Mastery Year 2: Part 4: post 4: Who Offers Thanks

The heat is on, now, full, fierce summer, the kind of weather that is delicious and lazy if the livin is easy and you have nothing particular to do, but it's miserable otherwise. Fortunately, the days are long, as though the sun, too, wants to get up early while it's still cool and linger in the evening when the air grows soft again.

I've been introducing Steve and his baby to the art of walking around just after dawn, and the equally alluring art of doing nothing at all in the shade in the afternoon. The other day, we were engaged in the nothing at all part under an elm tree near the Mansion. Charlie, Joy, and Apple Blossom and Joy sat nearby, although we hadn't said anything since we all sat down, so I am unable to say whether we were sitting together in the social sense or not. Perhaps we were all simply enjoying the same shade.

A group of young day-campers ran by, ignoring us, playing some kind of imaginative game in the sunshine. The one running in front (being chased?) turned toward the others and sang out "ooooooooooo!" while slapping at his open mouth with one hand. One of the following children said "Pow! Pow!" shooting an invisible gun. The other must have had a Star Wars blaster, because she said "Pew! Pew! Pew!" instead.

"Why don't we have any Indians here?" asked Apple Blossom.

"We have at least three," said Charlie, rattling off the names of three yearlings with ancestry on the Indian Subcontinent.

"No, I mean like them," Apple clarified, pointing to the children.

"Them? Well, there they are."

Apple sighed and rolled her eyes. Charlie smiled, fractionally.

"How do kids learn stereotypes like that?" complained Steve.

"They're six years old," I said. "Maybe they just like making that noise."

"While pretending to be Indians," Steve added.

"Seriously, though," said Apple,"why no Native Americans?"

"I don't know that we don't," I pointed out. "I don't know everybody's ethnic background. I don't know yours."

"Mostly German," said Apple.

"I don't think they need this place," said Joy.

Charlie rolled his eyes.

"And they are an extremely small portion of the population," he put in. "Statistically, you'd expect them to be rare."

"But not non-existent," said Apple. "We're not that small a school."

"We're mostly white, here" acknowledged Steve. "When nothing changes, nothing changes."

"What do you mean, they don't need this place?" asked Apple of Joy. "I would think it would be the perfect place for them."

"Exactly. What we have to give, they already have. Like showing gratitude to the natural world."

"You can't make generalizations like that!" protested Steve, "you're totally romanticizing a culture you don't understand."

Joy looked surprised to be thus taken to task by a student, but then she shrugged her shoulders. She didn't contradict Steve, though.

Charlie reacted more forcefully.

"What, walking around giving coins to plants?" he said. I should explain that a lot of people on campus make a practice of leaving a small gift, usually a coin, sometimes a small crystal or some other offering, as thanks whenever they harvest a wild plant for any reason. Charlie has never thought well of it. "Of what possible use could a coin be to a plant? Is it going to buy itself ten cents' worth of fertilizer. Meanwhile, you get to feel all noble and shit for leaving religiously inspired trash."

"And what do you do, when you harvest a plant or an animal?" Joy asked, knowing the answer.

Charlie did not respond, Just looked at each other, but I knew the answer. And I knew that Charlie offers thanks.

Mastery Year 2: Part 2: Post 3: Missing

Steve is gone.

I don't mean he's died, as far as I know he's perfectly fine, he's just not here on campus and I don't, as of this writing, know why. All three of them, Steve, Sarah, and Sean are gone. They left in the middle of the night.

Everything seemed normal with them when we went to bed--though, maybe I missed something somehow. They did make some noise at night--woke me up--but nothing that sounded like them leaving. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was sex-noises, an irregular, almost rhythmic, half-voiced sound. It was clearly coming from Steve and Sarah's room, and however sex-positive we are around here, it doesn't mean I want to hear the people in the room next to mine going at it. But within a few seconds I realized it was crying. Someone was crying hard.

June was awake next to me.

"Should one of us go over?" I asked, whispering.
"No, wait until we're asked," she whispered back. "It could be private."

But however private it might be, we kept listening, ears peeled in the dark.

A voice spoke, Steve's, but we couldn't hear his words. Sarah replied, also unintelligibly. It must have been she who was crying. Her voice, as the two spoke, rose, became wild, almost panicked, but I still couldn't make out more than the occasional word, nothing I could make sense of. The crying started up again, escalated, something went THUMP. Steve spoke, soothingly, the crying abated, silence returned. It took a long time for June and I to get back to sleep.

We woke again to pounding on the door.

"What's the matter?" I half shouted. June and I were tangled up in the covers. I felt confused, muddle-headed.
"What's happening? What time is it?" asked June at the same time.
"It's almost six," the voice, I realized, was Mason's. "Steve is missing. Steve and Sarah and Sean are missing. Their door was open, I looked in, they're not there. Do you have any idea where they went?"

His panic was contagious, but I couldn't see the reason for it.

“Maybe they went for a walk, or went to the bathroom?” I suggested.

“Went for a walk before dawn with a newborn? They’re not in the bathroom, I’ve just been there.”

“You have a point.”

June and I got up. She started fumbling into her clothes and I went to the door.

“Why me?” I asked. “What do you want me to do?” I wasn’t complaining, I just didn’t see how I fit in to the situation.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “your door is right here and you’re a mastery candidate.”

I guess he figured I knew what to do. And I kind of did.

“Ok, you go to zazen, I’ll handle it.”

“Ok, thank you,” and he ran off.

I went downstairs, into the still-dark office, and found a phone list. I used it to call Waverly, who is the new security head now that Joe has retired. The security head is on call, and therefore wouldn’t mind being woken up before dawn. I heard a sleepy voice on the phone and explained the problem. A few seconds went by while she woke up more fully.

“You’re right to ask,” she assured me. “But in this case everything’s ok. They left campus last night, Allen’s with them, there’ll an announcement at breakfast.”

Ok, then.

But at breakfast, Karen’s announcement (she’s the current head of the masters’ group) was only that the Kellys had left campus temporarily because of a family emergency, that she wouldn’t give details out of privacy concerns, but that personal friends of theirs could call Steve on his cell phone and ask him. Sharon had the number.

Sounds innocuous enough, but nothing that causes the head of the masters’ group to make an announcement at breakfast is ever good. And I can’t get Steve to answer. His phone is going straight to voicemail.

Sounds trivial, and it’s honestly not my primary concern, but I can’t help thinking that he’s supposed to be my student, and he isn’t here, so how am I supposed to learn to be his teacher?

Mastery Year 2: Part 1: Post 5: Birth

Note; since I skipped last week, you get two poss this week.-D.

When you get used to a place, anything out of the ordinary, out of place, you notice.

That's why, when someone opened the main door of my dorm and ran down the hallway in the middle of the night, I was awake-and anxious--even before I heard Steve Bees cry "HOLY SHIT!!"

He has the room next to mine this year.

His voice woke June and we both got up, put on pants, and poked our heads out the door. Steve's room light was on and spilling out the half-open door into the hallway. We could hear him moving around in there frantically. Other heads started poking out doors.

"Steve? Are you ok?" I asked. No answer.
"He probably got 'the call,'" suggested June. "His wife's in labor."
"Yes, but who ran down the hall?"

The hall door opened again and Cuppa Joe hurried in, fully dressed. Cuppa Joe, you may recall, is the husband of Security Joe, the now-retired campus security chief. Steve emerged from his room, also fully dressed and carrying a full knapsack, followed by Security Joe in pajamas and a red robe, who must have been the hall-runner.

"Hey, there, Dad," Cuppa Joe greeted Steve. "You ready?"
"What?"
"I'm your driver."
"I'm driving."
"No, friends don't let friends drive anxious at three AM. Gimme the keys."
"What? No."
"Come on, you want your wife to be all alone in the back seat? I'm already dressed. Gimme the keys."
"Oh, alright."

Steve handed over the keys and took off down the hall without acknowledging the small crowd that had collected around his door. Cuppa Joe followed, after a goodbye kiss from his mate.

"Call me," Security Joe said, and patted the other Joe's chest, fondly. They look odd, next to each other, and not because they're both men. It's because Security Joe is so little, not only short but petite, under a layer of aging, working-class muscle. His personality isn't little. Even half-asleep and in a bathrobe, Joe looks like an old cop from central casting, so you don't see his size until he stands next to another man and you realize he's eight to ten inches shorter than you'd expect. Cuppa Joe is as tall as I am, so the effect is even more startling. Plus, I don't usually see masters kiss.

Joe leaned in the doorway watching his receding mate, wearing an odd, almost nostalgic expression. Some of the assembled went back to bed, but Ollie, Eddie, June and I, and True, Nutmeg, and two yearlings, Mason and Jay, formed a cluster around Joe and the doorway.

"Well, that does it for sleep for us," said Eddie, quite brightly, speaking for all of us.
"There's no reason for you to stay up," said Joe. "They'll probably sleep at the hospital. She's not very far along, and first labors usually take a long time."
"Why did you come down?" asked Nutmeg. "Steve has a phone."
"He gave his phone to me at night so extraneous calls wouldn't wake the rest of you up. He wasn't sure 'vibrate' would wake him. I'm used to being on call, so I volunteered."
"And Coffee Joe volunteered as driver?"
"Yeah. When we had Rob, he drove about ninety miles an hour until I threatened to write him a speeding ticket myself in between contractions. We figured we'd lessen temptation for Steve."
"I imagine all new fathers are like that," said Ollie. "You're nervous and you want to be useful."

He and I made eye contact. I think we both had a sense of being the ones on deck, now.

"Not all fathers," pointed out Joe. "I was a little too busy to pace the hospital waiting room at the time."
"Do you miss it?" asked June. I suppose she meant whatever shred of femininity Joe had once had. It's not the sort of question you're supposed to ask in general, and Joe in particular is notably private. He gave her a look but elected to answer anyway.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "But not enough."
And he bid us goodnight with a courteous little nod and returned upstairs.

"It's strange, Steve having to go away to have his baby," said Nutmeg. "Like there ought to be some special School way of doing it. There is for everything else."
"I expect we'll do a welcoming ritual or a naming ceremony for the child afterwards," Eddie assured her.
"It seems...cold," said True."She ought to come here, or they should both stay home. "You wouldn't have a bunch of doctors and nurses and equipment around at the beginning of a pregnancy, why have them at the end? Birth is a sacred, natural process."
There were nods of agreement all around. This is one of the ideas that pretty much everyone around here learns to take for granted.
"You know what's also natural?" said Ollie, who doesn't like to take anything for granted. "Uterine rupture."

And on that rather depressing note, we turned out the light in Steve's room, shut his door, and went back to bed.

So, it seems as though my work as Steve's teacher is going to be delayed. The plan is for him to stay with his wife at home for some weeks, and then they'll decide whether to move the family to campus or if Steve should go back to splitting his time, as Ollie does. Either way, I don't think Steve will be back here until after Ostar.

We did talk that night, after class, about what my responsibilities will be. Charlie will be Steve's master, not Greg, and Charlie will delegate most of the day-to-day responsibility to me, though I'll work under his close supervision and with his direction and support. Partly I'll be repeating what Charlie taught me, just as I repeated what I learned in grad school to Charlie last year--though Charlie says it probably won't be necessary to push Steve so much into the science. He's not, temperamentally speaking, a naturalist. Rather, the point will be get him into the habit of close observation and awareness. And the point will be to teach me how to be somebody's master, though why I'm getting this intervention and no one else, to my knowledge, is, is beyond me. Maybe they think I need extra training, or something? I've never claimed to really know what I'm doing.

But it's obvious to me that all of this is about some kind of spiritual practice. For some reason, Greg and Charlie decided that neither the Christ nor the Buddha is Steve's best "way in" right now, which is why the meditation teacher tossed Quaker Steve over to Charlie for healing. And being a naturalist is a spiritual practice for Charlie. But is it for me? Ostensibly it must be, because Charlie was my spirit master and I graduated, but if so, I don't know what my spirituality consists of. Going outside doesn't feel especially religious to me. I don't have all kinds of fancy ideas about energy and animism, or whatever else, supporting the practice. Does Charlie? I don't know. But aren't I supposed to at least understand a topic before I teach it? Don't I have to have something to give it away?

Although I suppose there is something else that gets given when the person giving didn't have it before: birth.