Mastery Year 3: Sixth Interlude

Hello, Daniel-of-2019, here.

It's been a warm, mostly dry fall--climate change becoming ever more obvious, more ominous--except the day-to-day realities of our lives here are going well. After months of relapse and hit-or-miss treatment, Sarah Kelly's mental health seems that have stabilized again, a great relief. It's as though everyone can finally breathe again. We've also gotten some very good news that I'm not going to tell you about quite yet, but I will tell you.

My story is drawing to a close; we've entered the realm of Lasts, last Samhain post, last Yule post, and so on. I will take my narrative up to the point where I received my green ring, and then there will be a few more posts to catch you up on some of the things that have happened since. Then I will fall silent--except that I may set about recasting my story in book form.

I'm kind of sad--I've been working on this blog for the better part of a decade, now, and it's been an important decade for me. My daughter's birth, for one. The re-emergence of the school as a community, for another. But all things end.

All things end. That is the message of Samhain, I suppose, for while endings are followed by, and to some extent cause or allow, beginnings, there is a point in time where the bereft doesn't want to hear that, where hope and comfort and it's-all-for-the-best just sound like meaningless platitudes. My Dad would say Good Friday must have its due, before you can get to Easter. Charlie would say be here now.

I'm going to keep this note short. I'm preoccupied with endings and losses today, and yet I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of autumn, which has finally peaked this past week. "We are the flowers' threnody," a line of poetry I remember from somewhere, based on the mistaken notion that flowers die upon being visited by bees (the truth is more complicated), and evoking the idea that the bees are simultaneously the cause of and the beautiful mourning for the death of the flowers, as though beauty could in fact be both. The yellow and orange leaves are the year's threnody.

Be here now.

-best, D.

Oops

So, the week before last, I posted the wrong post.

The issue is that I often work offline in a Word document, then cut-and-paste into Blogger and delete the document. But since I'm in the habit of deleting after I finish, if for some reason I don't finish, I often don't delete. Two weeks ago I accidentally typed the beginning of the Mabon post into an abandoned draft of the Lammas post. Later, when I went back to finish, I found what looked like a finished post already, and I was in a hurry, so I went ahead and posted it without reading it through.

I skipped posting entirely last week because I kept hoping to come up with some way to avoid posting this apology, but I never did think of anything. So here I am.

Sorry.

Here is the missing Mabon post.

-D.

Happy Mabon!

I don’t feel very celebratory at the moment, but of course that’s no reason not to wish everyone a happy holiday. And maybe it’s appropriate that Mabon feel like a mixed bag, since it is the equinox. No, nothing bad has happened, I’m just feeling glum.

It is Fall, now, though I have to admit it doesn’t yet look like it. The forest is still green, the air is still warm—even hot, some days, though not nearly as hot as a month or two ago. But under the green is a yellow cast, a hint of change, and the birds are heading south—some are staging to migrate, others have already left. As with spring, which is present from the first hint of growth, Fall is present from the first hint of preparation for the cold. I didn’t used to understand this. I see things more deeply now, I suppose.

Every year (except one) that I've been here, the question at Mabon has always been whether to do the Gratitude Circle or the Thankyou Doll build, these being two of the many optional activities of the day that happen to occur at the same time, at least most years. The reason, I've always guessed, is that Kit co-leads the Gratitude Circle and Charlie co-leads the Thankyou Doll build, and Charlie and Kit have a mutual allergy. Something has to be scheduled in conflict, since there are too many events to have them all sequentially, and since Charlie wouldn't attend Kit's event anyway, and Kit wouldn't attend Charlie's scheduling them opposite each other is at least less frustrating for them than if either had to give up attending something they really wanted.

And frankly, I think Kit probably likes the idea of forcing students to pick between her and Charlie.

This year, I chose the Thankyou Doll build. Partly I wanted to hand out with Charlie, and partly it's that I really don't know a lot of the novices anymore, and it seemed like it might be weird to stand in the Gratitude Circle with a bunch of near strangers. Of course, you could argue that's exactly why I should have gone....Maybe it's something Allen said to me a while back, I'm amphibious--I'm mid-way, emotionally and mentally, between being a student and being a master, and while I no longer feel comfortable treating the novices like peers, I don't really know how else to treat them, yet. I feel like a fraud when I act too much like a master, and I don't know what the intermediate thing really is. So I don't talk to a lot of them at all, outside of class. I don't want to stand in the Gratitude Circle with them.

The Thankyou Doll--it's been a while since I explained this. The Doll is made out of produce from our campus farm, and sometimes a few wild plants make an appearance, too. Once assembled, the Doll is taken to the center of the farm and woken up in a simple ceremony; everyone stands around saying wake up! wake up! and such, and then the youngest person present leans down to listen and hear the Doll whisper that it is awake. When it does, the young person says so. I've always wondered what, if anything, these young people hear, but I've never asked any of them.

Then the Doll is taken on a tour of the farm, and all the places where its parts grew are pointed out to it. The Doll later attends the Paleolithic Dinner that night, and everyone in attendance gives the Doll a small something from their own plate. The Doll, and its plate of offerings, sits in state in the Great Hall for some weeks until Charlie and whoever else wants to return it to the center of the farm and bury it with proper ceremony.

It's a fun activity, and a good choice for children, so most of the sprouts usually attend.

This year was no different. We had my nephews and niece and all the sprouts younger than them, including Sean--he's still too young to wander around by himself, but Steve Bees wanted to hang out with Charlie, too.

Sarah brought a huge box full of ingredients and a box of toothpicks and spread everything out on an old sheet on the ground. We built the Doll out of potatoes and turnips and carrots and other items and sat it on a silver tray, all of us working together, sharing ideas, and solving design problems--like what to do when the Doll kept falling over, or how to make facial features that wouldn't fall off or look creepy.

And when we woke the Doll, Sean did the honors. He listened for a long time, and then when his dad asked him "Can you hear the Doll say it's awake?" he nodded. He's at the age where he can talk, but not in front of strangers.

After the tour, when everyone was dispersing, Charlie took me aside and casually asked me what sort of event I might like to run on Mabon.

Of course, Charlie never actually says anything casual. He always has a reason for speaking, because if he doesn't have a good reason, he'd rather listen to birds or wind, or possibly someone reciting poetry. I knew what he was up to--either spurring me to take another step towards thinking like a master, or checking to see whether I had taken the step on my own already. Most of the masters, and some allies, either lead or co-lead something on this day, after all. But not all of them do.

"None," I replied, without hesitation. I'd thought about it already.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Because Mabon isn't missing anything. I could take over an existing event if someone had to, and I'd put my own stamp on it whether I meant to or not, but I don't need to start anything new because nothing new needs to be started. It's complete."

And Charlie grunted and appreciative acknowledgment. He didn't need to say anything else. Neither did I. I learned that by watching him.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 3: All Gone to Look for America

Steve's grandfather is dying. Of course he and Sarah and Sean had to go, but it's a long trip, raising the specter of sleep deprivation, challenging childcare, disrupted schedules, and possibly missed medication doses. Sarah's health has seemed a bit vulnerable lately--her doctors want to change her meds but they're not sure yet how--and she was concerned that the trip might trigger a relapse.

For a while she considered just not going, but she's close to the grandfather, too. The candidates' group discussed the matter (it's really the first time we've functioned as a real-world problem-solving body, not a college class) and decided that Sarah should go, but that one of us should go, too. That way, Steve could focus on making sure his wife ate and slept and took her pills on time while someone else entertained Sean and kept the boy fed, hydrated, and in clean diapers.

Somehow, I was chosen.

So I cleared my schedule, and got on a bus--and I stayed on that bus, or inside one or another bus terminal, for almost three days.

You'd think that inside Bus World, as I came to think of it, would be the most prosaic, least magical place imaginable. Buses are dirty, most bus stations are worse, most of the people one meets in that world are crabby, and basically you're all hurtling across America in a fossil-fuel-powered, air-conditioned box while surviving on fast food purchased at truck stops. It is a world of strangers, most of whom have probably never heard of sustainability or magic or deliberate communities founded on kindness and wonder. And yet, on our last night on the bus, while Steve and Sarah slept leaning on each other and Sean slept cuddled in my lap, the man sitting next to me started talking.

He told me this long story, beginning with the fact that he had once had a wife who also had schizophrenia, and that they had both known she couldn't handle the stress of living closely with someone (why not? Sarah seems to draw strength from living with Steve--but of course I did not ask), but they had married anyway because they loved each other and wanted to honor that love while they could. And a year later, still loving each other, they divorced so she could seek the solitude she needed.

The story went on from there. Much of it was convoluted, and most of it was sad. Some of it involved guilt, shame, and uncertainty. But the man seemed to need to talk, and so I listened. Finally, as dawn started to color a world that had got flat and agricultural and arid over night, he slept.

I felt as though I had been treated like a priest. And I suppose I had been.

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 4

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2019, here.

After much consideration and consultation, I've decided to go ahead and tell you why I've missed several posts over the last few months (and could miss others going forward):

Sarah Kelly, Steve Bees wife, has relapsed--you may recall she has schizophrenia. She had been having problems with the side effects of her meds, and since she was doing very well, she and her doctors decided to try transitioning off anti-psychotic meds. That works, sometimes. They say that about half of all schizophrenics who go off meds relapse, but the other way to look at it is that half do just fine--and some people who stay on meds relapse anyway. For a while Sarah was alright--and then suddenly she wasn't.

And this time she has fought going back on the meds.

The scary thing is that a sizable minority of people who relapse don't respond to further treatment, and some who do respond never get back to where they were before the relapse. Acute episodes appear to make the disease worse.

Steve is beside himself, of course, but he's using what I taught him during his candidacy, maintaining his connection to the natural world, and it seems to help him stay calmer and better focused. What I taught him isn't all of it, he has other resources, too, but it's part of the package.

But it's not that the peace and serenity of nature help him de-stress. Not exactly. See, the thing is, while many people feel peaceful and serene out of doors among green, living things, that's not the same as nature itself being peaceful and serene. The living world itself is often ugly and unfair and indifferent. Most of what we think is its value for mental health is actually something projected onto it by humans.

Real nature provides no answer; it just asks better questions.

Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Post 3: Ug

I'm ill. Really quite ill. I haven't been this sick for years, and it's really, seriously, unpleasant. The worst of it is Charlie has the same bug at the same time, so I'm missing an opportunity to sub for him. I'm not sure who he got. Probably Raven--though it might actually be June. Come to think of it, I haven't seen her since this morning. Where is she?

Ug. I don't want to be awake and I can't sleep. When I get up I get dizzy and nauseated. I think I have a fever, but nobody around here has anything as mundane as a thermometer. There's all sorts of things I should be doing--Steve and I were supposed to go walking today, I have tutoring appointments in the afternoon--I can't even read or I get sea-sick.

I'm pretty sure I have a sinus infection.

So, I'm lying here in my boxer shorts on top of the covers, sitting up sometimes to drink the tea someone brought me (cedar, licorice, and ginger, with honey, supposedly medicinal) and then flopping back down. The balcony door is open. The day outside is warm. The breeze from outside washes over me. It feels nice.

The Mansion is silent, except that sometimes someone speaks in the distance or Sean cries. He's sick, too, poor boy. I can hear frogs and birds singing outside.

I must go back to sleep.

Mastery Year 3: Part 2: Post 1: Ostar

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

Happy Ostar!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie looked at me for a few seconds.

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

Mastery Year 3: Interlude 1.

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

I'm making this my interlude week, even though it seems a little early, because I've decided I like posting the sabbat posts before the big day, not after--like how Christmas movies mostly come on before Christmas. It's a matter of anticipation.

For the first time in a long time, I find myself having to issue a clarification.

Reading over what I wrote last week...I described Sarah Kelly as sometimes seeming "crazy." I think I did use the scare-quotes, I was trying to indicate a subtlety of language that might have gotten lost. I meant that she sometimes acted in a a way that prompted me to think "she's crazy," probably because the bizarreness of her behavior frightened and confused me. I didn't mean that she actually was all the things that word implies.

"Crazy" is a pejorative, an insult based on the assumption that nobody wants to be compared to a mentally ill person. Of course, it insults mentally ill people in the process. So, first of all, I probably shouldn't use words, even in scare-quotes, that require me to explain the following week that I used insulting language but didn't mean it. I'm sorry.

Second of all, the popular ideas about what mental illness looks like are all wrong, or at least, I've never seen any of the several people I know who have such diagnoses act anything like what people do when they mimic mental illness as a joke--you know, maniacal laughter, exaggerated reactions to goofy hallucinations, all of that. So when I say that sometimes Sarah acted "crazy," I'm not only being insulting, I'm also not doing a very good job as a writer.

That word doesn't tell you what I mean.

I've never seen Sarah react to a hallucination, though she's told me about some of them after the fact. I have witnessed others' reactions--a large minority of the school population had them. The reasons, in a psychiatric sense, probably varied. Some had a history of hallucinogen use and had "flashbacks." Others had "natural" hallucinations for one reason or another. Interestingly, many did not define it as a problem but called it clairvoyance--the difference between a vision and a hallucination is complex and debatable and I'm not going to get into it now, except that there are people who see things and appear perfectly sane.  Other people see things and don't.

Usually when someone sees something they know it's not real in the normal sense and don't react overtly, except possibly by seeming briefly distracted. They might react emotionally to what they see--the vision might be funny, confusing, pretty, frightening, or whatever else--but it's the way people react to emotional thoughts or memories. It's not like people ducking to avoid invisible birds or that sort of thing.

What Sarah did that frightened me into thinking of her as "crazy" was to seem subtly irrational. The "weird" or "off" behavior I  noticed before she was hospitalized didn't come back, but sometimes when she spoke she would sound like she was speaking from inside the illogic of a dream.  More often she was simply easily distracted or confused. I don't know how much of it was her meds and how much was the disease. It never looked goofy, free-spirited, or fun--she is all those things, but only when she's healthy.

I  also said she couldn't be much of a mother--that, too, needs clarification. She couldn't be much of a care-giver, not for the first several years of Sean's life, not so much because of the dream-logic issue, though that didn't help, but more because she couldn't handle a lot of stress. But of course she was very much a mother in the other sense. She spent a lot of time with him, sharing affection and attention, while Steve and various friends and family took care of feeding, cleaning, safety, and all of that. Sean has no doubt whatever who his mother is.

Anyway, I wanted to clear these things up.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 1: Post 5: Progress and Lack of.

Sean Kelly, Steve's son, is almost a year old, now. He can't walk, yet, unless he holds on to something, but he's been highly mobile on four legs for a while. He can't talk, either, but knows some sign language and can make himself understood by signing, pointing, and grunting. He's always been a quiet baby, anyway. He is a happy, observant, engaging child, with a somewhat unfortunate habit of breaking things to see how they work.

He'll get something apart, look up at a nearby adult, and squeal with delight in his own accomplishment, and it is impossible to be angry with him.

Sarah Kelly is living on campus most of the time, now, though her meds aren't really stable, yet. Some weeks she seems frankly "crazy," other weeks she seems just tired or depressed. For a while she was entirely normal except she was shaking all the time. She can't work--she can't even be much of a mother to Sean, yet--but she hopes to be able to in the future, and is doing what she calls "pre-working," doing research on what law and policy applies to mental health, building relationships with people involved in the "Mad Pride" movement, which I'd never heard of before, but clearly she intends to become a leader of it.

Steve had never heard of Mad Pride, either, but now he is becoming well-informed--just another axis of injustice for him to feel angry and overwhelmed about.

He and I have a rule--no talking about politics or law when we're outside exploring. No talking, in fact, about anything other than what we're observing around us. I'm training him to notice. I'm training him to pay attention. I'm teaching him enough natural history that what he observes becomes meaningful to him. And he's mentioned that now he looks forward to our walks together as a kind of break. Sometimes some problem that was bothering him before we went out resolves itself when we come back--it just doesn't seem so intractable anymore. He's said sometimes he'll be working off campus and something will start to feel like too much, so he'll go outside for a bit.

He's making progress. I feel like I'm able to help.

Which is a nice change, since I  feel pretty helpless, otherwise. Eddie is still off-campus and will be for a few more weeks--we offered to make him a place to stay on the first floor of the Mansion, so he could avoid the stairs, but he declined. The yearling who was hospitalized last week has formally withdrawn from school. For Allen to have to find a bed in a psychiatric hospital for someone twice in one year--I haven't talked to him about it, yet, but it must be hard.

It snowed again last night, but then shifted over to sleet and ice before freezing again. The world is an odd, hard, spider-web gray, and winter is starting to seem very long.