Mastery Year 2: Part 1: Brigid

Happy Brigid! A new year, a new group of yearlings, several newly-awarded Green Rings, and, best of all, I think my wife is going to talk to me again!

I exaggerate; June never stopped talking to me, but I think she considered it. She's still angry.

She's angry with me, of course, for not telling her about the Ordeal which, in case you have forgotten, involves an about-to-graduate student being more or less kidnapped and stuck in a dark room alone for three days. Of course I didn't tell her; for the Ordeal to work, it has to be a surprise.

It's not hazing, it's the thing that hazing is a debased echo of--an initiatory experience. The word "experience" here is key. It's not an initiatory ritual or an initiatory event, it's an experience, and the experience does not occur if you're not in the right head-space for it. Not all forms of initiation require surprise, but many do. You can't be braced against the change you're about to experience.

Then, too, you have to decide real fast whether you trust your teachers when one of them pops a black-out bag over your head.

The thing that separates what we do from what many college fraternities and such do is that our initiation is not meant to be unpleasant or degrading. The person undergoing initiation is always reminded that they are free to quit, and they are encouraged to do so if they run into any sort of physical or mental trouble. They are closely monitored, offered plenty of food and water and opportunity to sleep. They are asked to trust, never to submit.

And yet being taken out of your day-to-day life and hidden away for an undetermined about of time is no joke. And to have it done by the masters--who have always obviously been up to something, that's part of the point--while to realize that your spouse is complicit is something else again.

She must be wondering whose side I'm on. She'll realize eventually that I am on the side of the masters and that now, so is she--that's what the initiation experience is for.

It's not as if I wasn't worried. It's one thing to go through the Ordeal yourself and afterwards to know that it doesn't hurt, it isn't scary (except for that first startling moment under the black-out bag, in the seconds before you hear their reassurances). It's not actually all that much different than a long trip on a Greyhound bus, except there's no view and the toilet doesn't stink. But it's quite another thing to watch your wife leave your dorm-room to go to a meeting and to know she thinks she's coming back in an hour--and she's wrong. And you don't say anything. To spend those three days, however you spend them and whatever you're doing, periodically casting your attention to your wife, knowing that at that very moment she is in the dark, sworn not to speak, and she doesn't know where she is or when she's getting out. To spend all the hours of that final day constantly looking at your watch thinking ok, now they're going to get her. Now she's seeing daylight again for the first time in the wing of the stage in the Chapel. Now the sun has set and she's still in the wing with all the other new initiates, in the dark again, waiting for the ceremony to start.

It's warm down in the basement, where the Ordeal rooms are, but it's cold in the wing of the Chapel.

Then I was back in the audience, sitting in a cold, metal folding chair in a dim room that smelled of wool and honey, and the little bell was ringing, ding! ding! ding! as the masters processed in carrying their as yet unlit candles. I was sitting with Ebony and Eddie and Aidan (it was his seventh birthday), as I often have before, but for only the second time in my experience of Brigid in that hall, Kayla wasn't sitting with me. She was waiting in the wing with June to graduate.

Was the Ordeal a surprise for Kayla? She certainly knew the rooms were down there, because that's where she went to be out of the way when she thought she was dying but was actually giving birth to Aidan when she was twelve. Did she know what those rooms were used for? She learned a lot of the school's secrets, just being a kid on campus, and of course secrecy is mostly maintained using the principles of stage magic--and when you're not part of the target audience, frequently the illusion does not work. I never once saw anyone being escorted to their Ordeal the whole time I was a novice, but this year, not being the target of the illusion anymore, I saw three of them without even trying to look. So, I imagine Kayla had seen some of them, too, over the years, and probably asked questions about them. Direct questions always receive honest (though sometimes legalistically narrow) answers around here. So maybe she knew.

On the other hand, would she really have asked all the right questions? Might the masters have evaded her, at least partly, in case she grew up to want to join the school? I don't know.

In any case, watching that twenty-year-old woman walk across the stage, a young but not prodigious college graduate, and thinking about where she was and why eight years earlier, was quite something. Almost as big a deal to me as watching June walk across the stage and knowing that the period of our being on different sides of a divide, of it being part of my job to keep secrets from her and hold distance from her, was over. We're both initiates, now, both entitled to wear the brown uniform, and I knew that starting that night, and from here on in, we'd share the same room.

The thing about uniforms--of course, novices wear white uniforms with black cloaks, candidates and allies without the Green Ring wear brown except for white belts, and people with the Ring wear all brown. So the symbolism of dress is important, here. When you graduate, one of the masters takes off your cloak and underneath is the outfit you choose to symbolize your life after the school. At least one person almost every year is naked and everybody laughs, and otherwise you get everything from suits to graduation gowns to jeans. When it was my turn I wore cargo pants, a turtleneck, and a flannel, which was my guess as to what I might be wearing in grad school (a good guess, as it happened). June hadn't told me her plans. She ended up wearing the same brown uniform she'll be entitled to wear every other day she spends on campus, unless and until she gets her ring.

"Because I don't think I'm leaving," she explained, later.

Afterwards, we watched Andy and Veronica receive their rings--I found Andy's graduation very moving, too, considering where he started and how far he has come--and then the masters processed away again, to do whatever it is they do on Brigid Night.

But I hadn't gotten a good look when the newly arrived candidates stood to introduce themselves at the beginning of the ceremony. I was sitting fr back and couldn't see or hear them well, I could only gather that there were two of them, a man and a woman. Afterwards, I sought them out to see who it was and found that the returnees are Raven G. and Steve.

Steve Bees is back.

Mastery Year 1: Interlude 8

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here.

So, later this week is Brigid, the day we traditionally started a new school year. I'll write the Brigid post next week, after the fact. In the here and now, I'm busily helping to prepare for our community's Brigid celebration the first full one we've held since the school closed.

What I mean by "full" is that all the students will assemble for the induction of new students. Yes, we have students again--twenty of them, five new this year. It's not like it used to be. Aside from not having a residential campus, we're not an accredited school, so rather than teaching a lot of courses ourselves, we direct students in meeting their requirements for us through other schools. That's part of why we have fewer students--we simply have less to offer.

As I may have mentioned, most of what we do now is give public workshops and talks. Only a small minority of our regular attendees realize we have something more and pass the entrance test, but some do. And so, we, as a community, are growing again.

Since the election, we have gotten very serious about maintaining a community where certain things are important, so that none of us get burnt out or complacent.

So, to wrap up the catching -up process I've spent this January on, I want to talk about the candidates' group.

Candidates, you may recall, were (and someday, will be again) those students who have graduated, completed Absence, and returned to become masters. Not all masters ever have a leadership role in the school, but only masters can. The mastery program isn't accredited, and indeed a lot of us spent our Absence getting masters' degrees elsewhere--I did, Rick did, Ollie did, Ebony did--you don't need a masters' degree to be a master, but you need to take mastery seriously. If the area of your mastery in healing, you need to go to med school, or its equivalent. You can't just be a master because you say so.

The candidates form a distinct group because there are only ever a few at a time, because they have so much in common, and because they all take two main classes together, Candidate's Seminar and Chaplain's Seminar, every semester. So we get pretty close.

Except that I never got especially close with Oak (though I liked and respected him) or Veronica, and Veery and I continued to have nothing to say to each other, despite having dated for several weeks, years earlier, and in fact I did not talk to any of the three, except in an incidental way ("please pass the salt") the entire year, outside of our shared classes.

Jasmine and I started to become friends, years ago, when we partnered to win to Ostar egg hunt, and I started teaching her about birds and she started teaching me about photography. But somehow our incipient friendship fizzled, and we drifted apart. When I returned for my candidacy (she had returned the year before), we picked up where we had left off, as I started attending her photography classes (as did Ebony) and, once I started teaching, she attended my classes in natural history and so forth. It was (and, to a lesser extent, remains) an exchange of skills, not a deep friendship, but we get along with.

And then there's Eddie, who returned in order to deepen his work with therapy dogs into some kind of spiritual practice and ministry.

It wasn't immediately clear to anyone--even his master, Joy--how he was supposed to accomplish that deepening. Usually, you develop competency in several areas as a novice, then as a candidate, pick one area to get really, really good. Developing that aspect of mastery--skill and the ability to teach--then serves as a focus for developing those other aspect of mastery that are harder to define. But Eddie was already very, very good at training and placing therapy dogs. He wanted more. But what?

He spent the first four or five months of his candidacy teaching workshops on campus and volunteering at area animal shelters. Then Joy started helping him design and market a series of classes for outside participants and their dogs, such as basic obedience, behavior correction, and agility training. During his Absence, Eddie had worked as a dog groomer and a vet tech (he's always done most of his work with therapy dogs for free), and Joy wanted him to have more professional options. She also helped him start the process of getting professional certification as a trainer, which isn't required but does help. But all of that was secondary to what he'd come back to do.

I think it was in early November--after Samhain--when Joy finally gave Eddie two directly relevant long-term assignments.

The first was to do a series of six-week studies on people who have diagnoses consistent with having therapy dogs or some other kind of service animal, like a seeing eye dog. The idea was a kind of sociological study of the need for service animals, though I think it was obvious from the beginning that the scholarly nature of the assignment was a cover--yes, he had to do the study, but Eddie was actually being assigned to get to know potential clients on a deeper, more personal level, and the idea of doing research simply gave him a socially appropriate context through which to get to know people.

At the beginning of the study the person had to be considering getting a service animal of some kind, but not have one yet. Eddie had to spend at least five days with each research target over the course of the study, had to conduct at least two formal interviews, and write a report. In payment for the person's willingness to be a research subject, Eddie also had to devote at least six days to doing some sort of service for the person that didn't directly involve dogs.

He found his first several participants by talking to local vets, animal shelters, and doctors and therapists for humans. His first "subject" was a middle-aged man who had gone blind as a complication of mismanaged diabetes. Eddie simply became the man's driver. By Brigid, Eddie had begun his second study, working with an artist who had debilitating anxiety. For her, he ran errands and did yard work, service that had nothing to do with her disability, she just appreciated the help.

Joy's other assignment for Eddie sounded harder--it was designed to sound impossible, actually.

He had to fully train at least one therapy dog who, in Eddie's expert opinion, initially seemed completely ill-suited to therapy work or actually wholly untrainable. That is, he had to go look for hopeless dogs, try to train them anyway, and succeed at least once, before earning his ring.

The tallness of the order, its sheer craziness, made him grin.

By Brigid, he had begun looking for hopeless dogs, but had not yet begun to train any.

There. I think we are all caught up now.

Mastery Year 1: Part 8: Post 2: Introductions

Hello, I'm continuing playing catch-up, delivering an info dump on he people and stories I neglected over the past year. This week, I want to talk about the people I didn't introduce as "new characters," but should have, especially as I'll have reason to mention them next year.

When I returned, there were no students I recognized except Kayla, though some of the fourth-years remembered having seen me graduate at their first Brigid. Of course, the other fourth years saw me, too, but evidently I made no impression on them. Over the course of the year, I got to know the entire campus, at least well enough to say hi to, mostly because I had them in one or another of my workshops and classes. Some I got to know very well.

Two, besides June, were one-hit wonders, meaning they spent one the minimum year-and-a-day on campus. Of course June spent a lot of time with them, since they shared not only all the activities required for yearlings, but also all the activities required for graduating students. She became friends with them, so I did, too. But I appear to have missed the boat on telling their tales, as they disappeared into Absence at Brigid. Neither came back as candidates, by the way. One got back in touch a few years later, admitting she'd given up on becoming a candidate and wanted to visit. The other we never heard from again at all. It sometimes happened that way.

There were twenty other yearlings, half of whom were either in June's dorm or her therapy group, and another four were in my dorm, so we spent a fair amount of time with them, had breakfast with them often, and so forth. Some of the others I sought out deliberately, for one reason or another, or they sought me out.

Three, out of the yearling group, stick out especially strongly in memory.

There was Diana, an extraordinarily little woman of interesting contradictions. For starters, she was a Christian creationist and had a bachelor's degree in botany. She had started drifting away fro the strict pathways prescribed by her church, and had taken up the Tarot, and even some ceremonial magic. She seemed to be groping her way towards a vision of the cosmos similar to Joy's, in which the Trinity is gender-balanced, Jesus and Mary Magdalen are married, and angels assist humans in learning magic. But she wasn't quite there, yet. She felt a powerful spiritual connection to the natural world and sought out Charlie to help make sense of it. I've always felt a certain kinship with Charlie's other students.

There was True, another of Charlie's students, and an animist, but Charlie wasn't his spirit-master (no one was, he arrived, unusually, with his spiritual practice entirely intact). Instead, he chose to focus his studies on learning the art of chainsaw sculpture.

And there was Nutmeg--her real name was Megan--a Jewish pagan who accepted Greg as her spirit master, despite his being neither Jewish nor pagan. I got to know her because she became a friend of Ebony's (a self-identified "Jewitch") and thus, eventually, mine.

I made friends with a number of the senior students who were graduating, especially those fourth-years who remembered me, but again my widow for telling those stories has closed, since I won't have occasion to talk about them again in this narrative, and most drifted out of my acquaintance in subsequent years.

Some twenty were senior students who did not graduate but returned for 2008, and I more or less became friends with most of them, though for a few those friendships still lay in the future when the second year of my candidacy began, and there were a number of them with whom I seemed relatively close that first year, but when they returned from wherever they'd spent the winter, they had drifted away from me for reasons I never did understand. Finally, there were a very few I befriended over the year but then cut off personal contact with, for reasons I do understand but am not going to write about. I don't want to give the impression that our little community was entirely free of human foibles.

That leaves some five I am likely to refer to in this coming year:

Acorn, a committed Wiccan nonetheless studying Buddhist meditation with Greg,

Hawk, who was studying falconry with Joy and martial arts with Karen. Hawk has since come out as female, but my story will make little sense if I pretend I knew that was going to happen, so male pronouns it is, for now. "He" always seemed small and elfin, for a man, in a way other men "his" physical size did not. When I learned she'd come out, my only real surprise was that I'd never realized what was, in retrospect, obvious.

Samara, who we called (and still call) Sam, a young and outspoken Wiccan woman who was making ritual implements and religious art with Kit. She also studied the same subjects with Charlie and was the occasion of some flare-ups of the tension between them.

Edna, whom we all called Eddie, though to avoid confusion I'll probably call her Edna here, an intense little woman studying a range of topics all related to her black heritage--Voudou, with an outside master and with Joy's help, self-defense, with Karen, and political philosophy with Greg. Curiously, she chose philosophy as her healing modality, something I'm not sure anyone at the school had done before. No one has done it since.

Freydis, a Heathan woman dedicated to Odin, who worked mostly with Kit. She caused a bit of a fuss that year (her second) when she announced her intention to offer animals in sacrifice, something that is accepted (but not required) in modern Asatru but very much not in Wicca or New Age, which together dominate much of campus culture. People who are fully accepting of Charlie or Joy killing animals were all up in arms over Fredys wanting to do so, simply because of the word "sacrifice." There were some really interesting disccussions of the issue--and some amusing ones--before Freydis won, and Joy trained her in humane slaughter.

In our candidates' group there were, of course, no new students, but I haven't talked about Veronica, Veery, or Oak all year, and they were certainly there. I didn't have much to say about them, though. We seldom interacted outside of our two shared classes.

Ok, info dump over for the time being, but it occurs to me there is one more student whose presence on campus I hardly discussed; me.

To myself I am always just Daniel. To my friends, also, I believe I remain ordinary, in the way that people one likes, cares, about, even admires can be ordinary. Yes, I suppose some of my friends admire me--they have said so, and I don't think they're lying, and I admire them, so why not? But to the new students, those who never knew me before and did not know me well, who and what was I?

It's hard to know for sure, of course, since I can only see me from the inside, but there were glimpses.

There was the day I was sitting at the base of a tree on the edge of the Formal Garden, and I heard the voices of a group of people going by behind me, heading towards the stairs into the Meditation Hall entrance. I turned to watch them and saw half a dozen yearlings (none of the ones I've named above), all walking together in a tight group ad talking about...me.

I debated alerting them to my presence, since obviously they would not have spoke so if they knew I was there, and I opened my mouth to warn them so I would not passively violate their privacy. Then I closed my mouth again. After all, I was in full view of all of them. Had they looked anywhere but at each other or their own feet they would have seen me, and that they didn't could hardly be seen as my fault.

Second, they had intruded on me far more than I'd intruded on them, walking along as they were, talking loudly enough that I could could clearly hear their words some fifty feet away. This was in early June, and their racket made the birds around us stop singing, except for one enterprising robin who sang rather angrily at them from the gutter of the Meditation Hall porch roof. A squirrel, who had been ignoring me, lashed its tail--it was obviously used to humans, and not overly concerned, but resented the intrusion. All of us were utterly ignored. A sudden rebellious anger in me insisted that if you ignore me and my solitude, you deserve to be eavesdropped upon.

What were they saying? Some confused, multivoiced chorus of the following:

"Daniel? He's kind of creepy, isn't he? I mean, he's so quiet, you can't tell what he's thinking. No, I've talked to him, he's a really nice guy. It's not that he's mean, or anything like that, it's just that it seems like he's always watching everything. He notices everything. That's the creepy part. I think it's cool. He's like some magic forest creature. Exactly, that's why you should sign up for some of his classes. I mean, if you find a magic forest creature, don't you want to ask it questions?"

And I smiled. My resolve to not reveal myself intensified. After all, I didn't want to disappoint them.

Mastery Year 1: Part 1: Post 3: Introductions

So, I told Charlie that, of course, I was ready to work with him again. I was surprised he asked--I'd have thought that my presence here is proof enough of that, and I'd have thought that my prior history with him is enough to prove I can take whatever he can dish out. But he's always done this--occasionally double-checking to see if I'm still on board or something. It's like he's self-conscious or something. I wouldn't have pegged him for the nervous sort, but perhaps he's more human than he lets on.

Anyway, with my reassurance given, he gave me a new assignment. We're supposed to meet for an hour or two every week so I can teach him everything I learned in graduate school. I must have looked pretty dumb-founded.

"You've spent all this time and money learning all of this stuff and I don't want you to forget it," he explained. "Teaching is the best form of learning, so you can start by teaching me."

"Charlie, it took me two and a half years to learn all that stuff. At an hour or two per week, we'll be doing this forever."

He laughed.

"Daniel, it may once have been true that I taught you everything you knew--though I doubt it--but I certainly never taught you everything I knew. Anyway, you'll find I'm a quick study."

I believe I turned red. Anyway, my face grew hot and I turned away. Of course, Charlie completed all the coursework of a master's in ecology years ago, and he's obviously kept up with a lot of it, and he's brilliant. Most of this will be review for him. I am so dumb.

We've met once now, for two hours. Mostly, we just got organized. We'll take my courses one at a time, and he anticipates that each will take two or three meetings. I should prepare to summarize each major concept of each class and I should prepare to explain each in detail, because he's going to ask questions and I'm not going to know when he'll ask questions because some of the questions will be deliberate tests. I've kept all my course notes, homework assignments, hand-outs, and books, so I'll go home this week and pick those up so I can use them as study materials--when I told him that, Charlie asked me to give him all my old homework assignments. He says he's not going to do most of them, but he will do some of them, and he won't tell me which he'll do until we get there. In the meantime, he's borrowed my laptop. It has the statistical software I used in class, and Charlie says it's new to him ("When I was in school, computers ran on punch cards...") and he wants to play.

This is going to be one massive assignment.

Otherwise, I don't really know what I'm doing, yet. I see the value in Charlie's request, both as a way for me to strengthen my understanding and as a way for him to find out what I'm up to, but it doesn't really get me into new material, so far as I can see. I don't see what it has to do with my becoming a master. And I haven't been told to do anything else. There is no set curriculum, no required credits, for mastery candidates. I've been kind of wandering around.

I have been exploring campus and I've noticed a few changes (besides the departures and arrivals I talked about last week). Most obviously, campus has finally joined the digital age. When I came here before, there was no policy on personal electronics, other than the bland suggestion that new students not bring computers and such when they first arrive, but very few of us had computers or cell phones. Few of us even had email accounts. There were a few computers available for student use, but we seldom used them, not even for school work. Most of our homework assignments could be hand-written.

In my last year or two, that had started to change. More incoming students had email and cell phones and expected to use both regularly. There were ongoing discussions about when and where it was polite to use these things--many of us felt that cell phone conversations were intrusive, somehow, but we couldn't figure out how or why--and there was some concern that yearlings might not acculturate properly if too many of them spent too much time digitally conversing with outsiders in the beginning. At the same time, the idea of interfering with yearlings' connections to family and friends seemed sinister.

In any case, the question seems to have been resolved. Yearlings are not allowed to have their own electronics on campus until the beginning of the summer semester, but they are allowed to do whatever they want online on the campus machines (of which there are still only six) or by borrowing those of senior students. Otherwise, cell phone conversations may only be held inside a student's own room, except for emergencies, and WIFI only works well in the Office, the tiny computer lab, and the eastern half of the Great Hall. And it's not entirely reliable--I suspect by design.

So, there are still no rules limiting what you can do, only how you can do it and where you can do it. They're depending on inconvenience to keep people focused here, in the real world, but you can still keep in touch easily enough.

For me, the weirdest thing is seeing half a dozen people sitting with their laptops almost every time I go through the Great Hall. It does look wrong, somehow. I'm still not sure why. And sometimes I'm one of them. I'm on Facebook, these days.

We do have two classes, we being all the mastery candidates. We're allowed to take whatever else we want, but these two are required and we all take both of them every semester of our candidacy. The two classes meet on alternating weeks, so we've only had one of them yet--it's the orientation meeting they told us about.

The one we haven't had is called Chaplains' Seminar. Honestly, it sounds like the more interesting of the two. It's about being a priest/priestess and what that means, both in the abstract and for us individually. The other, the one we have had, is called Candidates' Seminar, and it seems to be mostly a group meeting where we can all check in and talk about how our studies are going. Curiously, I didn't know either existed when I was here before, though I don't think either is secret. I just wasn't paying much attention--and if I did hear someone talking about it, I probably ignored it. A "seminar," around here, is usually a mini-class with only two meetings. They come and they go. I don't know why the word is being used differently for these.

Usually, Allen will teach Candidates' Seminar, though they say that the others sometimes substitute. But this week, all Six of them showed up together, I guess because they all wanted to hear for themselves what we've been up to.

We went around, each of us introducing ourselves (that's tradition--I think we all knew each other as novices, but that's not always true, and anyway we hadn't all known each other well) and saying a few words about where we are in our process and, for us new arrivals, why we're here and what we've been up to:

Ollie went first, looking a little nervous and stiff.

"I'm Ollie, I'm--new--I guess. I'm working with Allen. While I was away, I was ordained as a Baptist preacher and I married Willa--some of you know her--and I received a master's degree and professional certification in Christian counseling. I've come back because I want to deepen my spiritual practice and because I want to learn to be a better counselor--I want to bring my whole self to my work, as Allen does."

Allen nodded in acknowledgement.

Rick, seated next to Ollie, went next.

"I'm Rick, also new. I've worked as a logger, completed the Appalachian Trail, and gotten a degree in forestry. I want to learn how to do some good in the world without letting you people bug me too badly. I'm working with Charlie."

Everyone laughed in response, but Rick didn't laugh. He wasn't joking.

"Jasimin, second-year mastery candidate, working with Karen. I'm looking at photography as a Zen art. Lately I'm been focusing--no pun intended--on visual observation, but we're talking about exploring a more journalistic approach. I don't expect to finish this year."

"Ebony, first-year mastery candidate, working with, well, I was working with Allen, but I think I want to work with Kit, too. I've gotten my teaching certification and I want to become a visual art teacher. I don't know how that works, yet."

There were appreciative nods all around. Ebony, remember, does not have working eyeballs, and it looked like some in the group hadn't known how visual she is anyway, how of course, she'd want to teach visual art.

"That's doable," commented, Kit, and Ebony smiled in her general direction. Her introduction was much smoother than Ollie's or Rick's--she was imitating Jasimin. I'm not sure why an experienced candidate didn't start the introductions. Maybe one would have, if Ollie hadn't jumped in.

"Eddie, first-year mastery candidate, working with Joy. I train and place therapy dogs. And I'm a pretty happy guy. I live a good life, now. But I want to integrate the two, so my work isn't just a job I like. And I want to get better at the placing part."

I had forgotten how little Eddie is. He fills a room with his personality, but he's not much bigger than Ebony or Jasimin. Sitting next to Oak, Eddie looked rather like a man who had been shrunk in the wash.

"Oak, second-year mastery candidate, working with Kit. I just wanna learn to be a better priest. I have no new news." He shrugged. "I don't think I'll finish this year."

"Veery, second-year, working with Allen. I've been a counselor for years. Allen got me into cognitive behavioral therapy, and we've been working on tying that into my spirituality as an animist. Now, I'm thinking I'd like to work in my singing, too. I'm nowhere near graduating."

Again, a friendly laugh. It's a little weird having her here--she's an ex-girlfriend of mine and I didn't know she'd come back. But I feel no special connection to her, now. She looks older than I remember. She's a lot older than me, something I never thought about before. No wonder she got frustrated with me, I must have seemed like a kid to her.

"Veronica, second-year candidate, working with Kit. I do botanical research, and I'm working on merging that with my pantheistic Christian spiritual practice. And I do expect to graduate this year."

"Sounds like you're like John Chapman," said Charlie, but I didn't understand his comment. Veronica did. She nodded.

"Andy, second-year mastery candidate, expecting to graduate this year. I'm working with Greg, mostly. I want my bicycle-repair business to be my Christian ministry. I don't mean, like, to convert people, necessarily. I mean to love people. With bicycles. I want to be a good person."

And then it was my turn.

"Daniel, first-year mastery student, working with Charlie, and...how do you all know what you're doing? I don't. I just wanted to come back, so I did. I want to be a master, but I don't know what that means."

There was a titter of laughter, not unfriendly.

"None of us really know," said Greg. "That's what they call Beginner's Mind."