Year 4: Part 8: Post 1: Endings

Usually these stories depict events that happened close to the same date that I post them and one week's story is set about a week after the previous one. This month I'm doing something different. Today's post is set in the second week of January. --D.

I got back on campus about a week ago. It's good to be back, but I really don't know why I'm here.There was a meeting of the graduating class--most of us, anyway--yesterday, and we were supposed to be here for that, but I don't know why it wasn't scheduled later in the month. The masters aren't even back yet, except for Greg, who led the meeting, and it's really not his thing. At the meeting. he talked vaguely about events and responsibilities we need to be here for, but he wouldn't explain what they are, and at the moment there doesn't seem to be anything to do.

Not that I'm not busy--I'm applying for caretaking jobs for the summer and working on my grad school application (both of which seem incredibly complicated after the elegant simplicity of how they do things here) and I'm training for the Appalachian Trail. I'm now hiking ten to fifteen miles a day, mostly in circles, in the woods behind the school, with a pack on my back. None of it is for school, but it is important, and I couldn't do it as well at my parents' house. And there are some of us doing school work, running around, dealing with last-minute paperwork problems, settling up fees and debts and resolving issues with lost records or misplaced credits...I never appreciated before that in January Sharon (and Malachi, who handles money) has her hands full with graduating students as well as the new prospective students, who are wandering around looking amazed and confused as per normal.

But why am I here, why am I on campus? Why have they clearly arranged for us to be here, and then given us nothing particular to do?

I know why I'm here--it's to do something I'm not supposed to know about. And I don't know about it. I don't know what it is or when it will happen, only that something is. I don't intend to try to find out, as I have no desire to ruin the surprise.

In the meantime, the campus is covered with snow. It snowed, remember, back on Yule, only an inch or two. That melted the following day, but then late in the afternoon on Christmas it snowed again, a good eight inches, and while we've had some melting since, it's never all melted, and we've had several more snowfalls. At the moment, there are about six inches on the ground in most places, not counting the drifts, with a bit of a crust on top, so you can't make very good snowballs with it. When I hike my way through our hills, I break through the crust, crunch, crunch, crunch, as though I am exploring a magical world made of sugar, a sweet world of snow. I have not had to use snowshoes, yet, the snow has not been deep enough, but I hope that changes, soon. We're supposed to get more snow tonight, and I want to get some practice in.

Since I've been back, I have not had any more "encounters" with Joanna. How does it sound to say it that way? Writing it, I wonder...it seems euphemistic. Charlie would say not to hide from the world with euphemism. Kit would say not to treat sexuality as a thing that must be hidden. Not that I've actually spoken with either of them about my sex-life. But "had sex" sounds clinical, impersonal, and despite my initial worries on the subject, that's not how it ever felt with Joanna...and regardless of what you want to call it, we have not done it since before the holiday.

I had wanted to. I hadn't expected it to be over, yet, but after I got back--she was back already, as she doesn't celebrate Christmas--I found myself avoiding her. And I think she was avoiding me. Finally, yesterday, circumstance brought us together unavoidably as we both found ourselves waiting in line for the toilet in the Great Hall after breakfast. The awkwardness of standing next to each other even for just a minute or two was impossible to ignore, so after we'd each used the facilities, we sat down at the polished table in the Bird Room to talk.

"You don't want to spend time with me," she stated. It was not an accusation.
"No," I told her with some reluctance. "But I don't know why not."

She smiled at me, warmly and knowingly.

"Try this," she suggested. "What happens, if we do get together?"
"We have sex," I said, promptly. "It's kind of the thing we do."
"So, do you want to?"
"Yes," I told her, again without hesitation. "But, I don't know, I think I want more than that. I feel...I don't know. I don't know how to describe it."
"You romantic," she told me, as though she were teasing me for something embarrassing. I happen to think being a romantic is a good thing. I frowned.

"You haven't been trying to hang out with me, either," I retorted, trying to reclaim some of my dignity with her. But she just giggled, like I'd caught her at something. I've always found her impossible.

Then she grew semi-serious again.

"I think it's time," she said. "To get out or to get deeper in. This thing has run its course."
"Get deeper in?" I asked.
"That 'more' you wanted. Do you want that, a relationship, with me?"

I said nothing. I couldn't understand why she was making it entirely about what I wanted, as though I were a therapy patient or something. I knew perfectly well she didn't want to be in a romantic relationship with me. There were so many things I wanted to say that none of them made it out of my mouth.

"Then I think this thing has run its course," she repeated. She took my hand, for a moment. Her skin was cool and smooth. "This isn't a break-up," she told me. "That's the advantage of not going out, we don't have to break up."

But it felt like a break-up to me.

I wanted to say, what occurred to me to say, was "So we don't get to have sex anymore?" But Joanna would have laughed at me. I hate when she does that. And it would have sounded as though the sex were all I cared about, when it isn't, or shouldn't be, except that that's what all this was supposed to be about, wasn't it? Just sex, with no strings attached? I never wanted to date Joanna, I just got tongue-tied in her presence because she's goddam beautiful, and because she always invades me just slightly. She keeps me off balance, just slightly, all the time. Of course I wanted her, but only on the surface. I would have been crazy to want anything else. And it was on the surface that she offered herself, so I said yes...and somehow I ended up with all kinds of strings attached to a woman who obviously never liked me to begin with. Except sexually, she was never nice to me.

But the sex...I hadn't expected that to end so abruptly, to go from having a lover to not having one in a conversation around a dining room table. But then, how else do such things ever end? And how that felt...I can't explain it, I can't name the feeling, the way Allen taught me to do, not precisely. The best I can do is say it's like being cut off, walled up, sealed in...I am suddenly alone in a way I wasn't before.

I walk around campus, watching the janitorial and maintenance teams working to prepare for the influx of new students, watching the yearlings going to meditation, meeting in their therapy groups, finishing up their assignments from over the break, and watching the new, prospective students wandering around, confused and amazed. It all looks so normal, so reassuringly ordinary.

The number of things that are simply over for me right now is heavy on my mind.

Year 4: Part 7: Post 8: Yule

Note; in 2003, when these events happened, the solstice was on the 22nd, which was also the fourth night of Hanukah. This year, the solstice will not occur until the 21st, but I'm posting this as though today were the solstice, because it's close enough. -D.

I'm getting tired of this bitter-sweet parade of "lasts," seriously. Last spring, last summer, last fall, last Yule on campus...I've gotten used to celebrating Yule. I like it. I like it a lot. How am I going to greet the holiday season without it, next year?

I suppose you could say the winter solstice is going to happen everywhere, and that's true (at least everywhere in the northern hemisphere--in the southern hemisphere the solstice in December is for summer), but it's the community that makes it meaningful to me--just as long as we have we, as Dr. Seuss says.

I'm at the Yule celebration now, in the Great Hall. The whole room is full of decorations and the scent of good food, and bits of wrapping paper and gift bags and people in their pajamas--we changed into our pajamas this morning at Joy's request after  lot of us got wet and cold during a snow-ball fight on the lawn in front of the Mansion. After that, we came down here and all ran around the room, finding our gift bags, each with a student's name on it, each filled with chocolates, candy, and fruit and little "stocking stuffer" toys, and then we had breakfast--pancakes, freshly made, and each round and golden as the sun. That was hours ago, and a lot of people have crashed out, gone to sleep on the couches and out-of-the-way corners of the floor. I might take a nap, too. Tight, after dinner, we'll clear all this away and have dancing, those of us who are up for it.

When and where else am I ever going to have an opportunity to act like this much of a kid again?

Earlier in the day, me, Steve Bees, Raven G., Joanna, and Eddie were all sort of huddled together, working our collective way through a bag of nuts. We had a variety of nut-crackers, but none of them were working very well, and nuts kept escaping, slipping out of the crackers and popping up into the air and rolling away. We'd have to chase after them, not always with much success.

"This is why chocolates are inherently better," asserted Eddie. "They're easier to eat."
"Chocolate has to be processed, too," I pointed out. "It's just that we don't have to process them."
"Exactly. The processing makes them better. That's why processed foods are called 'value-added products.'"
"But don't you think this, with the nuts, is more fun?" said Raven.
"I can think of more fun things to do with nuts," asserted Joanna.
"Well, there is peanut butter," suggested Steve Bees.
"I wasn't talking about food," clarified Joanna.
"Neither was I," Steve replied.
"Ew," said Raven, "Steve, I don't want to think about you and peanut butter."
"What?" he protested. "Anybody on campus can talk openly about their bodies and sexual practices, but when I make one little crack, I get 'ew'?"
"I don't want to think bout your crack, either," said Raven, and just then the English walnut she was trying to open squeezed right out of the nut-cracker, shot straight up into the air, and fell, knocking over her hot chocolate. We all scrambled to get the spill cleaned up before it could stain anything.
"You'll shoot your eye out," sing-songed Joanna.

Alien Steve, the new Nora, and Evie, who is one of this year's one-hit wonders, we clustered beside us, and they jumped up to help deal with the chocolate spill, too.

"Merry Yule," said Alien Steve to Steve Bees, as we sat down again. The two Steves shook hands. Apparently they hadn't yet gotten a chance to interact today.
"Merry Yule to you, too," added Steve Bees, addressing Nora. "Those were some pancakes."
"Thanks. I think using yogurt, instead of milk, made a big difference."
"Well, something did. Yogurt, huh? Could I have the recipe?"
"Sure. I think it's still pinned up in the kitchen."
"How are you liking Yule?" Steve asked."You and Evie." Both Nora and Evie are yearlings.
"It's not new for me," asserted Evie. "I've been Wiccan for years. I like how you do it here, though."
"I like it," said Nora. "I didn't expect to."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Well, frankly I thought it would distract from the birth of Jesus. A fake Christmas."
"Historically speaking, it's the other way around," asserted Eddie.
"Yes, I know. Everyone keeps telling me."

"I didn't know you were Christian," said Steve Bees.
"You never asked. But I'm not very Christian. I don't know. I shouldn't have worried about it. Maybe I'm just getting more sensitive because I feel like I'm the only Christian here."
"But you're not."
"I know."
"You know, sometimes Yule here feels more like Christmas to me than Christmas does?" said Steve. "It's like Christmas when I was a little kid."
"I feel the same way," I said.
"I don't," interjected Alien Steve, who is Jewish.
"Does this feel like Hanukah?" I asked.
"Of course. It is Hanukah. I don't know what you all mean about the feeling of this or that holiday. This is Hanukah, therefore, this is how Hanuka feels."
"How's your Hanuka going, then," asked Eddie.
"Oh, fine, fine.
"What you get?"

For answer, Alien Steve pulled something out of his gift bag and put it on his head, wearing an expression as though he really did not deserve such ridiculous indignity. It was a head-band with alien-type antennae on it. We all laughed.

"You totally had that coming, though," said Eddie.
"Did not. I take my identity very seriously. It's not a joke."
"It's because you take it so seriously that it is a joke," I told him.
"Your identity, my sexuality," commiserated the other Steve. "Nobody gives us any respect."
"I could make some comments," said the alien.
"But you won't, because I'm better at making comments than you are," warned Eddie. Alien Steve threw up one hand in a gesture of resignation.

Steve Bees and Raven made a run for more chocolate and brought back a handful of candy canes to share.

"Now, these are easy," said Eddie, sucking on the straight end of a candy cane, and we all giggled. He looked at his candy cane a moment with an odd expression. "Not everything I do or say is a sex joke, you know," he said.
"We know," said Raven. "If it were, we wouldn't be able to tease you."
"Just tease back," suggested Joanna.

"I've been wondering," said Steve Bees, "If Yule is like Christmas for children, what is Yule for grown-ups? Wicca isn't more childlike than Christianity, is it?"

"Maybe only children still notice the important part of the holiday," suggested Evie.
"Maybe the grown-up part is what you have to be a grown-up to notice?" suggested Eddie.

Last night, when we started our Yule party (and lit three Hanukah candles), it was raining, not hard, but it was a cold, spitting rain, and I worried we were going to have another wet walk up the mountain. By the time we all headed out, though, the rain was over and the sky clear and full of stars. The air had gotten very cold and I could feel the ground crunching under my feet, but in the moonless dark I thought I was feeling frozen grass, or maybe a little slush.

Then we got to the top of the mountain, all silent, and waited, shivering, for the dawn and the music of the hidden masters. And when the sun lifted clear of the horizon, it did so all golden and clear and glowing, shining out on a world covered in...snow!

Everything was white, all the ground, covered with about a half inch to an inch, all the shrubs and the twigs and branches of the trees and the windward side of all the tree trunks, all painted white with clinging snow and ice, the whole world golden and white spreading as far as we could see out over the hills and ridges to the horizon.

And that's when we came back down to campus and had the snowball fight.

Year 4: Part 7: Post 6: Reflections after Thanksgiving

In my last post, I described a little of the conversation I had with Kit and Allen in the car on our way back to campus from Thanksgiving. But it's a 20 minute ride and our conversation continued.

Allen had all but admitted that he's being nice to my parents in order to smooth my way into coming back and becoming a master. I've heard similar things from most of them over the past few months--not just that they want me to earn my ring, but that they want me to stay involved long-term, maybe as an ally or a staff member or something. Come to think of it, Charlie's probably the only one who hasn't said something like that, but he has taught me how to lead all of his workshops. And I've noticed that Charlie doesn't say what he wants very often. He clearly had a curriculum developed for me even before I asked him to be my teacher, even though when I did ask, his first reaction was to say no.

Anyway, so I've been thinking about this, and so in the car, I asked Allen and Kit what being a master means. I can't remember if I'd asked them before, but they've both been known to answer the same question multiple ways, anyway. I wanted to know their answers at that moment, what exactly they were seeing for me, wanting from me.

Allen was driving. Kit sat in the front passenger seat, and she turned and answered first.

"Mastery means working as hard as you possibly can to learn one thing as well as you possibly can, so that the process of learning transforms you. Then you can transform everything else. Mastery as in teaching--learning the state of the art of some subject so you can transmit that to someone else--is important, too, but that's secondary. To master a subject, you need skill and ability, and the more natural talent you have, the easier mastery is. But to be a master, anyone can do that, and it's always hard."

She looked at me a moment in that deep, somewhat Yoda-ish way they all have, and then looked away from me a moment and giggled a little nervously. "I don't mean you aren't talented," she said,  little awkwardly.

I love how these people shift back and forth between really deep and entirely human. I assured her I took no offense.

Allen chuckled and turned on the windshield wiper. It was raining a little, and the droplets shone in the streetlight on the windshield for a moment, before they were wiped away.

"I wouldn't say that's wrong," he said, "but I don't think mastery is about excellence. I think it's about wholeness. You develop yourself as a whole human being, physically, emotionally, intellectually, all of it at once, fully and equally. Most people only build up those aspects of themselves that they like, or that they believe others will like, or that they believe they need to develop to meet whatever challenges they're dealing with. They abandon parts of themselves in the process. They're not whole human beings. It is my wholeness, as a man, that gives you permission to be whole when we interact."

"You realize you gave mutually exclusive answers, don't you?" I asked. Allen chuckled again. Kit said "so?"

"So, if you'll defining mastery differently, how does that work, when you're the mastery group?"

"Well," began Kit, "I think Allen is excellent."

"And I think Kit is whole," Allen replied. "In theory, I suppose, you could have members of the masters' group who did not believe each other were masters, but when you earn your ring, you need the votes of all of the Six, so if we have six different definitions of mastery, then you'll have to be a master six different ways."

"That sounds hard," I said.
Allen shrugged.
"It is," affirmed Kit, lightly.

"You know that I know that you two don't actually disagree on this, right?"
And once again, Allen chuckled.
"He's learning!" said Kit, of me.

"Do you enjoy it?" I asked. "Mastery?"

"Sometimes," said Allen.
"Sometimes," agreed Kit. "I wouldn't say it's fun, you don't do it for fun, but it's alive. It's meaningful. And sometimes that's fun."
"It's my life," said Allen. "I wouldn't miss it."

We had turned onto the rural road that goes by the school. There are no street lights there. Sometimes there are porch lights, but not at that time of night. It was past 11. We drove along in a restful dark. I could hear our wheels on the wet pavement, but it wasn't raining hard. The windshield wipers were still intermittent.

When they let me out behind the Mansion (yes, they were acting like they were going to drive elsewhere afterwards. I don't think either of them realizes I know about the secret door), Allen rolled down the window and spoke to me.

"You know there's no firm distinction between masters and non-masters, right?" he asked. "Before, you learn. After, you learn. It doesn't feel all that different. This" and he showed me his ring, "is arbitrary."

"Yes," I assured him. "But I still want one."

And I trotted up the steps and in through the Meditation Hall doors and up the darkened steps through the mostly sleeping Mansion to my room.

On my door, I found a note from Joanna, asking me to join her, even if I got in late. I did so, and found her in bed but not asleep yet, and glad to see me.

But even as I opened the door to her room, which smelled of sleep and line-dried clothes and women's shampoo, as well as of her own delicious body, something occurred to me. It's almost a cliche, but I really do feel more in possession of myself now, as though there were parts of my mind and body that did not feel wholly mine until she gave me permission to use them. And yet, there is something about our agreement to be no-strings-attached lovers that I do not feel quite satisfied by. Maybe it's that I have strings, and I want them to be attached somewhere. Whatever it is, there are parts of my wholeness that are not welcome in her room.

Year 4: Interlude 6

Hello, Daniel-of-2016 here,

I'm posting on Friday this week, even though I usually don't, because Samhain is coming up fast and I wanted to get this interlude in.

About last Monday's post, it's odd how difficult that was to write. Not that I'm embarrassed about having been a 23-year-old virgin anymore, I just find I don't really like writing about my own sex life, even in the merely R-rated way I did so. I'm not one to kiss and tell.

But the story had to be told. Not that it matters much when I had sex and when I didn't, but the particular way that my first time happened may be unique to the school. It says something about our community.

You have to remember the impact of fiction and fantasy on our community. A lot of us had ideas about how a pagan community should work, what it would be like to live in a world free from Christian "oppression" (yes, such oppression certainly happens, but in most cases I've come to believe that narrative is an oversimplification), and those ideas were fed largely by fiction. I'm thinking of the writings of Jean M. Aule, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Jeanne Kalogridis, and others, alongside J.K. Rowling and Ursula K. LeGuin, whom I've already mentioned. And in the more feminist of those books, sexual attitudes are very different than the ones we're used to hear in 21st century America.

These books are full of ritualistic, and somewhat impersonal sex. The characters often go to bed with each other, not because they love or desire each other personally, or even to scratch the proverbial itch, but to honor the Goddess, mark seasonal changes or rites of passage, or to make magic.

For Joanna to offer to...un-virginize me as a friendly favor seemed a lot more reasonable and normal to us then than it does to either of us now--we, and more especially she--saw it in the context of those books, as a form of sexual initiation free from judgment, body shame, or social control. Me, I didn't know what to think. As usual, I wasn't being very self-analytical.

I don't regret it, precisely, and I have to say the operation was a success. My paralyzing shyness on the subject vanished. But I'm no longer sure it was the best possible thing to do--or that Joanna was really sincere in her desire to serve merely as my initiator, no strings attached. Had we not belonged to such a community, we might well have slept together anyway, but justified it to ourselves with different narratives.

That's the thing about belonging to a counterculture; you become more aware of your interior programming and of the fundamentally arbitrary nature of most of the things we tell ourselves.

I'm going to tell the rest of the story of me and Joanna in the upcoming posts, but I'm going to include a good deal more self-analysis than I actually engaged in then. I'd been at school for years, by that point, and I'd learned how to notice and name my own feelings, even to consider them important, occasionally, but I didn't process through my feelings quickly--I still don't. I remember at the time feeling gratitude, eagerness, and a vague discomfort all rolled together, but I didn't even start learning to articulate any of it to myself for years afterwards. Since inarticulate jumbles of feelings are hard to write about (and probably boring to read) I'm going to give the me of the past more understanding and self-awareness than he really had.

I should also point out that I've quoted myself as being wrong at least twice.

First, I thought that 23 was freakishly old not to have had sex yet and, further, that the people around me would care. I actually don't know how many 23-year-old virgins there are or what the actual chances of running into one are, but I've gathered it's a lot less unheard of than I thought and, in fact, most of the people I met after I graduated couldn't have cared less either way.

Second, the whole concept of "virgin" is problematic. You can watch YouTube videos on this, actually. The heart of the matter is male sexual possessiveness and some highly questionable gynecology mythologizing female sexual purity in a way that makes even less sense transposed to men. Yes, there are first times, but the reality is that sex isn't just one thing. There are sex acts I have heard of but have not tried and probably won't because they don't appeal to me. There are sex acts that I had in fact done several times even when I was obsessively worrying about being a virgin. At what point a person starts feeling experienced in bed is pretty arbitrary.

But I didn't realize any of that back then.

On a completely different note, here is some quick "housekeeping" for the blog. Usually, I begin each "part" with a sabbat, but I'm going to put Yule in as the final post of Part 7, instead of making it the first of Part 8. That way, the seventh Interlude will be around Christmas and the first post of Part 8 will be around New Years. I will not, however, put the narrative on hiatus for January as I have in recent years. Instead--and this is going to be kind of odd, so bear with me--I'm going to cover Brigid twice.

The thing is, I graduated at Brigid, 2004. From then on, for three years, I was in Absence, meaning I literally had no contact with the school at all. So, there is no point in covering those years in this blog, whose purpose is to describe the school. So, I'm going to speed through those years with just two or three posts, and then start up again in 2007, when I started my candidacy for mastery--and of course, I started on Brigid.

So, while I haven't worked out the details yet, I'm going to cover Brigid of 2004 in mid-January sometime, then do an extended interlude of two or three posts to explain a couple of important things that happened while I was away, and then Part 1 for next year begins with Brigid 2007 in early February. Does that make sense?

In the meantime, I have to say, we're all very worried about the election right now. I don't usually discuss politics on this blog, and I'm not going to discuss it now, but certain things go beyond politics. We, in our little community, don't have any particular agreement as to whom we are supporting--we certainly haven't endorsed a candidate as a group--but we all agree on whom we are not supporting. If you don't know who I mean, you haven't been paying attention.

Most of what we as a community care about--the environment (especially climate change), the rights of women and LGBT people, racial and economic justice, and participatory democracy itself--are all on the line this year. There is no one who really stands to win on this one, although some could lose more or more quickly, and yet his supporters seem to view him as some kind of savior. I could go on, but I don't really want to overstep my bounds. Political writing is not my strong suit, and I don't want to do it wrong.

But please vote. Make sure your neighbors vote. If I can work a magic this year, let it be this; victory for the candidate amendable to reason.

Year 4: Part 6: Post 6: Connecting

I can't believe I'm about to write this, but at the same time, there's no good reason not to tell the story. I'm a grown-up, and it's time I start acting like it and not hiding the parts of myself I'm embarrassed about.

Re-reading that--it's not that I've just now become a man, or something. I didn't mean that, and that's not the way it works.

So, to cut to the chase...I was a virgin. Until a few days ago.

It was Joanna. I never would have expected that. For the longest time, I didn't think she liked me, nor would I have said I liked her. She teased me too much, especially in the beginning, and not all her jibes were friendly. I think maybe I put up with that for too long and for the wrong reasons.

But the last couple of months, we've been talking more, and I mean really talking. And there's always been something like a bond between us. I'm not sure how to explain it, but even when we weren't getting along well, we always came back to each other. We'd always start talking again.

Anyway, so last week, we were walking along through the field under the Edge of the world, talking about the future, what we each plan to do after we graduate. I told her that I was going to grad school, that I'd started the application process for the place Charlie suggested--I don't mean I've sent in the application, I won't do that until after I've graduated here, but I've contacted the school and asked how the process works, what I need to do and when, and I've scheduled a campus visit for November, after our classes are over. While I suppose there's no guarantee I'll get in, I have a good feeling about this. I think this is really going to happen.

They don't give us grades here, but if you need grades to apply to grad school with, they'll give them to you retroactively, based on your evaluations. I actually made that request over a month ago, so, with the exception of my grades for my current classes, I now have the results--and I'm a straight A student. So, between one thing and another, I'm pretty confident about things academically.

Otherwise?

Joanna asked me if I were nervous. I told her I was.

"I mean, I've been living here for four years. What if I can't make it on the outside?"

"We've all been living here for years," she told me. "I doubt the graduates would keep supporting the place if too many of them got out and couldn't make it." She had a point. The graduates don't provide a lot of money, but they do provide some, and many do volunteer work here. I've learned that if something happens, it's the alums who come together and keep the place going.

"It's not just that," I said. "I suppose I'll do alright academically, and that I'll get a job and everything. I'm not stupid or anything. But...I don't know how to talk to women."

"You're talking to me."

"No, I mean flirting and so on. Being seductive. I don't know how to do any of that."

"I think Ebony would disagree with that."

"Ebony was a friend. Still is."

"So? Date friends." She made it sound so easy.

"But you all know me...it's different."

"This is about sex, isn't it?" Joanna has known for a few months about my inexperience. Most of my friends here have known for longer, it's just that I didn't want to admit it publicly, by writing about it.

"I'm 23," I reminded her. "And I'm a virgin. I can't imagine anyone  else out there is. So, how do I talk about that? How does that conversation work? Who's going to want to be with a guy who doesn't know what he's doing? I'm going to be a virgin forever."

For once, Joanna wasn't laughing at me. She tends not to, when it's really important. She just smiles a little.

"So, let me get this straight. You can't imagine asking a woman for sex because you're inexperienced, and you can't get experienced because you can't imagine asking?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"You know it's not that difficult, right? You don't strike me as the one-night-stand type, so you're not going to be asking anybody you don't know. It's just a conversation. It's not a magic spell where you have to get the intonation just right."

"Wingardium leviosa," I said, that being the spell they use in Harry Potter to make things rise. Joanna cracked up. Yes, I meant it that way. "I suppose so," I added, more seriously, but I still felt pretty glum. The thing is, I couldn't have that conversation with Ebony, and she and I were pretty close. We talked about everything else. So, I was pretty sure it wasn't as simple as Joanna made it sound.

"Hey, um," she began, "do you want to just take care of this? Have your first time so you don't have to worry about it?"

I turned and looked at her, searching her face.

"You mean, with you?"

"Yeah, if you want to."


I honestly hadn't ever thought of that possibility. Joanna and I weren't a couple, or even a potential couple. We just weren't. But I'd always found her incredibly beautiful. Almost as soon as I considered the possibility, my body responded. I think she could tell from my expression because she grinned, flattered, but I didn't say yes right away. I used to think that for real, red-blooded men, sex was the most important thing--given a willing partner, of course you'd go for it. I spent a long time, a couple of years, pretending to be that guy, hence my secrecy. I felt like such a loser. But that's not the way it works.

"What you're talking about sounds kind of clinical," I told her.

"It's only clinical if we do it wrong," she said. "I'm not talking about some kind of virginectomy. I like you, I think you like me, we can do this, and if we like it we can keep doing it. Maybe we'll, I don't know, fall madly in love and live happily ever after. Maybe we'll get up out of bed, say, well, that was fun, and go our separate ways. Or something in the middle. I don't know. I'm open to whatever possibility."

"Then so am I," I said.

"Great!"

It seemed sort of silly to go on treating each other platonically  with that decided. If we were lovers now, I thought we ought to act like it.

I touched her face, cupping her cheek with my hand, like they do in the movies, and stepped in close to kiss her. It's not like I'd never kissed anyone before, but I felt really awkward about it because Joanna and I still weren't a couple. We weren't kissing because we wanted to, exactly, we were kissing because we'd decided to, it was an artificial encounter and called for an artificially romantic gesture. And yet I felt about as wholly turned on in that moment as I ever have.

With my fingertips, I stroked gently along her neck, her collarbone, her throat, as we kissed. I remembered Ebony had liked just that sort of light touch, at least in some of her moods, and Joanna must have as well because she grabbed my uniform in feral handfuls and pulled me against her, hip to hip. If she hadn't known how aroused I was before, she knew it now.

But then I remembered Charlie's habit of spying on campus from above.

"We shouldn't do this here," I said. "Trees have eyes."

She giggled.

"You would say that." She doesn't know about Charlie's spying and somehow I didn't want to tell her. It would have felt like violating something, between him and I, to reveal anything I've learned by so carefully getting to know him.

"How do you think the masters know everything?" I said, instead, because we've all noticed that they know more about us than we have ever intentionally told them. Joanna laughed again and stepped away from me.

"Where do you want to go and when do you want to go there?" she asked.

The logistics turned out to be a little complicated. There's no real privacy on campus, and very little genuinely free time. We know that the dorm rooms have no sound insulation whatever because we've all gotten used to overhearing each other. Sex, like snoring, is simply one of those sounds you hear at night. And I didn't want anyone to overhear me. I harbored a fond hope that I could make her scream in pleasure. I worried that I might make her laugh.

We solved that problem. We had the talk about preferred forms of birth control and disease prevention and what we'd expect each other to do if either failed. We kissed some more. And I am not going to tell you any more about any of that.

But yes, we did it, and we enjoyed it. And I rather hope we can do it again.

Year 4: Part 6: Post 2: Senioritis

Charlie and I seem to be ok again and, just to prove there are no hard feelings, he's given me another assignment.

Actually, he has given me work, though I don't think it has anything to do with hard feelings. We do seem to be relaxing with each other again. He approached me after lunch the other day and, looking somewhat embarrassed, asked if I minded another assignment.

"You don't really have to, you have my vote," he told me, "but there's something I'd like you to do."

"Charlie, you know I'll learn anything you care to teach me," I said.

He flashed me a very quick smile.

"I'd like you to write me a report on all the things that could possibly threaten your spot in the woods and what you, personally, can do to address those threats."

"Any deadline?"

He shrugged.

"When you can."

"Got it."

It's odd, thinking about it, I really have spent very little time actually talking with Charlie. We seldom have long discussions. Aside from the occasional lunch together, most of our interactions probably last less than a minute and a half. And yet I feel like we're together almost all the time--when I'm working on an assignment from him, he is present for me, challenging, supportive, exasperating, just Charlie.

Anyway, I'm glad to have a project from him again, but I do wish he'd given me a deadline, because with "as you can" I'm not likely to feel comfortable until it's done. It feels like it's supposed to be done immediately. And yet, later that day, I did manage to go to a party.

More and more of us are getting the votes we need to graduate, and frankly we're getting a little silly. I mean, most of us already were silly, but there's a loosening. For example, this party. It sort of erupted out of this week's Callaloo, the "open mike" concern Kit hosts. I don't go every week, but this week I did, and about half the rest of the graduating class did, too. I think only two or three people there weren't part of our group. It was weird, like a convention nobody had to invite anybody to, we just showed up.

When the big crowd showed up, Kit sent a couple of people over to the Dining Hall to snag more snacks and some alcohol. Not a lot of people actually drank much, but it just being there made things seem more festive. A couple of people played or sang--I remember Dan (who is not me!) doing "Eleanor Rigbe" on his cello, and Raven G. singing something or other badly. A group of us, yes, me included, formed a chorus line and sang "Those Were the Days," while kicking our legs and falling over ourselves. Tommy, who I don't think I've mentioned before, sang "Proud Mary," and a couple of women, including Joanna, jumped up to sing back-up. That one surprised me, that Joanna would sing back-up--it was girly in a way I would have thought she'd find negative.

But that's kind of what I mean by silly--people doing things they normally wouldn't, just letting themselves go a little bit.

That's what Steve Bees did. The latter part of the evening became a concert for Steve and Eddie, singing mostly early and classic rock and roll and some Motown. That music is happy, light-hearted in a way most newer music isn't. Eddie favors it and sings that kind of music a lot.

Steve doesn't--he likes to listen to it well enough, I've seen him dancing to the music Eddie makes, but when he sings, he's usually serious. For a year or more, Steve's been a man on a mission. It's not like he never enjoys himself, but his passion, the important part of all his days, has been social justice. It's what he talks about, what he reads about, the end to which he is transforming himself. When he sings to himself, under his breath, he'll sing anything, things he likes, things he doesn't, ditties from commercials, but when he sings for us, it's always on message. He sings well, now, and we like his message--having deep conversations is a big part of what we do, here--but it's just something we notice about him. Steve is serious.

Which is why it was so good to see him perform some Chuck Berry and just having a good time.

Eddie, of course, is more or less always having a good time, but that's his message and he's always on it. His infectious joyousness is deliberate, religious, even political. This time, for once, there seemed to be no message, no challenge, nothing to think about, just two men with a couple of friends accompanying them on various instruments, singing "Rock and Roll Music," goofing off in their talented way.

Towards the end of the song, Steve sang alone, sweat visible on his face, as happy as I've ever seen him, while Eddie jumped and jittered and windmilled his arms, dancing around the little open area we were calling a stage. We were all on our feet, dancing.

Year 4: Part 5: Post 4: Living on Earth

I've never talked about Dan much, except to insist that he isn't me. We have the same first name, where the same age, and we've both been here three years and counting. But there, I like to insist, the resemblance ends, because he's always putting his foot in his mouth.

Except, I suppose, so am I.

Anyway, over the past several years he's matured into a talented musician. A group of us went to the Great Hall the other night to watch him play. It wasn't an official Event, but it didn't need to be. He just checked to see that nothing else was scheduled and put the word out that he planned to play. Maybe fifty of us showed up, which is enough to make a pretty good crowd in that room, which isn't all that large as performance venues go.

He played the cello and he did it wonderfully, with skill and passion and his longish, black hair flopping all over the place, his face starting to shine with sweat from concentration and effort. I did not recognize most of the songs, and many of them were classical pieces, which I don't normally listen to, but he was really good and it was fun just watching someone I know be talented.

He played for about an hour, and afterwards most of the crowd meandered away, draining slowly out of the room with much chatter and congratulations of Dan, off to do homework or something. A couple of us stayed behind to chat while Dan drank a bottle of water and kind of recovered.

By chance, all of us were part of this year's graduating group. Me and Dan, of course, plus Joanna and Raven G. from our group of yearlings, and Space Alien Steve and Eddie, who are in their third year, and Steve Bees in his second. Plus Jutta, who is a yearling and a one-hit-wonder, as we say.

Her name is pronounced "Yoo ta." It's German. She isn't, except by descent.

Anyway, we all sort of collected on the couches. Jutta was asking Steve why people call him Space Alien, which we used to do behind his back, but then we found out that he knew and didn't mind, so we dropped the pretense.

"Because I used to think I was a space alien," he explained.

"Used to?" I asked. He shrugged.

"Mostly used to," he amended. We all laughed, because of the way he said it.

"What changed?" I asked. This was big news. I mean, I haven't hung out with Alien Steve much since my second winter here, but his alien status was so much a part of him. We used to have these long conversations about it, late into the night, about identity and possibility and the definition of truth. And now he was saying "never mind?"

"Well, I still think I could be one," he said,"and I still feel like an alien, but...I guess I'm not sure the answer's so simple anymore."

"Ok, but I'm still a dude, ok?" put in Eddie, and we all laughed again. Eddie's masculinity was another part of those conversations.

"I don't get what's so simple about space aliens, though," said Raven, and held out her hand for the water bottle so she could have a sip. "You know, I wish we had the stove on so we could make chocolate or tea."

"With wintergreen!" said Eddie, because that's what we drank that winter, wintergreen and chocolate.

"You could start the stove, if you want," said Dan.

"No, she can't," said Joanna. It was almost eighty degrees inside. The day had been hot, and while the evening was cooling outdoors, the Great Hall hadn't caught up yet--not with fifty people and their body heat in it until recently.

"I don't get the part about space aliens at all, honestly," said the other Steve, Steve Bees, who wasn't there for those conversations.

"I've always felt like an alien," explained Alien Steve, "so I just assumed that I was one."

"Literally?" asked Jutta.

"Yes, literally."

"But that's impossible."

"No, it isn't."

"Yes, it is."

"How do you know?"

There followed a long and involved discussion about speed-of-light travel and resource limitations and whether science could legitimately say anything was impossible, anyway. Much shouting and giggling occurred.

"Forget chocolate," said Raven, "you guys need some pot."

"Except evidently we don't," Joanna told her.

"Anyway. Aliens and simplicity," said Raven.

"I feel like an alien so I thought I was one. That's simple."

"Overcoming the speed of light barrier, etc., etc., isn't."

"Yes, it is," Steve told her. "It's not unreasonable to suppose that a discovery we haven't made yet makes interstellar travel feasible. I have no idea if such a discovery is out there to be made, but I can't prove it isn't, and lots of things that used to seem impossible are possible now. Expanding possibilities are an established feature of our reality. But to feel alien and not really be? What does it mean if I can't tell if I'm human or not? Do I belong and not know it? How is that possible? Or am I alien in some other way, and if so, what way? What does it mean to be human? All of that. That's complicated."

"Ok, said Raven."Except I still wish I could get you high."

"I'm going to miss all you people," said the other Steve, Steve Bees. 

Year 4: Part 3: Post 8: The Difference It Makes

"I have to get arrested," announced Steve Bees at breakfast.

"Rob a bank, that's fairly reliable," suggested Charlie, between bites of scrambled egg. "Don't tell them I sent you."

Steve shook his head, as if shaking away an irritation. He'd been speaking to Greg. Greg smiled at Charlie, briefly. Charlie didn't see him.

"Have you done anything illegal?" asked Greg, with the same kind of dry humor Charlie had used.

Steve tried very hard to not look irritated. Neither master was taking him seriously, which is what they tend to do if they think we're being overly serious or self-important. Steve clung to his composure and persevered.

"No, I have never done anything illegal, that's why I have to get arrested."

"That's not usually how it works," said Greg.

Steve held even more tightly to his composure.

"If you laugh, they might cut you some slack," I suggested.

"Oh, don't you start," he said, but then he did laugh and took a bite of toast. Then he tried explaining himself again, more fully.

"All my life, I've kept myself safe. I've been a good boy, and I've stayed out of trouble. For me to make the kind of difference I want to make--that's going to end. The people I admire--they make enemies, they break unjust laws...and, honestly, I'm afraid. Everything I want for myself, could be jeopardized. So I think I have to get arrested, just to prove to myself that I can. Find a direct-action campaign and join it. What do you think, Greg? Is this a big mistake?"

"I don't know that it's a mistake," said Greg, slowly, "as long as you don't implicate the school, and we can teach you how to be careful there. But civil disobedience is a means to an end. You may be putting the cart before the horse."

Before Steve could reply, Joanna jumped in. She was sitting next to me, eating miso soup.

No, he's not. It's like sex," she announced.

"Well, I hope so!" said Steve, taken aback and laughing.

"No, I mean, it's like having sex for the first time," she clarified. "I mean, if you're gonna have sex, you want it to be for love, for pleasure, for magic, whatever it is. Something big. But the first time is going to be pretty awful, because you're nervous and it's awkward. So there's something to be said for just doing it, getting the first time over with. Save the mind-blowing experience for later."

"Well, I wouldn't know," admitted Greg, who is widely rumored to be a life-long celibate, "but the metaphor sounds reasonable. If you want to engineer a learning experience, just make sure whatever cause you pick is also worth it. Because even your first time can have consequences." He said this with a straight face, in his dry, somewhat prim voice, and the rest of us all smirked and snorted with laughter to hear Greg talking about sex. He normally doesn't. Then he smiled--he was in on the joke.

"So, Steve," said Joanna, "do you have a specific protest in mind? Where are you going to go to lose your political virginity?"

"A gentleman never tells," he replied, with a grin. But then he took his food and moved to another table. Greg followed him a moment later, to continue their conversation away from Joanna's teasing, I suppose. They probably had some important things to discuss relative to Steve's plans to become a criminal. The rest of us scooted over, evening out the gap the two of them left at the table.

"The first time isn't always awful," Joanna said to me, quietly. "Not if you really like the person you're with."

I have no idea why she said that to me. I could think of no response.

We all ate quietly for a bit, but then we started to focus our attention on other conversations. I saw it happen--my ear tuned in to a conversation behind me and at the same time I saw Charlie's attention caught--his eyes focused and he moved his head a little, like a cat when it sees something interesting across the yard. Joanna must have seen his eyes, too, because she turned in her chair to see what he was looking at. She turned back pretty quickly so she wouldn't be caught staring, but I could tell she was still listening.

Usually, we don't pay attention to conversations at other tables, but this one was kind of half-and-half. Dave, a yearling who works in the Dining Hall, had paused in his work to ask Joy and Kit about magic. The two women were sitting directly behind me and Dave had squatted down between the tables so that he didn't tower over them. They had turned in their seats to talk to him, and if I'd turned my seat I would have been right in the middle of the conversation.

Dave apparently was having trouble with using prayer as a magical technique.

"How do I know if anyone is listening?" he asked.

"Try talking," advised Kit. "And if what you say is interesting enough, someone will turn up to listen to you."

"Someone?" queried Dave. "Who? Who or what will listen to me? Does that matter?"

"It matters," said Joy. "To work with an archetype you need a personal relationship with it. And there are ways to choose an archetype that is suited for your particular temperament and magical goals. But which archetype you choose, what your relationship with it is, even what, exactly, an archetype is, whether it's a thought-form or an independent entity, it's really not my place to tell you. That's stuff's personal. It's really all up to you."

"If someone wanted to talk to me," interrupted Charlie, "and believed that whether I actually exist is entirely up to them, that would not work."

Joy laughed at that. Kit frowned.

Year 4: Part 3: Post 1: Beltane

Happy Beltane!

Every year we do roughly the same thing—and we do something completely different. This year, for example, we got rained on.

For three years now, Beltane for me has been about celebrating the newly warm, beautiful  weather outdoors. If it wasn’t exactly summer in the normal sense of the word, still I could believe it was the beginning of the warm, green season, and since I never really celebrated Beltane before I got here, that’s how I thought of it; outdoor picnics and flowers. But I suppose it has to rain on Beltane sometimes, and this year it rained on us—a cold, soaking, spitting rain all day long.

This year we began with the Maypole, right after breakfast. It wasn’t really raining yet, only sort of drizzly. The children’s dance went first, and then before we were halfway through the first song, the sky let loose. The first song was, as usual, “Celebrations,” by Cool and the Gang, and I have to say that being rained on caused no problem for us at all—we just got sillier, slopping through the wet grass, our uniforms getting all clingy and uncomfortable with rain, and all of us determined to have a great time anyway. 

The other new thing about that Maypole is that I, for the first time, danced as a woman.

I haven’t uncovered some inner feminine or anything, I just decided that if I ever wanted to just pretend to be a woman for the day because why not, I had better do it here on campus and this year would be my last chance in a while. So I did it. It was weird how hard it was—the only thing I did differently was grab the other color ribbon and dance the other way around the circle, it’s not like I wore heels and a bra or anything, and it’s not like I had to be female in any meaningful way. And nobody was going to tease me or second-guess me, it was the most minimal, no-big-deal thing in the world, and yet I was really scared to do it. Like, really scared.

Anyway, of course everything was fine. I ended up facing Steve Bees at the end—he did a sort of double-take when he saw me—which was, yes, a little weird for me, too, but I was happy to spend the day with him under whatever circumstances. As I’ve mentioned, there’s a blessing at the end that’s a little different for men verses women, and Steve gave me the women’s version. When I’ve ended up with guys dancing as girls I’ve given them the men’s version, but Steve seemed to think that my temporary femininity needed blessing.

Afterwards, Kit stood up on one the chairs we’d taken outside for the picnic and gave a speech explaining how the rest of the day would go, how we were changing the plan because of the rain, and so forth. She also made a lot of jokes based on the idea of “getting wet at Beltane” which drew a big laugh.

It’s weird, even though Beltane is supposed to be a very sexual holiday, and this community certainly isn’t squeamish about such things, I think that’s the first off-color Beltane joke I’ve heard here. The day was rowdier than it has been in the past, bawdier. Sarah was much less involved. I doubt that was a coincidence.

They did the blessing of the animals in the barn, to get out of the rain, but I didn’t attend. There’s not a lot of room in the barn for a crowd and I needed a shower to get the chill off. Lunch was a casual thing, just go in and grab a bite, like normal, not any kind of feast, and afterwards Steve and I, and a couple other people helped set up chairs for the concert in the Chapel. I remember, the whole time Steve was singing “going to the chapel of love,” except he only knew two or three lines. He sang them over and over again mostly under his breath until Joanna got tired of it.

“Stop going to the chapel!” she shouted from across the room. “You’re already here!”

Every year we’ve had a musical element, but it’s been getting bigger and more elaborate each time. My first year, Kit and Sarah sang a single song as a duet. The next year they each sang a couple of songs. Last year there was a bull-blown concert. This year…this year we got a mystery play. And the first part of the mystery was how they’d organized it and practiced it without any of the rest of us knowing anything about it—and they must have practiced, because they did the whole thing perfectly.

There were two separate bands on stage, including two sets of back-up singers, all interwoven together so you couldn’t tell who was in which group until they started performing. The lead singers were Kit and Eddie.

Eddie started, singing “Come on Nature,” by the Proclaimers.  It was an invocation, I’m pretty sure, since “Nature” is obviously the Goddess and the addressee of the song.

Come on, Nature, I don’t wanna read a book or talk about the world

Come on, Nature, I just wanna spend some time being boy to a girl.

It’s a prayer for sex, basically, and as frank as it is, there’s something innocent about it—desire without an agenda, without complication.

Kit watched him and appeared to respond, launching full-throated into “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” as if she thought perhaps Eddie didn’t know what he was getting himself into—I think she was singing the part of Nature, not that of the girl to Eddie’s boy.

He seemed encouraged, because he responded with “Help you Dream,” by the Blasters, about a charming but unsuccessful pick-up artist. Kit shook her head. The kid wasn’t getting it. She’d have to explain things.

She sang “Fever.”

Now, long-time readers will remember that I’ve had a thing for Kit for four years now. And her performance of this song did nothing whatever to change my mind. And then she sang “Rhiannon.”

I’ve seen her do that song before, but this time it was times ten. The band behind her throbbed like a heartbeat, vaguely mind-altering and we were all on our feet, dancing, maybe some two hundred of us, students, masters, and graduates visiting for the holiday, half of us still soaked from the rain outside. And then there was Kit.

The thing about that song, aside from its general awesomeness, is it’s not about the singer—it’s about some third person whom the singer seems to be pushing the listener towards.

All your life you've never seen
A woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?

Who is singing? Is it Nature, the being invoked with Eddie’s first song? Or is Nature the woman being described? It isn’t clear.

In any case, as Kit finished the song the throbbing beat didn’t stop, only altered lightly, and Eddie the acolyte began singing “Jean,” another Proclaimers song, to the accompaniment of both bands. The song starts prosaically enough.

I’ve never been lucky with girls, I confess

Don’t know who to blame for my lack of success

Even with ones up the back of the bus

There was always the risk of a slap in the puss

But Jean, oh, Jean, you let me get lucky with you.

But the thing is after a couple of verses of that the song goes into this hypnotic repetition of the words “I love her” over and over and over, until the words start to melt, to lose sense, becoming this animalistic drone…..

Loverai loverai loverai love, loverailoverailoverai love, loverailoverailoverai love….

And gradually Eddie starts slipping in these growls and shouts, leaning into the microphone oddly, eyes closed, body rocking, obviously out of his head. His movements became jerky, almost spasmodic, irregular but still in time with the beat of the music, gradually building to this insane crescendo shouting Jean!Jean!Jean!Jean!Yeah!

The music ended and he drew a ragged breath and opened his eyes.

He and the other singers and the musicians all left the stage abruptly, immediately, and anti-climactically, revealing, as they left, two more people who may have been on stage the whole time, or not, it was impossible to tell. One of them, of course, was Allen. The other one was Sarah. They sang an a Capella duet. 

They sang “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.”

They sang it soft and sad and bewildered and brave, and when they were done Allen withdrew and Sarah sang “Mother Earth and Father Time,” the lullaby from Charlotte’s Web, and Kit sat directly behind her, out of sight, accompanying her on the cello.

How very special are we
For just a moment to be
Part of life's eternal rhyme
How very special are we
To have on our family tree
Mother Earth and Father Time
 

I can’t explain all of this properly because, of course, you can’t hear the music. So go, please, find these songs, I’m sure they’re on the Internet, and listen. In order. The weird crescendo of “Jean” is, in fact, part of the original recording by the Proclaimers, though I’m sure Eddie’s body language added something to it. Then imagine all of this performed, the story they assembled these songs into. That’s the best I can do to explain it. It was intense.

Afterwards, on our way out, over to the Dining Hall for our feast (always eat after a ritual, it’s a necessary grounding), Steve and I found ourselves walking in step with Joanna and Eddie—I think they were partners for the day. Eddie looked exhausted, spent, but otherwise normal.

“Hey, nice orgasm up there,” said Joanna. She says things like that. Direct. Just to see what would happen. What happened was that my ears turned red, Steve laughed uncomfortably, and Eddie laughed quite comfortably and thanked her casually.

“So, it worked?” he asked.

“Worked?” exclaimed Steve, “I had no idea you could do that!”

“I wasn’t sure, myself,” Eddie replied.

“I’m surprised Sarah was ok with any of that,” I said. She won’t wear a dress that hangs above the knee.

“She almost wasn’t,” he explained. “And that won’t happen again. Not for a long time, and not just because I won’t be here next year. Sarah and Kit always do Beltane together, but sometimes Kit is dominant, sometimes Sarah is. Kit has been gaining ground now for a few years, it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way.”

“I’m surprised Kit is ok with that,” I responded. “That concert, play, whatever it was, was brilliant. I’d think Kit would want to do more of it.”

“You and I will be gone next year,” Eddie reminded me, “but Kit and Sarah will both stay. They have to find ways to get along.”

We had reached the Dining Hall, and as I held the door open for the others I noticed Charlie standing unobtrusively near the entrance, leaning against the wall, staring at the rain, barefoot. I let the others walk ahead. He looked at me.

“Whad’you think?” He asked me, looking back towards the rain, following it up towards the sky with his eyes and down again. That man can spend an extraordinary amount of time watching water, in any form, move.

“Sexy and weird and brilliant,” I told him. “What did you think?”

He shrugged a little.

“It was too loud. Not how I would have done it.” Charlie never thinks much of anything Kit does. He seems unable to compliment her without slipping in criticism here or there. Today he dispensed with the compliment entirely.

“Oh? How would you have done it?”

And for only the second time in our knowing each other, Charlie sang to me.

Scratch my back with a lightning bolt

Thunder rolls like a bass drum note

Sound of the weather is Heaven’s ragtime band,

He sang the whole song, which is called “Barefoot Children in the Rain,” by Jimmy Buffet. And you should go listen to that one, too.

Year 4: Part 1: Post 2: Feeling Weird

So, this is my last year. I'm still kind of blown away by it.

I'm not the only one, of course. There are at least thirty-four of us graduating next Brigid--more, if any of the new yearlings turn out to be one-hit-wonders. Ten of us are fourth-years. We were yearlings together. It feels like that was a million years ago.

Dan, who is, I always add, not me, has become a competent Wiccan priest and a gifted violinist. He's a good storyteller, too, and doesn't put his foot in his mouth as much as he used to.

Joanna is now  a Wiccan priest and spellworker with an interest in someday becoming a women's studies professor. I still can't quite speak coherently in her presence and she still teases me every chance she gets.

Raven G., the last of the Ravens, my fellow horticulturalist, is an animist very much after Charlie's model.

Sally, one of Joy's students, is even younger than me but is now a skilled horsewoman. I don' think I've talked about her at all, but she works in the library so I've actually talked with her a lot--usually about the location of one or another book I needed.

There's Brad, a martial artist, a student of Karen's and a member of the security team. Darren is also on the security team, but wants to become a therapist. Diane and Donna are both fellow students of Charlie, and Dillon studies both martial arts and Zen flower arrangement.

(Nora and Kayla are fourth years, too, of course, but aren't graduating with us)

But among all of these people there are none who have ever done this before--started their final year. By definition, anyone who has is already gone. And yeah, I feel weird about it.

"'Weird' isn't the name of a feeling," said Allen, when I talked to him about it at breakfast. He was giving me a hard time. When I was a yearling in group therapy he made a point of getting us to name our feelings.

"Disconcerted, then," I amended. "Slightly anxious."

"Why?"

"I don't want to leave," I told him. Greg nodded. Greg, Allen, Dillon, and Raven G, and I were all having breakfast together. The Dining Hall sounded really noisy after months away from it, and, at least to me, the whole thing seemed nearly elgiaic.

Allen nodded, too.

"When I graduated," he said, "I was nearly grief-stricken. I was a one-hit wonder. It wasn't long enough."

"So, you came back?" said Dillon.

"I did, although that's not exactly why. If you can't make it on the outside emotionally, you'd have a hard time getting hired here."

"I'm not there yet," said Dillon. "I'm still here, I don't want to worry about whether I'm coming back."

"Grief-stricken?" repeated Raven.

"Yeah."

"Maybe that's what I'm feeling," I volunteered. "It's like nothing here is real anymore. It's like I've already left. And it feels like I just got here."

"That's not unusual," said Greg. "As you get older and more mature, you'll get better at coping with loss, better at moving gracefully through beginnings and endings."

"I hadn't thought gracelessness was my problem."

"Of course not," Greg said, with some humor. I didn't understand. "But you said there's no one left who's been through what you're experiencing. That's not true. All of us in the master's group, except me, have been graduating students. And it's not like we don't know you're graduating. Have fun with it, meet your final credit requirements, and we will have events scheduled throughout the year to help you make sense of the transition. That's our job, after all."

You know, thinking about what Greg does for a living--mostly, he teaches meditation--you'd kind of think he'd advise me to stay in the moment. I mean, getting upset about leaving when leaving is still almost a whole year away--it's not really very Zen. He could also have said snap out of it, because nothing is really wrong. It's not like graduating from college is a tragedy. But instead he tells us that feeling a bit freaked out is normal, that we're not alone, and to have fun.

I guess neither Greg, nor any of the other masters, like to spend much time on the obvious truths.

Year 3: Part 4: Post 6: Updates

So, I've realized I haven't talked much lately about what a lot of my friends here are doing. Here, for your reading pleasure, is an update:

Nora

Nora's nineteenth birthday is this week. It's strange to think she's as old now as I was when I started--she still looks so young to me....

But she's obviously matured a lot. She's not rebellious so much as independent, now. When she started, she was only taking half as many credits per semester as the rest of us, since she hadn't finished high school yet. Now, she's gotten her GED and while she has two more years to go, she seems to have mostly caught up with the rest of us in other respects. She's been studying Wicca, bee-keeping, and aromatherapy, and seems very much a witch in her own right, now. The big news is that she's raising money to start her own business making scented candles, massage oils, and lotions.

Kayla

Kayla is sixteen and looks and acts like a teenager now, instead of a child. Since she's no longer nursing Aidan, her relationship with her son is much more like if she were an involved big sister or an aunt, which is probably how it should be. She's still taking just one class per year, spread out over the entire year, while otherwise home-schooling. Her mother is concerned that she's too isolated from other kids her age, so this summer Kayla got a job off-campus as a junior counselor in a day-camp for children. She seems to like it.

Andy

Andy is in his final year here. He is physically healthy, clean from drugs, and seems...more grown-up. It sounds odd to say that, since of course he's something like fifteen years older than I am, but for the first year there was definitely something childlike about him, and that wasn't always a good thing. Now, there's still a trace of that, but he seems almost, well, normal. He, too, is going about going into business. He has an off-campus job in a bicycle shop and the owner is seriously considering making him a partner. Once his credit is rebuilt, he wants to buy the place.


Arther

I haven't talked to Arther much this year. He's on campus as a candidate, and he often teaches workshops on various aspects of Wicca. He seems happy.


Joanna

Joanna is still a puzzle to me. She is not kind, but I seek her company anyway. Being on the receiving end of her teases and jabs, as I often am, is rather like being tickled--you laugh and try to get away at the same time. Maybe that's it--she makes me laugh. I've been told my writing seems overly serious. Maybe I'm overly serious. Maybe I need to laugh more?

She is working on becoming a yoga instructor and she makes, and sometimes sells, ritual implements, like chalices, wands, and alter cloths.

Rick

Rick is mostly living indoors again, though I can tell he still has mixed feelings about it. This is his final year, here, and he's spending it completing a few credit requirements he'd skipped earlier. He still does trail work with me, sometimes, and we go tracking together. I am still learning from him. We don't talk often, or at much depth, but I know he's wondering what he's going to do when he leaves here--and, more broadly, what he's going to do with his life. He doesn't have any clear answers on that, yet.

Ebony

I have not talked to Ebony in a while. I don't really know what she's doing. She's been spending a lot of time off-campus and seems unhappy, for some reason. She insists she's fine.

Ollie

Ollie is, of course, off-campus, having graduated. He's not in Absence yet, though, so he did come to visit at Litha. I don't hear from him very often, but his fiancee, Willa, does, and she gives us updates. He's starting graduate school in the fall, going for a masters' in Divinity. 
 

The Ravens

Of course, there are multiple women named Raven in my story, and I really should have established some way of differentiating them from the beginning, but I didn't.


There are four women named Raven left on campus, three of whom are Allen's students and planning on graduating this year. Two of them are in the Reiki group with me and one of those is a good friend of mine--she's studying totemic animism with Kit and there are overlaps between that and my studies with Charlie.

The fourth Raven is graduating next year and is one of Charlie's students. She's on the groundskeeping team with me, and we get along well.

Year 3: Part 4: Post 2: Juneteenth

Note:this post is rather seriously out of sequence. I wanted to write about Juneteenth in order to address, even indirectly, the recent tragic attack in South Carolina, but the thing is we never observed Juneteenth as a holiday on campus. In my second year, 2001, we came close, though--Greg did an educational event around it, much as he did for Hiroshima Day, Nagasaki Day, and Pearl Harbor Day. He was very much the campus historian and he was always very interested in using history to foster cross-cultural empathy and compassion. But after 9/11he focused his efforts largely on combating discrimination against Muslims and did not address Juneteenth in 2002. So, not only is this post out of sequence because Juneteenth is before Litha, but this was Juneteenth, 2001.- D.

Greg says that white American culture is, collectively, narcissistic. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

He said it during one of the evening talks he does--one of the few that everybody on campus is strongly encouraged to attend. I've noticed these things are kind of like minor, third-tier holidays here--like, for the major holidays of school, the sabbats, we have these campus-wide celebrations. For Christian and Jewish holidays and things like 4th of July and Thanksgiving, we make space and time for those who want to celebrate them to do so. And then there are these things, historical dates, mostly, that we don't exactly celebrate at all but Greg does one of these campus-wide talks, apparently to get us thinking.

This one was for Juneteenth, the nineteenth of June and the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Texas.

Why Texas? Apparently, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves in Texas weren't given the memo and were kept captive until well after the end of the Civil War when Federal authorities were finally able to come in and insist. They did so on June nineteenth. And a lot of the freed people immediately moved to other states, spreading the tradition of celebrating that day far and wide.

Apparently for much of the latter half of the 1800s and into the early 1900's, Juneteenth was something like a 4th of July for black people, with baseball games, barbecues, dressing up (something slaves were never allowed to do) and a lot of educational presentations for young people. Then the holiday kind of faded, but it's starting to make a resurgence. I'd never heard about it before, but a few others had.

The thing is that almost everybody here is white. There are exceptions, but it's disproportionate--there are fewer people of color here even than at most colleges. I think it's because so many people here are Neopagan in one way or another, and most (not all) Neopagans are white. So Greg makes a point of trying to broaden our horizons because, as he says, we're culturally narcissistic.

He wasn't accusing us individually of narcissism, but did say that being part of a dominant culture means you can pretend other perspectives don't exist and that if we don't want to be narcissists ourselves we have to make an effort to expose ourselves to ideas and information we might otherwise dismiss. It's much the same as what he said in his class, American Minority Perspectives, but not everybody has taken that, I don't remember him actually using the word "narcissism" then, and anyway I think that talking about slavery especially makes people defensive.

For one reason or another, he got some pushback this time, people wanting to argue.

Joanna stood up and said a lot of us are not members of the dominant culture, being variously pagan, and that in any case those of us who are female or gay or transgendered, are hardly dominant.Various people echoed the sentiment. They sounded angry. Greg held up his hand.

"So, what you're saying is that basically you're not boogeymen?" He paused to let that question sink in before continuing. "The fact of the matter is, no one is a boogeyman. No one is so privileged as to have no claim to any kind of unfairness, ever. This is no one so victimized so as to automatically understand the lives and struggles of all others who have been victimized, ever. This is not a contest and none of you can win."

From there he began talking about different forms of discomfort and fear, encouraging us to sit with those feelings and to listen to others when they talk about their lives, rather than speaking over them. He talked about how different categories of people can overlap so that a person can be both privileged and discriminated against at the same time, depending on context, and that looking for ways to address a problem makes a lot more sense than getting defensive about whose fault it is.

"Acknowledging culpability is part of justice," he said, and then looked around. We were outside, on the central field near the Dining Hall, and he'd spotted a plastic bag stuck in one of the maple trees along the field's edge. There isn't a lot of litter on campus, but it sometimes blows in or something. Then, too, outsiders sometimes come in for one reason or another, and drop things. Greg pointed at the bag and continued. "At the end of the day, I'm less interested in who put that up there than in who is going to get it down."

The thing is, he ended up spending most of his scheduled time responding to these questions and challenges--actually telling the story of Juneteenth went pretty quickly. I wonder if he used the word "narcissist" to incite a challenge so he could respond to it?

Afterwards, I asked him whether what he said worked to absolve people of responsibility for discriminatory or hurtful behavior. He shook his head.

"You're thinking like a judge," he told me, "or a legislator. Trying to establish who should be held accountable for what under what circumstances. That is the exact opposite of what I meant. Don't ask what should happen when they are accused, should they be held accountable for this or that fault. Imagine the question being asked of yourself. Then resolve that no matter what the answer is, you will respond the same way--in service." He looked at me a moment. "It's not like the self you're getting defensive about is real, anyway," he added, with a hint of a twinkle in his eye.