Afterword: Post 9: Finis Part B

So, yes, a disgruntled student of Allen’s triggered the closure of the school; her parents filed a lawsuit and as we had no liability insurance, in order to settle out of court we had to sell the school itself to pay our bill. Each of our several other options, including fighting the suit in court, would have required we compromise our community in some important way. We decided it was better for the school to die intact than live on as less than itself. Whether it actually did die at all is the subject of this last post, but at the time we saw no hope, no way forward but an ending.

I want to emphasize that while I have mentioned that the student was mentally ill, her illness was not the cause of her vindictiveness—mentally ill people are not inherently dangerous to anyone, and lots of healthy people are vicious. Indeed, we don’t know whether it was she or her parents who decided to come after us. The reason I mentioned her mental status at all is that had she had any other kind of crisis, legal blame would not have landed on Allen—there might have been no way for blame to find purchase at all.

Allen felt horrible, for while he was not in any way responsible for what happened, he had made a mistake. There was a kernel of truth to the lawsuit. But we all felt horrible. I can’t overemphasize how awful it all was, every step that we took felt just plain wrong. And there were a lot of steps to take.

Again, I don’t want to be detailed, or even entirely accurate in my description, because we engaged in some subterfuge that I don’t want to come to light.

The first priority was to appear to capitulate fully in order to satisfy our attackers and distract from the fact that we weren’t capitulating fully. The Six were the board members of the school as a legal entity and its sole shareholders, so we could not appear to remain involved after the sale, nor could we arrange to sell the school to an ally whose connection to us could be traced. We (staff and students together) therefore created the illusion that we were and had always been a quirky private liberal arts college, and we presented that illusion to several potential buyers.

We also quietly made a deal with a different quirky liberal arts college to accept our students and transfers and find ways to properly credit their real educational experiences, including the courses on magic and so forth. We would continue working with the students in secret, and the other school would find ways to credit that secret work.

Thus, we planned to honor our obligations to existing students, although we could not take on new students because we would all shortly have to find other ways of making a living.

We were sued in August. We sold the school in October, and according to plan Allen, Kit, and Greg all walked away unemployed and penniless. I stayed on, since I had not been legally added to the board, pretending to be an adjunct science professor and writing coach. The other allies stayed on as well, and more allies stepped in to cover Allen’s psychology classes and Kit’s classes on dance and movement. Joy and Karen lost their positions on the board, but they both owned their own businesses—as you may recall their classes were open to outsiders—and so they both kept going as though they were simply contractors who had lost a client.

Over the following year, most of us allies gradually left the school’s employment, replaced by real liberal arts professors who had no idea what the school had really been. Most of the students, particularly those close to graduating, transferred to the other liberal arts college, the one we had a secret deal with, to finish their studies. New students came in with no thought of magic. The place very rapidly became the ordinary liberal arts school we had pretended it was.

But we had not sold the campus to the same buyer. The campus was our home. It contained Charlie’s ashes and some of those of Shrimp and Jim, who helped found the school and whom I never met but have heard a lot about. And remember, ashes from the campus lie under my skin; as Charlie predicted, I can’t ever permanently leave.

So we sold the campus to a newly-formed non-profit created by Sarah Grimm whose stated twin purposes of sustainable agriculture and education would be furthered by continuing the farm and by renting the campus facilities to various other groups, including the college that bought our school and Karen and Joy’s businesses—and the summer camp, which my wife continues to run. How did Sarah get the money? Some of it was hers, some of it raised from our community, but the entire down payment came from Charlie; he had bequeathed her his life savings with the understanding that she would do just what she did, if it ever needed to be done.

We expected our retention of the campus and our deal to stay involved with our students to function merely as lifeboats for a sinking ship. We expected to more or less all go our separate ways. Kit spent a year as a full-time member of her husband’s band, the Blue Pixies, then got herself re-certified as both a dance movement therapist and a yoga instructor. She then taught yoga at the YMCA and volunteered her services as a therapist at nursing homes and in a women’s prison. Allen expanded his private therapy practice to full time and eventually founded an after-school program for troubled youth. Greg, long since retired from teaching, went to live with his sister, his social security check supplemented by a small pension collected from the school community at large, as per our promise to take care of the Six. The Joes moved in with their son. Raven G. went to work for Sarah supervising the care of the non-farm parts of the grounds. Rick went to work for the US Forest Service (where he stayed until shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump, when he went to work for a state agency instead) but continued to consult on the management of the campus forest. Karen and Joy continued teaching their classes and did quite well for themselves. Sadie put her energy into her restaurant, becoming Sarah’s primary buyer.

And I became a full-time landscaper, supplementing my income in the off-season as a free-lance writer and writing tutor and by sometimes doing classes or workshops for area high schools and the community college. And I had a baby. And I wrote this blog.

The blog was an idea that came up very soon after we sold the school, the idea being to “seed” some of the values of the school into the wider world. We hoped that someone would take our example and create another community such as our was—if that has happened, we have not heard of it. But we had another goal, too.

Our community was never unique. I’m not the only one who has had the experience of meeting people who seem to be masters in our sense of the term but appear not to have gone through our program—they are out there. And there are places, or corners of places, where magical little communities very like ours grow. They aren’t obvious. In fact, they’re generally hidden, much as ours was, in plain sight—a school or a business or a private club or a neighborhood, wherever two or more gather amazing things can happen and yet the third who has also gathered might notice none of it. It’s very strange, yet somehow comforting.

So the other mission for this blog was to give encouragement to such places, and to all those who seek them.

The reality is that if our school is seen as a larger phenomenon, a reality beyond a single institution, then it never closed. It still very much exists. If you want to figure out the specific reality of my stories, who we really are, what really happened, you can give up now—I’ve hidden us so deeply you’ll never find us. But if you want to join us as a student, you’ll find we are all around you. All you must do is recognize our existence and want to join and we will take you in at once.

That paragraph was to be be the end of the blog. I thought of it years ago, almost word for word, though I have not written it down before today. I figured that the tragedy of Charlie’s death and the school’s closing might impel some readers to take me up on my invitation, to take seriously and offer care to the secret magical places and people around them, and then maybe my losses, our losses, would mean something.

But while I’ve been writing, a curious thing has happened, to me specifically and to us generally (something I found last week would require enough words to explain that I had to split the last post into two parts).

I have found myself transformed once again, no longer merely a science major who likes to write but a chronicler, a person concerned with and knowledgeable about the uses of narrative to communicate, to frame, and to transform. It has become my special skill and magic, and while I once felt myself inadequate as a leader of our community, I now have a place here. It has grown around me. And around me, around us, has grown a new version of “us.”

It happened gradually, as our meetings shifted from nostalgic get-to-gethers (sometimes precipitated by people wanting to know how the blog was coming, or by me wanting to consult the memories of others on points I wasn’t sure of) to catch up to semi-organized discussions of our various projects and how they fit into some kind of whole. We became, once again, the Six. I’ve given you hints of this process as it happened, told you of our decision—or was it a discovery?--to begin moving forward, to build something new.

Initially what we built did not resemble a school. Sadie had her restaurant, and when she decided to move it into a slightly larger space with a better location, we pooled our resources to help her buy a building with a restaurant and two other retail spaces on the first floor, a large finished basement, and two second-story apartments. The basement became the new home of Aaron’s library, which he had been running as a lending club through the mail from his home since the school closed. I took charge of one of the retail spaces with several business partners, also from the community, and sold science books and supplies and art supplies. Kit took charge of the other retail space and built a metaphysical book store. We rented the library after closing hours to 12-step groups and other community functions, and turned one of the apartments into an Air B&B. The other we gave to Greg, rent free, when his sister had to give up her house and move to an assisted living facility. We taught classes to the public. We took on small numbers of students secretly, bringing them on as novices at Brigid, just as we used to.

By that time the school that had once been ours had failed, its resources folded into other programs of its owner—enrollment had dropped precipitously after we left. We started talking about what might be done with the campus.

The election of Donald Trump was a turning point for us. The “real world” no longer felt safe for us or our values, and we realized we needed to create a refuge for ourselves, not to hide from the world, which is what we had done before, but as a base from which to act. We needed our own land again.

It took a few years to organize, but...we’re back. This Brigid, as I prepared to finish the blog, we inducted our first new group of resident novices. Some are new, but some have been secret students of ours for a few years now. We even have two candidates living with us.

We’re not the same school that we were. We couldn’t be—we don’t know how far the antipathy of that student’s family extends, for one thing. For another, we recognize now how vulnerable we were and have taken steps to make ourselves less so. The Six is no longer the institutional leadership on paper, nor are we one entity, we we used to be. Instead, we are a group of legally separate organizations, one of which is the school, which rents the campus facilities from Sarah’s non-profit. Never again can an outside attack threaten the entire structure—the school could close again, but it could be immediately replaced by a new legal entity with new people acting as its public face and behind that face the rest of us doing the same work.

It’s just in time. COVID19 has given us very good reason to retreat to a place that can, after all function independently. We grow our own food, and since the restaurant and our stores are shut for the duration, we none of us need to leave. We have invited our friends, allies, and families to join us—the student body is still quite small, so we have plenty of space and food—and some have taken us up on our offer. For over a month, now, no one have come in or gone out, we’re like the mysterious workers in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and so far none of us are sick.

But who “we” are has changed, too. Of the Six who I knew as a student, only Allen and Kit remain. Greg has completed his retirement. Karen and Joy have been gradually drifting away from us for years, getting involved with unrelated projects, and when we decided to re-open the school they elected not to come with us. And of course Charlie is gone.

I am the new Craft Master, though my primary craft is writing. Allen retains his old position, but Kit is the new Spirit Master, replacing Greg (yearlings no longer do zazen; they do yoga), and leaving a vacancy that Ebony has filled. Ebony is the new Art Master, teaching mostly visual art and poetry. Breathwalker is the new Athletics Master (as well as our new grouchy old mystic). He spent many years as a long-distance hiker, before permanent injuries took him off the trail, and walking is the primary athletic form he teachers. It’s harder than it sounds. Our new Healing Master is a physical therapist named Brian who earned his Green Ring in the years when we didn’t have a campus.

Two months in, our new residential community seems to be doing well, still feeling its way into existence, but we seem to be finding our way. Yesterday’s on-campus Easter service was well-attended and lovely.

June and I and Carly (who is, by the way, named after Charlie, as are several other sprouts with similar names all born since his death) have given up our old apartment and moved into the suit of rooms formerly occupied by Charlie and Greg. June and I share one room, Carly has the other, and there’s the shared living room, too. It’s less space of our own than we used to have, but room and board is free and we have the entire campus as our home.

Greg, who was less sentimental than I, chose a different room from which to enjoy his retirement. He was 93 and though still perfectly clear mentally, he was getting frail physically and spent much of his time dozing or getting to know our newly-acquired barn cats.

Did you catch the past-tense?

This morning Greg Monroe did not wake up. When he didn’t come to breakfast, Kit went to check on him and found his body cold and stiff in bed. He must have died quietly very early in the night. Brian is dealing with the details of properly caring for the body and for the legal details of a death. We have another funeral to plan, and while we’re not sure how, yet, Greg’s ashes, too, will enrich our soil. And yet Kit found the body not quite as cold as it might have been, for his remains lay guarded and warmed by all our barn cats. We have no idea how they got inside.

I was among the first Kit told, and I returned to the Mansion in time to see Greg’s body, though not in time to see the cats. I did not involve myself in the initial discussion of whom to call and what to do, but instead retreated to my room. I wasn’t scheduled to teach until the afternoon—now, of course, classes are canceled for the week—and I blog post to write.

I sat there in my room, which used to be Charlie’s room, thinking about Greg and about my history here with this school since I have known him and everything that’s happened, everything I’ve learned and done, and thinking too about what I wanted to write in this, my last post. Because that’s what this is. It’s the end. The end always comes, sooner or later, and while beginnings are not guaranteed, they tend to come, too. This story may someday become a novel, and if that’s going to happen I’ll post about it here—so please stay tuned. Or you can go back and read the story again from the beginning. It’s all here. It’s not going any place.

So my thoughts went and my ideas moved, and I got out my laptop to write this post. But before I began to write I got up and I stepped outside and I played my tin whistle on my balcony.

Afterword: Post 6: Service

My friend and teacher, Charlie Robert Silano, died on May 23rd, 2011, outside in his hammock, on a warm afternoon.

We had of course, been expecting it, and yet it was a surprise. He had been cycling through good days and bad days, crises and rallies, with no discernible pattern or rhythm, for weeks. It had seemed at first that he couldn't survive another day, and then he could and did and then when he finally didn't it was a shock because there was nothing different about that last bad day than all the others.

I wasn't on campus that day, had not been, actually, for a few days. I found out an hour or so after the fact when Allen sent out a group text alert--"he's gone."

June saw me check my phone and didn't need to ask what the text said. She took me in her arms.

A few hours later, Allen sent around a more carefully thought-out message, sharing what information he had about Charlie's last days and hours, and inviting all who wanted to come to a meeting to discuss next steps.

Charlie himself had left no instructions as to funeral services and so forth, insisting "I'm too busy still living to bother with figuring out what you all should do after I am dead." He had not needed to tell us that his body could not be embalmed or incinerated using fossil fuels or sealed into an expensive, rot-proof sarcophagus, or anything else of that nature. We'd all been his students long enough to be as offended by such prospects as he was. But there are laws that more or less require expensive and environmentally destructive funeral practices, and so we not only needed to plan a meaningful farewell service but also to figure out how to break the law on his behalf.

I will tell you what we did, but not how we arranged to do it. I do disguise our identities in these stories, but there are limits to what I can hide and precautions that I must continue to take.

A few days after his death, a group of us gathered in a partitioned-off section of the Martial Arts Studio with Charlie's corpse, which was already starting to smell faintly of rot. There were six of us, all men--me, Rick, Steve, Breathwalker (a former student and ally whom I had only recently met), and two members of Charlie's family--all met to prepare his body. Allen was there, too, holding space for us, wordlessly paying attention.

We stripped and washed the body, dried it, and then wrapped it, confronting the physicality of his illness and death in the most direct, uncomfortable way possible, confronting reality, as he would have wanted. We took our time. There were moments in that process that the body seemed very much to be Charlie. Seeing him naked and ruined hurt, and we held his hands, touched his face. There were moments when what we worked with was very much an object, an animal corpse, and we worked efficiently, with faint disgust or detachment. Allen watched all the moments without comment, accepting the unendurable, his existence its own continued teaching.

In what did we wrap the body? Layers of wax-infused cloth, to begin with, then clean cloth, like a mummy, though we left the face, hands, and feet bare, and a plain white t-shirt. The layers replaced some of his lost muscular bulk, made him look a little more normal, but that's not why we did it--we left his exposed skin unadorned, waxy-looking, his face frozen in a somewhat unnatural expression, though we did close his eyes. We were making of him a fire-starter.

We intended to cremate the body, but to do it ourselves, in a bonfire, and human flesh has way too much water to burn easily.

Once we had him wrapped, we placed him on a clean, white sheet on a hand-made stretcher and placed another sheet over him, tucking it around him as though he were in bed, leaving his arms, his head, and his feet free.

The six of us lifted the stretcher--it had six, not four, handles--and stood wit our burden by the door, the back door that led right outside. Allen went to the door and knocked on it. Karen opened it from the outside. She wore her samurai sword and her ceremonial knife.

"We are ready," Allen said, formally. "We request a guard."

"Come. We will guard you," she replied, and stepped to the side.

We came out, awkwardly negotiating the narrow door and then walking formally, Allen processing at our right, Karen at our left. Our guard consisted of women, each of them carrying a staff of the sort used in one form of Japanese martial art (a weapon traditionally used there by women), except for Karen and her sword. Sarah and Charlie's sister marched before us. We were flanked by Nora and Raven G., and four more women fell in behind us. Together we processed around the building to the part of the Central Field where we hold the Burning Man Ceremony and where the soil is already scorched and wouldn't mind being scorched again. There, the rest of the extended school community awaited us besides a massive pile of kindling and wood and a row of recently-acquired low cast-iron tables of the kind used for garden furniture.

We laid Charlie's body on the row of tables and held a kind of viewing there for an hour or so. Then we prepared the bonfire.

We faced a serious logistical problem, here, for Charlie's friends and family and admirers extended well beyond the campus community and included people who could not be trusted to know the laws we were breaking. We had considered having a private cremation followed by a separate memorial, but somehow that did not seem right. Instead, we opted for something far more difficult and dangerous, holding a public cremation but not allowing the public to know what it was.

We covered Charlie's body, including is face, with another sheet. I expected that to be very hard--the last moment I would ever see his face--but it wasn't his anymore and I was glad to be able to stop resolutely confronting it. Then we laid fuel under the tables, so the flames would come up through the iron and claim the body. Then we covered all of it with a layer of wet plywood, then laid bundles of sticks over top--there were to be two fires, one under the body, claiming it, and the other above it, with the plywood in the middle. We would feed both, adding more plywood as needed, maintaining a kind of temporary oven until the object cooking inside it could be rendered unidentifiable. We even added bundles of sage and other aromatics to disguise and complicate the scent of burning flesh.

The strangers arrived at dusk, hundreds of them, in time to see the fires lit without knowing what they burned.

We had set up a low stage and a small sound system, and we circulated sign-up sheets for anyone who wanted to speak or perform. Once night had settled and the fire was burning brightly, Allen went first, sitting on the stage on a simple stool, and speaking calmly, intellectually, in his capacity as a psychologist, a philosopher, and a minister of sorts--he welcomed everyone, explained how the memorial would go, invited everyone to watch the performances or wander around campus, socialize, or sleep as they liked, and then he explained an idea of his that everything has an end and a beginning in both space and time. He held up one of those glitter wand things, an item reliably visible in the glow of the bonfire and the tiki-torches surrounding the stage, and said "we can see that this wand has two ends, and that after its ends it is not there--and yet the wand clearly exists. If the end of a wand in space does not invalidate or cast doubt on its existence, why should the end of a man in time invalidate or cast doubt on his?"

Then he paused and drew a ragged breath.

"I really believe that," he said, "and the idea is comforting to me, far more comforting than ideas about afterlives that seem so resonant to others but that fundamentally do not work for me. I offer it for anyone else who find themselves emotionally ill-prepared to believe what their intellects cannot accept--and yet, intellect itself only goes so far. I have no reason, no dogma, no credo to support it, but I find I cannot believe that my friend is really gone."

His voice suddenly broke.

"Charlie!" he called, looking out above our heads and into the night, "where are you? Do you see us gathered here, do you know that we all love you?" And the firelight shone on the tears on his face.

It is that moment that embodies for me, more than any other, the essence of being a master, of being of the Six--at no time is Allen ever purely professional, in the sense used in the outside world--he never pretends not to be a human being for the sake of his job, and if he needs to contradict himself, to admit to doubt, to weep, he does so. And yet even at his most personal moments he never leaves behind his role. That night he wept in public not because he could not help it, though I believe that was true also, but in order to role-model grief, in order to give us permission to do the same.

He sat a moment, weeping quietly, and then without another word left the stage. Joy read the name of the next person on the list.

The bonfire and the performances continued all night--our intention was to go from sundown to sunrise. I don't remember them all, and I don't intend to describe all of those I do remember. I did not go up myself, though I was considering it, and had my tin whistle in my pocket just in case, but it didn't feel right. Instead I watched the others and at times I mingled with the crowd, talking to the others, finding out who had come. His entire extended family seemed to be present, as were many former students, and probably the majority of those who wear the Green Ring, maybe sixty of us--some lived too far away to attend, and others have died, but those who could come did.

There were others, too, people who knew Charlie from the classes he taught at the community college, people who had read his writing, people from the AA groups he'd attended. Some of the eulogies were unintentionally funny as people who knew Charlie from one area of his life made clear they knew nothing about areas. Some made jokes about alcohol because they didn't know Charlie was in AA, and some AA members peppered their speech with 12-step truisms, apparently unaware that many in the audience wouldn't understand--none broke Charlie's anonymity openly, meaning that people who didn't get the references simply ended up confused.

Some people just delivered straight eulogies. Others sang or danced. Some did both. Allen came up on stage a second time about an hour into the event and brought his guitar. Without introduction or comment, he sang and played "The Boxer," a song I'd never paid much attention to before but have always loved since, honoring, perhaps, a time in Charlie's life and an aspect of his personality that most of us never saw, the scrappy, worse-for-wear, yet indomitable fighter.

Hours later, Sarah (the farm manager, not Steve's wife) took the stage. She, as I've said, was devoted to Charlie and had helped with his care in his last week or so. She sang "The Garden," a hymn I have heard at other funerals, but never so appropriately, since no one else found God so deeply in gardens.

And he walks with me and he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

As she sang, I noticed Kit standing near the stage, yearning towards it somehow. She wanted, I'm sure, to join Sarah and sing. I thought of what I'd learned the day I'd overheard her beg Charlie for forgiveness, and I knew why she wanted to get onstage and why she didn't go.

Sarah surely meant the song in its obvious way, but there is another, vaguely blasphemous way to read the words--that the "me" in the song was not Charlie but Sarah, walking in the garden not with God, or not especially with God, but with Charlie.

Either way, there was something solitary, something that not widely shared, something Kit, anyway, could not have. As Sarah came down off the stage, she and Kit embraced and held each other for a long time.

As the hours wore towards dawn the people tending the fire judged it time to stop replenishing the plywood and let the inner and outer fires merge. They kept refueling the outer fire for a while and then let it begin to burn down. I had returned from mingling to watch the end of the fire and to see the final performances before an audience much dwindled by the need for rest and sleep.

Dawn was starting to color the sky but the air still seemed dark when Steve Bees took the stage to sing, unaccompanied, "Bridge over Troubled Water."

He had, by that point, become a very accomplished singer, if not quite to the level of Art Garfunkel, but his performance of that song on that night pulled him out beyond himself, articulating a promise he had been living, the essence of his own mastery, for the whole world--but for Charlie specifically as well.

Towards the end, Charlie had needed help, first with keeping track of his meds and fetching things, cleaning things, self-care details he wasn't always strong enough for, then help with more basic things when he could not get get out of his hammock for days, when he couldn't bring himself to eat. Mostly he sought help from women. Charlie was not what I'd call sexist--he respected his female colleagues as his equals and supported his female students as fully as his male ones--but he was somewhat traditionalist in certain ways. I think he believed that nurturing is a woman's role, not a man's, and he was not comfortable being looked after by men. He relied on Nora, on his sister, Mary, on Sarah, and on Joy, and did his best to keep men from knowing how weak he really was. And yet, there were things he needed a man for, both for bodily strength and for propriety--and he chose Steve Bees.

Please go watch a performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" so you can get a sense of what this was like, how the song grows gradually, building to a crescendo, a promise, to be there in the face of difficulty, selflessly.

And when the song was over Steve stumbled and his face went slack a moment as the thing that had song through him let go. He coughed a little, taking a little while to get his bearings again, and the growing light of dawn shone on the lenses of his glasses.

The bonfire behind him was dying down. There was no sign that there had ever been a body among the ashes.

Afterword: Post 5: Vigil Begins

April brought us a new puzzle.

As you'll likely recall, in early May, the school traditionally would send all the yearlings to camp on a certain island. All the Six except Greg would go as well, but they would camp separately, on retreat. Each would come out for a day or two to teach a workshop, but the real point of the trip was a group vacation for the masters and a group bonding experience for the students.

But that year, Charlie clearly could not go.

It was not exactly that he was too ill to go--he was weak, and probably could not lead his traditional hikes for students, but he could certainly have participated in the retreat, and I and another former student could have led the hikes for him. But going would have meant missing a treatment, and that he could not do.

The others did not want to go without him. He argued back, told them they were all stupid and crazy and neglecting their obligations, and then when they would not relent he at last said "thank you," in a small, reluctant voice.

But what was going to happen with the students? I and the other allies teaching that year were in on that meeting. We discussed various possibilities, from skipping the retreats utterly to sending the students on some kind of local retreat. Eventually Greg pointed out that the yearling students were adults and were perfectly capable of going to the Island themselves. He did not say, but it's also true and also relevant, that the yearlings don't know Charlie and will not mind being away from him for a while.

So, that's what we had them do.

We gave them a debit card, directions, camping equipment, and the use of the vans. We also gave them an assignment--a series of scavenger hunts (photos to be collected, not items) in teams, with the teams changing for each hunt so that everyone would be on a team with everyone else at least once. They were to use the photographs to put together a presentation for campus afterward. Charlie wrote the scavenger hunts, though he did not sign them.

It was well none of us had gone, because the first week of May, a shift occurred; Charlie, who had been living with cancer, instead began dying of it.

I'm not sure how to explain the difference--I was never told any details of his treatments, test results, etc., so I'm not sure how cold, hard facts might have aligned with subtle intuition, but we all felt it. He was more tired, more easily distracted, more frighteningly thin. He seemed, perhaps, more thoughtful. Whatever had changed, he felt it, too.

Once, while checking for scale insects on one of the hanging plants in the car port, he told me, "You know what pisses me off, Daniel? Those stories and such about people being told they have a month to live so they go sky-diving or whatever. By the time you get that news, you're sick. Really sick. It's too late for the bucket list." His attention was on the plant and his voice sounded calm, almost professional. I asked him whether there was anything he regretted not doing. At first he simply ignored my question, but after a minute he glanced at me. "Oh, come on, you know me better than that," he said.

But what did I know?

On another occasion, we walked together down along beside the sugar maple avenue and stopped, sitting in the grass so he could rest. I had little to say, but he seemed unusually talkative, telling me things about his life I hadn't heard before.

"You know, if anything happens, and the stories I tell you prove useful, you have my permission to repeat them. Anything, even the alcoholism stuff. Use your judgment." Of course, he meant if anything happened to threaten the school--at the time I thought such worries somewhat paranoid, though of course I didn't say anything. I was touched by his trust, but didn't say anything about that, either.

He told me of the founding of the school and his role in it, how he had become the Charlie I knew him to be. I'd heard parts of the story before, even from him. He was repeating himself a little, not remembering what he'd told me already. Of course, people rarely do remember--they're always surprised when I recall what they've told me better than they do.

"I never expected to spend the whole rest of my life celibate," he admitted, "but that's what I've gone and done."

"You're life's not over yet," I told him, urgent. He looked at me, amused.

"'Elderly cancer victim seeks willing woman for final fling?' I think not." he said.

But that wasn't what I meant. I could not tell him what I meant.

Charlie had not exactly retired, though he was no longer teaching classes. His life was his work, and vice versa. He spoke with and gave crazy assignments to the various students he already had, for although everyone had chosen new masters by that time, he had insisted on not giving up his role while he could still breathe. He explored and inspected campus and, to a lesser extent, the woods, giving instructions to Raven and Rick to enact on his behalf. He had a walker, a fancy one someone had found for him in a specialty shop, with purple tubing and wheels with hand breaks and a little fold-down seat. He took to using that walker, not just to keep from falling when the weakness took him, but so he could rest as needed. There he'd be, sitting calmly in that fold-down seat, halfway between here and there, getting his breath back. He'd wave or nod as people passed by him. He refused any help.

How much of his calmness was illusion I don't know, but at least some of it was. One morning, when I biked in to campus, a student who knew me shared an interesting bit of gossip he could not explain; the night before, there had been a huge crash from somewhere in the Mansion. He and the others, suddenly woken, had come out of their dorms onto the landing in time to see Security Joe hurrying downstairs, tying his bathrobe closed over his pajamas as he went.

"Go back to bed," he'd said without stopping. "I'll take care of it."

"We'd expected some kind of announcement at breakfast," the student told me, "but there was nothing."

"That's very strange," I agreed. Then, when the student had gone on his way, I hurried over to Charlie's room in the Herbarium and found what I knew I would--Charlie slowly returning somewhat wrinkled books to shelves and cleaning up broken knickknacks. In the night, alone with his helpless rage, he'd pulled the shelves over.

When he felt good, he'd go to his doctors for check-ups or permit various alternative healers, most of them presumably graduates, to come consult. When he was feeling especially bad he allowed nobody to examine him. He was serious about not wanting to be hospitalized. He had a horror of dying under a roof of any kind, and on particularly bad days he would not go inside at all, sleeping instead in a hammock slung between blue spruces next to the Mansion--I'm not sure why those non-native trees had been spared Charlie's axe, but they returned the favor, since the group of them defined an interior private space, a little room where interior branches had been pruned away and he could rest outdoors but away from prying eyes.

The trees could not contain sound, however, and on two occasions, as I approached for our arranged lunchtime visits, I heard things I was not supposed to.

The first time it was the sound of a woman crying and, over that, Charlie's voice, shouting "I am a teacher! I am not a goddam learning opportunity! And I'm telling you to take the ring!" I crept away and came back later. He did not mention the incident, and I would not have known what happened except that Nora, Charlie's primary caregiver and the owner of the sobs I had heard, spontaneously told me, without even knowing I'd overheard.

Charlie had tried to give her her ring.

As you might recall, Nora was a mastery candidate working with Joy. She was already a medical doctor, and on Charlie's suggestion had taken over his care so that she could learn from the experience of losing him. She could not earn her ring until he died, nor until she had passed the job interview or gone through the rituals at Brigid. I'm not even sure how he had procured a ring in her size in May, it was very much not how we did things. He had decided not to care. She'd tried to refuse, which was when he shouted.

"Of course I took it," she told me, looking at it on her hand. "What else could I do? But it's not like it's mine, yet."

"I don't know," I told her. "What's the wording of the ritual? 'Why do you want it,' 'Because it is mine?' Mastery is ours before we step on that stage, but who knows how much before?"

She nodded, accepting my reasoning, then said "I hate this. I hate it, and he hates it, and I hate it for him."

I could only agree.

The next thing I overheard, some days later, was Charlie's voice, quite calmly, saying "Katie. I was wondering if you'd show up."

I had been walking by, not planning to stop in and see him just then, but I stood still then, wondering who Katie might be. He could not hear anything else, just the occasional low, incomprehensible murmur, so I waited, confident I would breach no privacy, to see who might come out.

To my surprise, Kit did.

"You're Katie?" I exclaimed. of course a lot of people in our community use names that aren't the ones from the original birth certificates, and I'd always gathered that "Kit" was a Craft name, meant to honor the red fox that red-haired Kit identified with. But I'd never given a thought as to what she might have been called before.

She looked at me with tear-reddened eyes. For a moment she seemed furtive, angry.

"I didn't hear anything," I assured her, "just the name."

"Yes," she acknowledged. "Go get the story from him. I know you want to. I can't talk right now." And she hurried away.

I could not figure out whether she actually wanted me to know or not, but in the end I went in to Charlie anyway. He looked up at me as I came through the branches.

"Are you here to exorcise your demons, too?" he asked me.

"No. What that...?" I pointed behind me indicating Kit.

"She was here among others. Everybody and their mother's cousin seems to want to have a death-bed scene today." He was not happy.

"Who else?"

"Sarah. This morning. She came to beg me to return to the Church. I should have expected it. She's always worried about my soul."

"What did you tell her?" I asked, having trouble imagining Charlie in a church of any kind, let alone the Catholicism of his youth, a faith I've always associated with stone, with stained glass, with the works of human hands.

"I told her to send her priest, why not?" At my evident surprise he grunted in amusement. "I never left the Church in the first place," he explained. "Except during my drinking, when I left pretty much everything. Other than that, I've spent my life pursuing truth. The search has taken me in heterodox directions, but if anything I've ever done has offended my God, then I am heartily sorry."

He did not sound repentant, but his humility was entirely genuine. I waited, to see what more of the story he wished to tell.

"Kit...Katie...wanted my forgiveness," he said, after a bit.

"For what?"

But he looked at me as though I really should have known, and indeed she has treated him badly the whole time I've known them, and doubtless before.

"I was her teacher," he explained, and it explained much. I'd heard the same from Sarah, years earlier, but I had not known any of them well enough at the time to understand.

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I chewed her out, of course. This wasn't for me, if it was, she could have come to me years ago, when I wasn't sick. Now she wants to avoid feeling guilty when I die." His opinion of such an order of priorities dripped from his voice. "I told her that if lets go of the nonsense that caused her to act like a spiteful child, she may consider herself retroactively forgiven by me, even if I'm already gone. One last assignment from me, I suppose, to be graded by the student."

We spoke a little longer before I realized that Charlie, despite being amped-up by anger, was tired. I let him rest.

Later that day I saw Kit and asked if she wanted to talk. She walked towards the Formal Garden and I followed her. She stopped and so I stopped before we got there, beside the magnolia at the corner of the Mansion.

"You did ask him," she said, not looking at me.

"She I not have?"

She shrugged.

"Did he tell you what a spiteful child I've been?"

In those very words. But what I said was "Frankly, Kit, he didn't need to."

She started to smile, embarrassed, but then turned towards me suddenly and flushed.

"Did he tell you why? I bet he didn't. Did he tell you how I did everything he asked me to do, every single fucking thing, and it had exactly the effect he said it would have--I transformed, I found my way to a truth you can't find in a book or a fantasy, or an entheogenic drug, only direct experience and a reasoning mind, and I've based my life on that experience. And everything that I've learned, everything that I've taught, everything that I am, it's all just so much fluff to him. I'm like you--one of the most dedicated, successful students he's ever had. And he will never, never notice."

I had nothing to say--or too much to say for any of it to ever come out. She'd been stupid in her anger and her hurt, far stupider and more cruel than I'd ever thought her capable, but I could not be sure I would not have reacted just as badly were I in her shoes. Stepping into Charlie's shoes at that moment felt harder--though it's true I've taken very few of Kit's teachings to heart. Her kind of witchcraft has not called to me, and I have difficulty believing it. How much of that is Charlie's doing, and how much is simply me seeing what he saw, because it is there to see?

But I did not speak. I put my arms around her, folding her head to my chest, and she, for the first time treating me wholly as an equal instead of as a student, wept in my embrace and took some measure of comfort from me.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 1: Beltane

Happy belated Beltane, everyone! The holiday was a few days ago and I am, rather unexpectedly, off to the Island.

Let me tell you about the holiday, first.

This year the first of May came very cold—there was actually a frost the previous night, and in the morning a cold, wet, fitful wind blew. If the clouds had loosed anything it would have been snow. But they held their peace, and the wind blew the sky clear by lunch, leaving an incredibly blue sky and a cheerful, warming sun.

We held the Maypole Dance in the afternoon, followed by most of the other festivities, and pushed ndinner back late into the evening to leave enough time. As Charlie acknowledges reluctantly, modern technology has some advantages, and somewhat accurate weather prediction is one of them.

I didn’t dance but sang and banged away on a tambourine and watched the pattern of the dancers and their ribbons, thinking about how by the next May Day I’ll be actually barred from joining them. I’ll have my green ring, technically a faculty member, and no more able to do this sexual metaphor of a dance with a student than to literally have sex with one. I’ll dance with the masters, I suppose. If they dance. This year, once again, whatever dance they did was private.

As to our other festivities, Kit’s tide seems to be rising again now, though she was actually not very involved. May Day here is largely a project of Sarah and Kit, except their ideas of how to celebrate it are more or less mutually exclusive. Kit favors sexy, bawdy, very adult celebrations that Sarah finds frankly offensive. Sarah favors an event focused on child-friendly activities organized around farming and nature. Kit likes those, but finds them somewhat euphamistic. And so the tension between the two generates a gradual oscillation in the event as first one and then the other gains ascendancy from year to year.

This year saw a return of the concert of slightly bawdy love songs, but Kit wasn’t in evidence except as an audience member. Instead, Eddie was everywhere—and Eddie, too, organized the blessing of the animals and the petting zoo, and a kind of amateur talent show for dogs and their trainers. Eddie in his person embodies both poles of the day, Eddie the incurable flirt, lover and fan of all women, and the devotee of dogs.

Eddie sang most of the songs, either alone or in duet, backed up with a gradually shifting band of students and masters, but the one song that sticks in my mind was the one for which he yielded the stage utterly—to Hawk.

As you may recall, Hawk is a transwoman still mid-transition. If she’s on hormones, they have not yet done much to transform her look. She still dresses like a man when she leaves campus without one of us for company—she says she feels safer that way. But on campus she’s been relaxing into her new identity, developing her style, and generally exploring herself. And it turns out she can sing.

Her voice, of course, is quite deep, and she has not yet learned to adjust it for speaking—I don’t know whether she plans to. But Kit has been coaching her in the use of her falsetto, and she’s at the point now where, as she puts it, she “sounds like herself.”

Hawk sang “Fever,” and she did it with a voluptuousness of soul that brought the house down.

Afterwards, while we were milling around, waiting for the people who had danced to finish setting up the Dining Hall, Charlie approached me.

“You didn’t dance,” he stated.

“No.”

“You didn’t try, did you?”

“No,” I admitted. “I danced more years than not. I figure it’s other people’s turn.”

He looked at me a moment, seeing, probably, my regret and my sadness.

“It’s first-come, first served, not rationed,” he pointed out. I said nothing. “Daniel, when you want something, try to get it. The worst that can happen is you won’t get it.”

I know a Teaching when I hear one, a principle I am supposed to remember.

“In that case,” I asked, “can I come with you to the Island?” I half expected him to say no. I knew he knew I wanted to go, and I knew him perfectly capable of encouraging me to ask for something I couldn’t have, just as an exercise. And I knew I couldn’t expect his attention and company forever. As with the dance, other people deserved their turn.

“Yes, you can,” he told me. “But why?”

“Why?” I echoed. Should I feel hurt?

“No, not why do you want to come, that’s obvious—why is coming to the Island this year part of your education? Make up something plausible.”

“Um, so that I can bring Steve? He needs an intensive exploration of a beautiful place unconnected with his daily life. It’s a sort of test for him.”

“Tell Steve to pack his bags. Talk to Sharon about arranging rides and campsites.”

“Uh, Charlie?”

“Hmm?”

“How ethical is it to draw Steve into this?”

“It’s fine. Because you’re right—he needs to go to the Island.” I must have given him a funny look, because he continued, “Daniel, make the thing you want the solution to other problems.”

And that, too, I realized, was a Teaching.

Mastery Year 2: Part 3: Beltane

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

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

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

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

The trees are having a merry May Day, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You look silly anyway."

"That's true."

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

"Always and forever," I said.

Mastery Year 2: Part 2: Post 4: Returning

Steve is back. Sort of. And he has Sean. But Sarah isn't here, and he won't say where she is. He won't say much of anything, which is why I said he's only sort of here. He's barely talking to any of us--though he seems to be spending a lot of time with Greg and Allen, so maybe he's talking to them.

I might wonder why he's back, except that he has classes to teach. Spring classes started up after Ostar, and Steve now has two out of the four that Greg used to teach every spring. Last year, three different allies took Greg's classes, and reportedly were somewhat uninspired, but Steve actually cares about and has expertise in his two--American History of Religion and American History of Dissent. A single ally is teaching the other two. In the almost two weeks Steve was out, Greg subbed for him. I can't help feeling sad that they're not really Greg's classes anymore, like the newer students are missing out, and I suppose they are, but he has earned his retirement. And Steve is, reportedly, very good. Another example of impermanence, I suppose.

But between teaching, caring for the baby--Steve often does both at once, delivering lectures while carrying his sleeping child strapped to his chest--and continuing to work part-time with his law firm, I don't think he's doing anything in the way of learning to deal with the anger that sent him back here. And if I'm supposed to act as his master, I suppose I'm supposed to do something about it, intervene, somehow, or at least make sure he knows what he's doing. But I don't know what to do or say....

I'll have to talk to Charlie about it.

In the meantime, I'm still teaching workshops, although attendance has dropped way down, since regular classes have started up, and I subbed for Charlie when he had his spring cold--that was planned, so I'd been kind of shadowing him, learning to teach those classes, so I'd be ready to step into them. I'm still doing that, in case he gets sick again. There's really not much he does that I can't do, now, other than, of course, being Charlie.

That's the thing about the masters--they teach classes and lead activities and make this college run, but really their primary jobs are simply to be themselves. I keep reminding myself that no matter how much Charlie trains me, he can't teach me how to be Charlie. I've got to be Daniel. And there is a version of me that is a master--and it is that version of mine I have to find. Except I really don't know what that might look like. I've obviously never seen it.

Spring continues, despite the dusting of snow we got yesterday morning. Among the trees the signs are still subtle--the red maples are flowering, but that's about it--and the native grasses are still brown as ever. Much of the greenery is exotic and is therefor off-campus. But Sarah Grimm's team is plowing the fields, the frogs and toads are breeding with gusto, the birds are arguing musically in the trees, and some of the spring wildflowers are up.

It's hard not to feel the warmth as some kind of victory.

Mastery Year 1: Part 8: Post 3: Sight

Hi, all,

I’m continuing my series of catch-up posts about storylines I didn’t adequately cover during the past year, but want to continue over the next. Most of these have, inevitably, been info dumps, but today’s post will be mostly narrative, because there is a single scene that nicely encapsulates most of the difficulty that my friend, Ebony, tackled her first year back—and largely triumphed over. I would have liked to tell the story of how she triumphed, of how she got to a place where she was able, by the beginning of the second year of her candidacy, to begin moving forward again. But, failing that, since I did fail that, this scene alone will do.

It was within the first week of our return, perhaps the day after Brigit, and I was walking across the Great Hall, for some reason (when I write these accounts, I often make up this type of lost detail, to provide the illusion that I’m writing about fresh memories). The Mansion was mostly deserted, most people being in some sort of workshop or orientation activity being held in the Dining Hall—but there were two people over by the couches, talking: Allen and Ebony.

I hadn’t had much chance to talk to either of them yet, since getting back, so I angled on over towards them, and got pretty close before I heard enough of their conversation to understand it was private. And by that time Allen, at least, knew I had heard, and it seemed wrong to just walk away and pretend I hadn’t.

They were arguing, or, rather, Ebony was arguing with Allen. Her voice was raised, and I came in on the middle of her reciting a long list of problems that had apparently occurred because Allen had neglected something. He, characteristically, was not arguing back, he just half-sat on the back of the couch, his hands clasped loosely on his thigh, listening attentively. A stranger would have thought him working, quite professionally, with a therapy client, but to me, who knew him well, something in the way he held his head—pulled back, ever-so-slightly—and some hint of a wince around his eyes, suggested he was deeply uncomfortable.

“I did try,” he said calmly, when she let him get a word in.

“You tried badly,” she asserted. “And I needed better from you.”

Allen and I made eye-contact over Ebony’s shoulder. Of course she didn’t know I was there, yet (Ebony doesn’t really do the compensating-with-heightened-awareness-of-her-remaining-senses thing) and I must have looked kind of frantic trying to figure out how to deal with the situation I’d walked myself into, an unintentional eavesdropper.

“Oh, hello, Daniel,” said Allen, resolving at least part of my problem. Ebony spun to face me, shocked.

“You heard,” she stated.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Some of it. I didn’t mean to.”

She stared at me for a few seconds—or, at least she faced me for a few seconds—and then turned towards Allen and then back towards me.

“This is going to become one of your stories, isn’t it?” she accused. “Fine. You tell him.” She meant that Allen should tell me what we’d been talking about, as she didn’t want to just then. She spun on her heel and stomped off towards the Front Office, though her melodramatic exit was somewhat spoiled when she nearly collided with the door-frame. She had misplaced her cane again.

I had a reputation for absorbing and remembering news and gossip about other people, though I never passed it on lightly and hardly ever passed it on at all. I liked, and still like, obviously, to know what’s going on with people. Over the years, most people, most of the time, have drawn comfort from knowing that I bear witness to things. Occasionally, there are sudden, resentful exceptions.

“Now I don’t know whether to ask you to tell me or not,” I said, turning to Allen. “Normally, she’d want me to know, so she could talk to me about it. Unless something has changed in the last four years?”

Remember, Ebony graduated the year before I did. I was frankly surprised to find her returning with me—I would have thought that if she was going to return, she would have done it the year before.

“I don’t know,” admitted Allen, looking after her. Then he turned towards me. “I’ll tell you, but not for her. For me.”

It was the first time Allen had so obviously sought support from me, as from an equal, and it surprised me, but I didn’t overtly react. He climbed over the back of the couch and slid into its seat, rather like a little boy might, and I walked around and took a seat beside him. He looked suddenly very tired.

“You remember when I warned you and why?” he began.

“You mean just before I graduated?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, you told me to be careful, because I’d been living in a very supportive atmosphere and things were going to change.”

He nodded.

“Did you believe me?”

“No, I had no idea what you were talking about.”

“Was I right?” A hint of of a smile played on his face.

“Of course,” I told him. “I got about a year in to graduate school and realized I’d forgotten to have a life, since no one was there to remind me. I think I noticed a few years earlier than I would have, because of your warning, though. I was able to start correcting the problem.”

He laughed a little, almost shyly.

“Well, Ebony needed a similar warning, only more so. She’d never really talked about transability* before she came here, and when she did talk about it with us, we all pretty much believed her. I knew she needed to prepare coping mechanisms for dealing with a world where most people wouldn’t….”

“But you knew she wouldn’t believe you,” I finished for him.

“Exactly. It’s very difficult to anticipate a genuine change of context like that. But I couldn’t depend on her just ignoring me if she wasn’t ready to hear it, the way you did, the way most students I decide to warn do. I mean, she wanted to go to graduate school so she could teach visual art. She was walking into a lion’s den, and you know how she would have reacted had I told her so.”

“She would have thought you didn’t have faith in her.”

“Or worse, that I’d never believed her in first place, that I wanted her to capitulate and just be blind. That is one of the things being a magician has taught me, Daniel—the mechanics of perception are the same for both illusion and truth, that’s why we need reason. And perception, even perception of the truth, is easily shattered.” As he spoke, he made a large, foil-wrapped chocolate coin appear out of nowhere in his fingers, then he made it vanish again—and then, with a movement of his wrist, he showed me where he’d put his “vanished” coin, deliberately destroying the trick for me. He smiled, sadly.

“So, you said nothing?” It didn’t seem like him.

“I encouraged her not to go into absence initially, to stay in active contact with me for a while. I couldn’t warn her, but I hoped to be able to catch her when she fell.”

“What happened?”

“She fell, and I couldn’t catch her. She was trying to explain to her college what she wanted to do, so she could get the classes she needed, the accommodations she needed...I’d been trying to validate her, but I can’t replace an entire supportive community, particularly not over the phone once or twice a week. She was getting discouraged and...losing ground, somehow. So I decided to be honest with her and hope she understood it later. I told her she should just go ahead and learn to teach art to blind students, like her school wanted her to. I mean, a teaching credential is a teaching credential. She could come back here to learn how to make the professional transition.”

“And she didn’t take it well?”

He gave me an eloquent look.

“She hung up on me, and hadn’t talked to me since, until today. Now, it seems she blames me for not preparing her better. Which, of course, I didn’t. She’s right as far as it goes. But how could I have done any differently? What else could I have said?”

“Well, she’s here now,” I pointed out. “She’s following the plan you outlined, in a way. So, maybe she did hear you, eventually, as I did?”

“Maybe. But, you know, of course I sponsored** her return, but I don’t know if she’s going want to work with me. I don’t know if we’re going to ever be friends again.”

Some students, clearly, are just students to the masters—people they care about out of professional duty and strictly in a professional way. But, to varying degrees, they all also make friends with some of the people they teach. Sometimes that friendship means the two cease to be master and student, as in Allen’s decision to tell me his troubles as he might to any good friend, but sometimes, instead, the teaching relationship itself deepens. Think of Charlie and Sarah, or Greg and Karen. That’s what Ebony had become to Allen.

“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking of the real vulnerability the masters take on and almost never acknowledge. Particularly I was thinking of Charlie, who had just spoken to me recently, for the first time in years, and who had seemed unsure whether I'd forgiven him for his more difficult teachings--and was willing to risk alienating me all over again, for the sake of giving me the help I'd asked him for.

Again Allen gave me that sad, ironic, eloquent look.

“It came down to a choice,” he said. “Which is more important to me, that I love her—and act like it—or that she continue to love me?”

“That sounds very difficult,” I said.

He almost shrugged, a kind of dismissive twitch.

“I probably could have handled it better,” he acknowledged. “Said something better, done something different. Strictly speaking, she’s right, I did let her down. But I don’t know what else I could have said or done.” He looked at me again. “Daniel, there are some things I just can’t see.”

* “Transability” is Ebony’s term for her paradoxical identification as sighted, despite not being able to see. She likens her situation to that of transgender people.

** To return as a candidate, a student must have a master vouch for the student’s ability to benefit from the program. Usually that master is the one who was most involved during the student’s novitiate, and who then goes on to guide the student’s candidacy, as Charlie did for me. But the returning candidate is free to work with someone else instead.

Mastery Year 1: Part 6: Post 1: Mabon

Happy belated Mabon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie sat down next to me. 

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

I blushed.

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

I relaxed a little.

“I heard you talked to Allen.”

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

“Welcome back,” he said.