snow crunching under our feet, the stars bright and the air cold. Up on the mountain, we found each other in the dark, and she sat on my lap and I wrapped her in my cloaks and we kept each other warm.

The sun came up and the masters sang and played and the world turned gold and pink and white.

When we got back to the Geat Hall, the Sprouts and some of their other family members (including, to my surprise, my brother and his kids) had arrived and transformed the place, filling the room with bowls of chocolates and candied fruit and nuts and oranges, and setting our gift bags here and there, and readying steaming pots of hot chocolate, coffee, and mulled cider, oatmeal and miso soup.

We spent the day playing and eating and more or less being unusually tall kids and June asked me why we’d never celebrated Yule on our own when we were in grad school—why hadn’t I introduced us to this?

Of course, for most of my Absence, I spent the holiday season, including the solstice, with my parents, not with June. But I didn’t celebrate Yule while I was away. I kept forgetting. I’d mean to, and then realize it was yesterday. There was no community.

I missed it here.

Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 3: Thanksgiving

Note; in 2007, Thanksgiving fell on November 22'nd, so I'm making this my Thanksgiving post, even though it's written as though Thanksgiving had already happened.-D.

My first Thanksgiving as a married man.

I hadn't thought much about this particular milestone, it's not like we weren't together last Thanksgiving, and it's not like Thankgiving really changes much, depending on whether you're a bachelor, but it turns out it matters anyway.

For one thing, it matters practically. Now that we're married, everyone seems to assume we'll spend the holidays together--it doesn't feel like I'm bringing a guest to dinner anymore--but at the same time, fewer people expect that I'll necessarily spend Thanksgiving with my parents. June said she wanted her turn. Her parents wanted their turn. But I like spending Thanksgiving with my family. I hadn't really anticipated that this would become an Issue. It's not like we never go see her family.

In the end, we decided the question is moot--her parents live farther away, and since June is a yearling, she can't take much time off away from campus. So, we're doing Thanksgiving with my parents again. But I expect next year she'll have to get her turn. It will be fair.

June donated her car to the school in partial payment, so we're once again a carless couple. On Wednesday, we got a ride with another yearling going our way, and June got to join her little support group of Women Who Love Kretzmans to discuss the baking of pies, while I went out for a drink with a couple of guys I knew back in high school. I know that sounds horribly sexist, me going out and leaving my wife home cooking with the other womenfolk, but it's what she wanted to do. Kit would say that "feminism is the radical proposition that women are people--it doesn't mean we people can't bake pies."

The next morning, I sat zazen with June--I hadn't sat in a long time, but I wanted to keep her company. As usual when I sit, I had the momentary urge to get back to a regular practice, but these urges are never strong enough for me to actually follow through on them. Then my brother and his wife and their kids came back over (they had stayed in a hotel--there's getting to be a lot of them), my uncles and aunts and this time two of my cousins and we all filled the house with cooking smells and small children shrieking, that the largely disregarded sounds of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then we had dinner.

Thanksgivings are much more enjoyable now than when I was a novice, especially that first year when everybody looked at me like I had two heads and my one uncle got mixed up and thought I was studying to become an Episcopal priest. It was like suddenly running into culture shock in my own family and it was horrible. That doesn't happen, now. Partly it's that they're all used to my association with the school, partly it's that I've gotten better at talking about it so that the place doesn't sound weird to people who really aren't interested in it, like my uncle, and partly it's that I'm not the only one in the family involved anymore--my brother's kids are sprouts, my wife is a novice, my parents invite Kit and Allen over coffee the day after Thanksgiving....

But it's more than that.

I did dishes after the big meal, as per tradition, and June dried them. Everything seemed familiar and good, and I passed a platter to June to dry and thought 'this woman is my wife. I get to stay with her." And she told me the platter still had soap on it and that I needed to rinse it again, and that was the fourth time she told me such a thing, so I daubed soap-suds in her hair and she put the platter down and chased me all around the kitchen, and I don't know what she was planning on doing when she caught me because I caught her first and we spent minutes at a time there in the kitchen, kissing, playing hooky from dishes entirely.

The next day, in the evening, Kit and Allen came to pick us up--and for coffee. They'd already dropped off the kids and Lo, but Kit's husband, Kevin, was with them. My Dad hadn't met Kevin before, I don't think, and my Dad seemed a little uncomfortable around him. My Dad needs to get over his crush on Kit, every part of how he handles it is ridiculous. At least Mom has quit taking it seriously.

Kevin never goes anywhere without his guitar, so he let my parents talk him into playing and singing a few of his songs, mostly stuff he performs with the Blue Pixies. Allen and I stood off in a corner watching my parents listening to live pagan folk punk, some love song about a man and a rather more literal (male) fairy. And they seemed comfortable with it, somehow.

"This almost looks normal," I said, to Allen. "It's like, school used to seem like Avalon, or something, but the worlds don't seem that different, now."

"I bet you feel like that even with your uncles," he said. "Even with people who have never heard of the school, and wouldn't like it if they did. Am I right?"

"Yeah. It's like the different parts of my life are merging. I don't get culture shock out here, anymore. Why?"

"It's because you carry the school within you, now," he said.

Mastery Year 1: Part 6: Post 1: Mabon

Happy belated Mabon.

It’s curious, we call our autumnal equinox party “Mabon,” but we never talk about who or what a mabon is. Where does the name come from? Why do we use it? Kit told a story once about a quest to find a man named Mabon, who was the only person able to kill a magical boar who needed to be killed as part of a long, multi-stage process without which one of King Arthur’s knights would have been unable to wed the woman he loved. But what that Mabon has to do with Fall, I do not know.

In any case, happy Autumn. The leaves have definitely begun to turn here, although we are still at least a week or two away from peak color, and the goldenrods and asters are in full flower in the fields—everything still has the look of fullness, of growth, although the insect song has changed radically—the cicadas are done for the year, as are some others I can’t name, all we have left in the thin, pulsing music of the crickets. They’ll go until frost.

I enjoyed the celebration. I always do. This year was a little different because for once I didn’t have to choose between the Gratitude Circle and the Thankyou Doll build, which normally happen at the same time, but this year Allen had to move the Circle up two hours because of an appointment he had with a therapy client that could not be scheduled at any other time. That put it opposite Greg’s Higan observance, which was unfortunate, because Karen normally attends the Circle and of course she helps with the Higan service. But the good news is that people who always attend the Thankyou Doll build—Charlie, Sarah, and most of the sprouts—were free to attend the Circle. Of course, Charlie didn’t come. I’d hoped he would, but Kit attends the Circle and they are still allergic to each other.

Anyway, the Gratitude Circle meets in the grassy area behind Chapel Hall, near the outdoor grill where we have Philosopher’s Stone Soup. It’s almost enclosed by the Hall on one side, the Main Greenhouse on another, and by a partial and broken ring of tall hickory trees. They’re only beginning to turn, and the place still looked very green and lush, with plenty of room in the middle for fifty or sixty people to stand in a ring, me and June included.

The way it works is that there is a big basket of balls of yarn, rejects from student spinners, and someone takes a ball, gives it to someone else, thanks them for something, and keeps the end of the yarn so that a strand of yarn connects thanker and thankee. The next person gives it to someone else, and on and on, until everyone is connected by a visible web of gratitude and yarn. Once the web starts filling in, it becomes impossible to cross the circle to give the ball of yarn away, so a child ferries it around, tying on new balls of yarn when the old ones finish. For three years Alexis had that honor, but I’ve heard that two years ago she gave it to Aidan, since she was getting too big to run under the yarn. Aidan is still little, but this year he decided he didn’t want to attend the Circle, so he passed it on to my nephew, Paul.

I’m proud to see a family member of mine getting involved in that way.

Allen always starts the Circle, since it’s his show, and he always thanks a member of his family first, in this case, Alexis, whom he adores. She handed it back to him, to thank him for getting the pet ferrets (whom she adores and actually had with her inside her shirt), so he had to find someone else to thank. To my surprise, he picked me.

“Thank you for becoming my friend,” he said. “And for coming back. We need you.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said. I could have thanked him in return, but there was someone else I had to hand the yarn to, first. That early in the proceedings, I didn’t have to use Paul as a go-between (and Allen hadn’t). I strode across the circle to my wife.

I handed her the yarn, and I kissed her. And I mean I really kissed her. Everyone else hooted and hollered, which of course was part of the point, and when I let her come up for air she said “woa!” and everybody laughed and hooted again.

So, who did June give her yarn to? She gave it to me, of course, and kissed me. And I mean she really kissed me. Grabbed my ears for leverage and everything (scratched one of them too, by accident, but I ignored that). More hooting and hollering. So, when she let me come up for air, I gave the yarn back to her and kissed her again.

“I could get used to this!” I said, to make everybody laugh.

“Get a room!” someone shouted. More laughter.

“We can’t until February, she’s a novice!” I shouted back.

“Screw February,” June said, with feeling, “I’m getting you alone tonight!” She spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear her, and triggered more laughter.

She made as if she were going to give me the yarn again, just for effect, then pushed me away, gently, and said “tonight.” That was for laughter, too of course, but it wasn’t only for laughter—she kept her promise.

I returned to my place in the ring, carefully trailing all three strands of yarn between us, and she gave the yarn to Kit and thanked her “for introducing me to the other kind of magic.” June is learning stage magic from Allen, but recently she’s started studying Wicca with Kit.

“What, no kiss?” asked Kit, and everyone laughed, and June kissed her on the cheek. “Oo, I can see why he likes you!” she said, afterwards, as though that chaste peck had been something else, and the laughter kept going, while June giggled, embarrassed, into the back of her wrist. From then on, though, Paul had to take up his duty as Yarn Ferry (Yarn Fairy?) and kissing did not become a theme of the whole Circle.

Anywhere else but here, on campus, such kissing and joking would have been out of place, especially with children present, but there is a kind of innocence to sex here. It’s an innocence very carefully maintained; Kit would never have joked about kissing me, for example, because it would not have been a joke to me, and she knows it, and her respect for that boundary is absolute.

A year ago, I don’t think June would have joked that way, not with me in public, and certainly not with a woman. She has learned that innocence. She has become of this place.

After the Gratitude Circle, we went right over to the Thankyou Doll Build, which June found utterly charming. This year, the Doll was made mostly of parsnips, with stalks of Setaria grass as hair and a couple of bright orange, pre-maturely fallen sugar maple leaves as a skirt. Two blue potatoes served as breasts, very long green beans for arms, and the thin tip of a parsnip made for a very long nose.

“Those potatoes aren’t the same size,” remarked a young yearling named Brad, as though the disparity were a comical design flaw. And indeed, we had tried to find a matching pair and done the best with what we had.

“Someone hasn’t seen enough women,” muttered Charlie, busily affixing a pair of tiny, round chilies to the face with broken toothpicks. They would be eyes. He wasn’t joking.  Charlie is celibate, but he’s not sexless, and he has no patience for straight men who maintain unrealistic ideas about women’s bodies. Nobody laughed. Brad blushed.

Later, after we had woken the Thankyou Doll (Joyce Anne did the honors, being a few months younger than my other nephew, Chris. The twins, Janus and James were both there, so technically James was the youngest one present, but the twins are late talkers), and given it the traditional tour, we sat down to the Paleolithic Feast.

Charlie sat down next to me. 

“I heard you had quite the Gratitude Circle today,” he said.

I blushed.

“I’m not criticizing,” he added, responding to my blush.

I relaxed a little.

“I heard you talked to Allen.”

He meant, I think, the conversation I had with Allen a week or so ago about my status as a student.

“Welcome back,” he said.