Mastery Year 3: Part 6: Post 3: Magic

"Why do you focus so much on science?" asked Albion, one of the yearlings. I should explain that while Albion is young--mid-twenties--he is well-informed and fiercely intelligent. He already has a bachelor's degree in English literature and half an MBA. He also has a very large number of intricate blue tattoos, lots of "tribal" jewelry, and the hungry look of a devotee. I've heard he is a high priest of something or other.

All this, and he spoke to me with that strange mix of deference and challenge that people around here usually address to the masters when they're being confusing. He didn't address me as "Professor Kretzman," but he might as well.

I considered. If he were going to treat me as a master, I might as well act like one.

"What should I focus on?" I asked.

"Magic, of course," Albion answered. "This is a school for magic."

I mentally grumbled something like don't take my classes if you don't like them, you little twit, but what I said was the deliberately intriguing, and not entirely true, "I don't see how there's a difference."

"What?"

"Well, what's magic?" I asked.

"Causing change in accordance with the will," he replied. It's a standard definition in some circles.

"Like this?" I asked, and picked up a small stick and broke it in half.

"No!"

"Why not?"

"Because everybody knows how to break a stick with their hands," he retorted, though a moment's thought should reveal that's not quite true. I let that point go.

"So you want to cause change by means that not everybody knows about?"

"Yes."

"So, it follows that you want to understand how the universe really works, not just how most people think it works."

"Yes...."

"Congratulations; you want to be a scientist."

"But I want to do things, not just study them!"

"Then you want to be an engineer."

"No, but I...."

"So you don't want to understand the secrets of the universe and cause change using the things you know?"

"Dammit, I don't want to be some intellectual bean-counter, the world is full of wonder! I want to key into that!"

I chuckled.

"If you think scientists aren't aware of wonder, you don't know very much about science," I told him. "Maybe you should take some of my classes?"

And I walked away and left him gaping.

Is this really me? I find myself having these conversations, and to an extent some of them feel artificial, but more and more I'm thinking yes, this really is me.

It's sort of magical.

Mastery Year 2: Part 8: Post 1: Yule

You know, sooner or later, there had to be bad weather on Yule morning.

I'd thought I'd experienced bad weather on Yule before. There was one year when the dawn was completely hidden by cloud, and the new day loomed rather than broke, and there were two years it rained. But on one of those nights the rain turned to snow and then stopped just before we went out, so we didn't actually get rained on, and when the sun came up, the world was white. The other time, we did get drizzled upon, but just as the sun came up--brilliantly, through a break in the cloud--the rain turned rather dramatically to snow.

In point of fact, the "bad" weather those years only served to make the dawn more dramatic and lovely.

This year, though?

This year the weather well and truly sucked.

It began with rain around midnight, first intermittent, then harder and harder, but I wasn't worried, because I unthinkingly assumed the storm would break before dawn. It didn't. Instead, it intensified, the wind rising till we could poke our heads out of the Meditation Hall door and hear broken branches falling in the Formal Garden and along the evergreen row behind the building.

Inside, the party continued. Every year, we hold an all-night party, and students who have otherwise left campus for the season, graduates, allies, and even some family (like the Sprouts) all come in and fill the Mansion with music and merriment. The Sprouts and the masters don't usually join us until the morning, they have their own party on the fourth floor, but some of the masters come down for an hour or so. This year, the party was no different. One advantage of having Kit here is that a lot of people play instruments or sing--she loves to teach music and does it well--so our parties tend to involve giant jam sessions. And the room is lovely and filled with food and drink and wonderful people and it feels like the center of the world.

But then around four in the morning, Greg came down to find Kit and whispered urgently in her ear. She whispered back, and then they both went upstairs. A few minutes later, Allen came down and rather casually spoke to several of the senior novices. Then, one by one, they all slipped upstairs. Most of us didn't notice. I did. And June noticed me noticing.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"I don't know that anything's the matter," I said. "But Allen just magicked up the students who were going to organize the walk up the mountain, and I don't know why."

"You don't?"

"Should I?"

"Do you want to walk up the mountain in this?" she asked.

Uh, no, I didn't. She had a point. My embarrassment must have showed on my face, because she laughed at me.

"Did you think a weather-witch was going to fix conditions for us?"

And the thing is, I'm sure there are weather-witches on campus, and I'm not certain their magic isn't effective. But I can imagine Charlie responding to such a proposal, and I don't think he'd like it. He'd say that the real magic occurs when we adjust ourselves to the world, not the other way around.

In the end, we didn't go up the mountain. It was too dangerous. Instead, we waited until twilight was well underway, and then walked out to the Edge of the World and stood there for a few minutes in the blowing 35-degree rain, turning our backs to the wind, our rain ponchos blowing up and flapping, letting rain in to soak our cloaks, until someone shouted "SUN'S UP! WELCOME YULE!" into the wind.

I imagine they relied on a clock to find the right moment. Dawn was not discernible at all.

We all turned and trudged back inside, and found there the entire master's group waiting for us in the Great Hall, all as sopping wet as we were. And they launched into "Here Comes the Sun," their traditional Yule morning carol, which definitely sounded ironic under the circumstances. We all laughed and clapped, and then Joy ordered us all upstairs and into warm showers, cautioning us not to come down until we were dry and comfortable.

When we came back down, there were the Sprouts and various other guests, and a hot breakfast with plenty of hot chocolate, and gift bags for everybody and presents to open, and we spent the rest of the day playing with our presents like children.

All the while, the temperature outside was dropping and, almost unnoticed, and ice storm was busy glazing the ground and the roads and the trees, and everything else. That was alright with me at the time, as I was at the center of the world, but our guests were trapped with us, and I'm sure many families traveling for Christmas had their plans interrupted.

Towards the late afternoon, the storm finally blew off and the sky cleared. Greg, invigorated by his mid-holiday nap (this year under the Yule tree, wrapped up in a blanket like a present) drew my attention to the sunset--the trees to the west of the back driveway were glowing with magic, unconsuming fire, the light of the setting sun shining in the rime ice on every twig in their high, massed crowns.

"That's gorgeous," I said, completely redundantly, but sometimes one has to.

"I've thought the weather gorgeous all day," he said, in his dry, somewhat formal voice. "The magic that gives us gorgeous weather consists in knowing the weather to be gorgeous."

He and Charlie are suite-mates, I recalled.

Mastery Year 1: Part 5: Post 7: At Some Point

"I'm sorry," I told Charlie. He was sitting on the steps on the porch of the Mansion, whittling something. I'd come up behind him.

"For what?" he asked, inspecting his whittling. He was putting a point on a long, thin, point of wood, though I could not think why.

"For acting like a kid scared you might get mad at me."

He grunted, like a single chuck of a chuckle, acknowledging, perhaps, that I'd understood him correctly. But he didn't look at me, only at his pointed stick. He seemed a little sad, somehow.

"Thank you," he said, and returned to his whittling. I sat down beside him on the steps, and we were both silent for a while, before he spoke again. "I was only ever a boogeyman for you. If you want to keep me in that role, that's your business."

"I don't know. I mean, I know it's only ever been my choice, but I like knowing that if I don't follow through you'll...care."

I meant that being his student, being a student, was my choice, not something imposed on me by anyone else. At the very beginning, he had offered to help me by pushing me harder than I could push myself. He'd said everyone needs a boogeyman. That's what I meant by him caring, that he'd get upset, or pretend to get upset, if I ever gave him less than my best. 

As I said the word 'care' he looked over at me, just for a moment.

"I do care," he said, inspecting his whittling again. "That's why if you're going to treat me like the enemy, you can go right to hell. Because I can't help you if your not honest with me about what you want."

"I don't want to do this giving advice thing."

"Ok, why not?"

"Because it's artificial," I said. "To ask for advice creates a bond, an opportunity, if that isn't there...I asked what if no one asks. Well, if no one asks, then I don't want to give advice. I don't want to be pressured to offer maybe unwanted advice. I don't want to advise other people for me--or even for you. I already know what my essay would say if I did that--I'd have to say I'd done something wrong."

Another chuck of sad, almost-laughter.

"If you already know all that," he said, "than you're a better young man than I was at your age."

I had no response to that, so I changed topics.

"What's that you're whittling?"

"A piece of scrap wood."

"No, I mean, why? What's the objective?"

"To make it look like a spear. Because I want to."

I watched him play at making a spear for a while.

"You ever wish late summer could last forever?" he said. And indeed the gardens had gone messy and top-heavy with blossoms and, beyond our view, on the other side of the hedge, those parts of the Flat Field and the pastures below it that had not been cropped close this year had become a sea of goldenrod and asters, attended by grasshoppers, mantises, and now the first of the monarch butterflies streaming south toward Mexico. In another few weeks, most of it will be fading.

And yet I could not say that fall had ever made me sad.

I spoke later with Allen, with whom I can be more articulate, since he demands articulate-ness, just as Charlie demands intellectual--and interpersonal--honesty. And of course, it's easier to talk about things with a neutral party.

"I was acting like a rebellious little kid," I explained, "and I can see why Charlie didn't like that, but I guess I like acting like a kid with somebody."

"Even though being treated like a kid pisses you off?"

"Well, yes, naturally."

Allen laughed at me.

"Daniel, you have encountered the central mystery of adolescence."

"At twenty-seven years of age?" I just had a birthday.

"Better late than never...no, seriously, adulthood is sort of a work in progress. The tendencies of childhood never entirely leave you."

"Adulthood is a choice."

"Every day."

"I just..." I didn't know how to put it, "I like having someone else in charge, someone who seems to know everything. I don't like it, but I like it. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes," said Allen. "You know, I don't have anyone like that for me. Not anymore."

"And you know all the deliberate mysteries around here, too. You know how the stage magic works."

"I do."

"Does that ever bother you?"

He made a non-committal sort of shrug, declining to directly answer the question.

"Daniel, at some point, you've got to start making magic for others."

Mastery Year 1: Part 2: Note

Hi, all.

I just wanted to tell you that, no, I'm not doing a real post today, and yes, everything's fine on my end. A group of us went to the Science March in DC on Saturday, which meant a three day trip--it's a long drive from where we live--so my work week got seriously disrupted. I'll post on Friday, after I've caught up.

"We," incidentally, was June and I and Carly, Allen, Lo, and David, and Breathwalker, whom I haven't told you about. He was a student at the school several years before I arrived and has recently gotten involved with the community again. He was another student of Charlie's. It's a different group than the contingent that came to the climate march a few years ago (and will attend the climate march next week), but it was a different kind of march. It felt different. I've been trying to put my finger on exactly how--here's part of it. The people asked questions. That is, when people at the march chatted with each other, they usually started by asking questions, not by making statements. About what you could expect from scientists, I suppose. What does your sign mean? What does your costume signify? What kind of scientist are you?

We had an answer for that one; David is an ecologist, Allen and Lo are psychologists, June and I are science educators, and Breathwalker and Carly aren't scientists at all, but science is important to them. By the end of the march, Carly was giving that answer herself. It's funny, I never thought of Allen and Lo as scientists, but I guess they are.

We could have gone to one of the satellite marches, several were much more convenient for us, but we figured the bigger the DC march was, the more impact it would have, and anyway we figured it was time for us to show Carly our nation's capital. Any kid her age should get to have astronaut ice cream at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

My favorite part of the whole march experience was probably the sign--and I saw it several times--that said "science is like magic, but real."

That sounds about right to me.

Year 4: Part 8: Post 7: School Days

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2017, again.

In my last post I forgot to say that I actually finalized the application process for both my summer job and my grad school while hiking the Appalachian Trail. I interviewed for both by cell phone from the tops of mountains that got decent reception. I think, in both cases, that my unusual circumstances helped win my case.

My summer job was as a back-country caretaker, meaning I lived at and was responsible for a hike-in-only campsite and a section of trail nearby. I did basic trail and site maintenance and Leave No Trace education--I had no enforcement authority, I just had to somehow explain to people why doing the right thing is a good idea. I had a radio to call for law enforcement if I needed it, but I never did.

It was remarkable how much of the caretaker training was review for me--Charlie had basically covered it. I'd even already read many of their recommended books. I don't mean that I didn't learn anything--I did--but that I kind of started out with a step up. I could pay a lot more attention to the parts of the training that I didn't know.

What I learned...I'd already become a naturalist and a student of place. I'd already become an educator, of sorts, since I'd been leading various workshops at school. What was different was that, as a caretaker, I was responsible for a place. I was its guardian. And I was the one deciding what kind of education different people needed, what kind of teacher they needed me to be. Sometimes I gave formal natural history talks. Sometimes I sprinkled information into my conversation so subtly that the other person didn't know I was trying to influence their behavior at all. And everything in between.

I spent a lot of time learning about the area and simply being there. I could sit quietly enough that I frequently saw animals, even at very close range, before they saw me. Often, human hikers didn't notice me at all, unless I wanted to. Once, I "decloaked" quite suddenly in order to tell a group of young boys not to damage a group of mushrooms they'd been poking at and I accidentally frightened them. I saw myself then, reflected in their eyes, as some kind of gnome or forest-sprite, a crazy and half-mythical man of the woods, and I thought of Charlie.

In August, as planned, I left my tent site in the mountains and started grad school--and ran straight into serious culture shock.

It wasn't so much that grad school was all that different, culturally, than what I had been in before. I mean, most of the students and, I think, all of the faculty were American, as am I, so it's not like there was this huge gap. Living at a strange little pagan seminary for four years couldn't completely change my background. It didn't make me become someone from another planet.

No, the jarring thing wasn't the culture, it was the expectations of the culture. It was as though I were approaching grad school from the opposite direction as everybody else.

As Charlie had suspected, the graduate program I chose prided itself on its environmentalist values, its progressive/liberal politics, and its dedication to community, but it wasn't as dedicated to any of that as the school I'd come from--or the employer I'd just left. At the same time, it probably was "greener" and more progressive than most of the other places the faculty and my fellow students could have been. So while everybody around me was either celebrating or joking about what a leftist, artsy, granola-greenie place they'd landed, I noticed the lights left on in empty rooms, the vehicles used for no clear reason, the profit motive lurking behind certain decisions made by the Administration. It was like getting directions to a place from someone heading South, except you're heading North, and neither of you knows it.

I don't mean to suggest any kind of pervasive, organized hypocrisy. Most of what I noticed was probably the result of simple institutional compartmentalization. There were faculty members who could explain in brilliant detail exactly why disposable plastic water bottles are bad, but those weren't the people deciding what to sell in the campus book store--which did sell bottled water. The other problems was that the school wasn't residential. We only spent a few hours a day together, and only, really, for a few months. Mine was a two-and-a-half-year program, but much of that time was occupied by off-campus internships and research trips. Even had the school leadership been interested in actively shaping a campus culture, there would have been small opportunity. And so each of us simply retained whatever interest in whatever values we'd started out with, and a thin, temporary, but on the whole caring, community grew out of our brief and hurried interactions.

And, on the whole, I liked it, once the disorientation of the first few months wore off.

I did well in my classes, of course, but for the first time in my life I did not shine among my fellow students. As far as I can tell, I was about in the middle of my class, academically, or sometimes somewhat below it. For one thing--honestly, I'm really smart. I know that. But in grad school, all of a sudden, all the other students were really smart, too. So the classes were designed to challenge people at least as smart as I am. I'd never had to work to pass classes before, but, all of a sudden, I did.

Then, I had never before taken a science class designed for budding scientists. Even Charlie had always proceeded from the assumption, probably accurate, that most of his students needed to be cajoled into taking any interest in scientific process at all. And I'd never before used a computer for anything other than typing up papers and playing video games (and, in the last few months, email)--while I was living in Brigadoon, the Internet revolution had happened, the virtual world moving from a curiosity reserved for geeks to the place where virtually all scholarship and professional communication occurred. I had to catch up, and quickly.

I was ahead in some classes. I was surprised to learn I was a better naturalist than almost all my fellow first-year students. Even most of the plant-geeks didn't know as much about plant identification as I did, and I was shocked to learn that even the professors assumed that you can't track animals except in snow. Many of the data collection techniques we were taught I already knew from Charlie's Messing Around Outdoors classes. What I didn't know, and needed to learn, was what to do with the data once you get them ("data" is plural, another new discovery!), and why you want to collect those data to begin with. I'd never before learned how to ask a question answerable by science, how to organize the rigorous search for knowledge.

I also didn't know bird identification. Charlie has only passing interest in it, but the student body included several enthusiastic birders and so I bowed to peer pressure and signed up for ornithology.

I thought of my friends back at school often. I thought of Allen midway through my first spring semester when I stepped out of the school building after studying late, looked up, and realized I hadn't thought to look at the stars in months. I hadn't spoken to anyone, other than my immediate family, about anything other than homework in about as long. I could not remember the last time anyone had hugged me, or the last time I'd sat doing nothing in the woods. I felt as though I'd been asleep, or worse than asleep, and was awake, just for a moment, before I slipped under again. I saw no way not to. I had homework to complete, responsibilities to meet. I had no time....

And I thought of Allen then without clearly understanding why. I had to wake up for several such moments over the course of almost a year, before I realized that Allen had in fact predicted my situation. I'd been working hard to do everything asked of me, and to do it well, just as I'd always done, except in the past, the people telling me what to do had all made a point of telling me to attend to my spiritual life, stay involved in my athletics, call my friends, and so on. Now, the only demands being made on me were academic. At the very first opportunity to take responsibility for keeping my own life full and vibrant, I'd become a lonely couch-potato with tunnel vision.

And yet, the longer I was in grad school, the more I noticed that the depth, the mystery, the magic I'd known was here, too. I just had to pay more attention.

Some of the school's traditions--even those I understood to be typical of academia in general--looked an awful lot like the ritual structures I'd learned from Kit and Joy. Some of the phrases some of the professors used reminded me an awful lot of the bits of mysticism and alchemy I'd learned. Some of the places we visited on field trips were obviously sacred sites and the professors clearly knew it--though they never said so.

Speaking in a mundane way, I'd say that some of the other people at grad school, including some of the faculty, may have had spiritual interests that they considered unprofessional to mention but which leaked out sometimes. But I doubt that's all of it. I thought about how, back at the school whose name I do not provide, Kit and all of the others would be so obviously mysterious. It was like the entire school was a giant neon sign blazing MAGICAL SECRETS HERE! TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT! But at grad school, there was no sign. That didn't mean there were no secrets.

In fact, I gradually realized that whatever interest in the occult individual professors may have had (and I never was able to confirm that hunch), I had entered another initiatory process. Learning to think like a scientist is every bit as much a transformation as learning to think like a priest or priestess is. The only difference is that the secrets of the craft are not hidden--

--Which makes them harder to find. For example, words like "theory" and "experiment," mean very different things to the general public and to the scientist, but because everyone thinks they are the same words, nobody realizes that scientists are, in fact, saying radically different things than everybody else--things you have to transform your mind in order to think. But nobody ever tells you that the transformation is about to take place, nor even that it is a possibility.

Kit and Charlie and Allen and the others put magic in a big pile, more or less directly in the way of everybody else, and kept making you trip over it until you finally realized it was there and started asking the right questions. In the larger world, I discovered, the magic still exists, and many people know about it, but if you don't notice it's there you can just walk on by it and nobody says anything.

Every minute is another entrance test.

Year 4: Part 6: Post 3: Standing Out.

Please note that in 2003, Rosh Hashanah occurred about a week earlier, relative to the standard calendar, which is why the holiday is referred to here as having just happened.

I just realized that I really didn’t know what Alien Steve has been studying. We spoke often in my second winter here, but not that much since then. And even when we did talk a lot, we were mostly discussing identity, belonging, and what it was like for him to be an alien, not mundane matters like school. So, today I asked him.

“I’m an alchemist,” he told me, as if I should have known. I should say that ‘alchemist,’ as we use the term here, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with turning lead into gold. Instead, it’s about transforming the self so as to effect practical change in the world. Something like that.

“But you’re not working with Greg, are you?” Greg, as you may recall, is the alchemist on staff.

“No,” he told me. “I mean, I’ve talked with him. He’s helped me, some. But I’m working with Joy on magic and spirituality. They’re the only two areas I need.”

“But I didn’t think Joy was an alchemist.”

“She’s not, not especially, anyway. But there are alchemical dimensions to her magical practice.”

“Why alchemy?”

“Why not? What else is an alien going to do?”

“Ok, what does that mean?” I was confused.

“I’m different,” he told me, grinning a little. “Different people are disruptive by definition. Think about a dance, like a group dance, like square dancing? If there’s somebody in the dance, just one person, who is doing something different than anybody else, then the entire pattern changes. Do you see?”

“I suppose so.” I was imagining, not a dance, but a traffic pattern—somebody drives the wrong way and everyone swerves around and crashes.

“So, the question is, how do I insert myself in a system to effect the change I want?”

“How do you?”

“Be very careful about what I compromise about and what I don’t.”

“Oh?”

“Consider; Frederick Douglas became free, without compromise, before he even ran away from slavery. And he helped free all the slaves. Mahatma Gandhi also made himself free, without compromise, and helped free India. If you don’t move, everyone else has to.”

“I bet you don’t include Jesus on your list,” I teased him. Jesus was the first person I thought of adding to the list, but Alien Steve is slightly hostile to Christianity.”

“I’m not sure he existed.”

Steve is pagan, but with the subject up in my mind I remembered that he’s specifically Jewish pagan.

“Hey, you just had a holiday, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Rosh Hashanah. No really my thing, religiously speaking,” he told me. “I did go home to my parents’ for a big dinner.”

“Are they ok with your being pagan?”

“They don’t care. They’re both atheists.”

“Huh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. Then—“hey, there are a lot of Jewish people here, aren’t there?” There aren’t a lot who identify as Jewish now, though Steve does, are nine or ten students, plus Aaron, who were raised Jewish and sometimes show up at campus Seders and such. That’s about ten percent of the student body, which is much higher than the national average. “Is that odd? I thought most neopagans used to be Christian.”

“No, it’s the other way around. Most of Christianity used to be pagan. The rest was Jewish.”

“I knew that part. I mean now. Individuals. The holidays are so similar, it just seems weird to me, Jewish pagans.”

“It shouldn’t. European magic has deep ties to European Jewry.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Remember Nicholas Flamel?”

“Was he real? And Jewish?” Nicholas Flamel, you may recall, was one of the couple who created the Sorcerer’s Stone in the Harry Potter book.

“Real, yes, Jewish, no. He was something like a clerk, but he endowed a couple of churches and hospitals and things. How did he do that, if he didn’t have some unusual way of making gold? He claimed to have created the philosopher’s stone. But when he was first figuring out alchemy, the first thing he did was to go to Spain to look for a Jewish scholar who could teach him the Qabalah. The first thing that occurred to him.”

“Huh.”

“I mean, if you think about it, we, too, are different and so change the world.”

Year 4: Part 5: Post 5: Asking for Votes

I just got Joy's vote to graduate.

She's my master for both healing and magic. The healing part was pretty simple, since I'm doing Reiki. She says you need to get the second attunement, which she offers after you do at least six months of regular practice--that's a lot more than most teachers require, apparently, but it's really not a lot, given that once you've had the second attunement, you're allowed to charge people money to give them Reiki. Two workshops and six months of practice isn't a lot to become a certified healer!

There's a third attunement, too, if you want to be able to teach Reiki, but I don't expect to do that--I don't even expect to do the charging money thing. I got into Reiki because I need to get into some kind of healing to graduate, and I've enjoyed it--I still don't know how it works, but it does work, and that's what I like about it--but I don't see myself going professional with it.

Anyway, I got my second attunement a while back--a couple of months ago. I could have gotten it earlier, of course, since I've been practicing now for over two years, but I didn't feel a need to rush things. And that's all I need to get Joy's vote in healing.

To get her vote in magic? It's less cut and dried.

I've been learning "manifestation," which is where you more or less learn to make things happen because you're thinking about them. It's a little more complicated than that, of course, and no one can manifest just anything, like, you don't become omnipotent, but those wonderful coincidences where someone shows up with exactly what you need at the right time start happening a whole lot more often.

But because manifesting isn't a completely predictable thing (and wouldn't be as much fun if it was), there's no way to test someone's ability. Like you can't say "Ok, manifest X now," and give the person a good grade if X shows up. There can't be any grades or levels.

But you can make progress. I succeed more often than I used to, and I feel more confident with it. Or--no, that's not quite the right word. I feel more trusting. I'm luckier than I used to be and I'm more relaxed about whether the things I want will happen. And I get as excited when I'm part of someone else's manifestations as when mine work. I mean, when I'm able to help someone else out in an unpredictable way I just get a huge kick out of it.

Those of us who are learning manifestation with Joy get together every so often and talk about how, we're doing, and what's been working for us and what hasn't been, and what insights we've had, and she asks us questions. So Joy can keep track of our progress that way.

There's a rule, or at least a tradition, that you have to ask for someone's vote--they don't normally tell you you've got it until you ask. So, the other day, on a whim, I asked Joy. She said yes.

You need the votes of all the masters you're working with, plus you need to complete your credit requirements and your year-and-a-day of campus life participation. Then, when you get all that, the final decision is made by a review committee composed of three or four out of the Six, though I don't know when that committee meets. I've been told that we dn't ask for that one--they ask for you.

I am working with only two masters, so I only need one more vote--but that vote is Charlie's.

God, the thought of asking him for his approval and for his permission to leave here....

But I can't ask him yet. He said I had to do a year of this sleeping outside thing, and it hasn't been a year yet. Almost. It's almost been. And then I will ask him.

Year 4: Part 4: Post 2: Magic

The heat is on. Weather, I mean. This is full-on, undoubtedly by anyone’s definition, summer. At night, there are fireflies. In the daytime, we hear cicadas. We shut the Mansion up tight against the heat before we leave to go about our day. By mid-day, the Great Hall is dark and cool and almost deserted.

Almost. Sometimes, when I pass through, I find someone else sitting quietly there in the gloom and sometimes I stop and talk to that person—it’s often Allen. I like having these little, apparently accidental meetings with him.

Today, I saw him sitting there on one of the couches, which had been turned around so it faced outward, away from the fireplace. I almost didn’t see him. Allen can make himself curiously invisible—he’s not literally invisible, but he’s hard to see. Your eyes slide off of him. But today, when my eyes passed over, something tickled my brain and I looked back. He smiled and de-cloaked—I mean, he suddenly became much clearer and more obvious. He was sitting there, petting Greg’s Cat, who got up and ran away the instant Allen became plainly visible.

“How do you do that?” I asked. He laughed.

“How do you see me?” he asked, by way of reply. “You’re getting quite magical yourself.” He patted the space beside him on the couch and I sat next to him. “I’m glad you see me.”

I wasn’t sure whether he meant that he’s glad to be known by me, to whatever extent I actually know him, or that he was glad I’d noticed him that particular moment, like he was glad for the chance to talk with me. Either way, I felt quite touched.

We didn’t actually talk for a bit, though. The room was so dark and quiet and still.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said, finally.

Allen laughed again, a minimal laugh, something between a grunt and a snort, a single huff of laughter. I wish I had more words for the sounds people make when they are pleased or amused.  I glanced over and he raised one eyebrow at me—I’d left myself open to a smart-ass remark so obvious that he wasn’t even bothering to say it. I chuckled and shook my head.

“That thing Ebony does to see that you don’t know about,” I began, meaning her use of cannabis, which Allen certainly does know about. There’s no internal rule of our community against drug use, provided nothing illegal comes on campus, but the masters don’t want to appear to condone it, and there’s a strict rule against using mind-altering substances as part of one’s studies. You can’t use hallucinogens to see spirits, for example. Ebony doesn’t use cannabis to see spirits, but she does use it to see and Allen helped her learn to understand vision. “Why did you make an exception?”

“Why do you think?” Allen almost always answers questions with more questions. “I’m not quizzing you, I really want to know what you think.”

He may be my friend, but his status as one of my teachers is ever-present. He weights different parts of the conversation with his experience and authority very deliberately.

“I think you like her,” I hazarded, “and that you knew she wasn’t going to do any of the stupid things that made us have to have the rule to begin with.”

“Right on both counts, but those aren’t the reasons. I’ll give you a hint; what kind of stupidity do you think required the rule?”

“People using spirituality and magic as an excuse to party and be irresponsible? And I imagine you didn’t want to enable addiction.”

“Half right. Another hint; why do you think people try to use drugs for spirit and magic? Aside from excuses to party, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Maybe for seeing spirits? But that only works for hallucinogens. I don’t know, Allen. Will you tell me?”

“Alright. A lot of people look for spiritual experiences, by which they mean feeling or thinking differently from what they normally do--and drugs will give you that. So will sex, extreme exercise, fasting, whatever. But how you feel is irrelevant. Your experiences, all by themselves, are irrelevant. You blow your mind, then come back to Earth and live exactly as you did before. There's no magic in that. The magic is the process by which you engage with experience, how you actually accomplish change. Drugs are a tool--but they're a very distracting tool, and I doubt if anyone can really use them well without guidance from a teacher, and we have no such teachers here. Except Ebony actually uses a drug to give her an experience that I can teach her how to use. I made an exception for her because she made an exception of me. She is exceptional."

"She is." I could think of no other response, but his explanation was interesting.

"Ok, my turn," announced Allen. I turned to him, expectant. "How's the search for magic going?"

I looked at him, a moment, confused. I didn't think he was asking about my studies with Joy. He waited. Finally, giving me a hint, produced his wand, waved it, and pointed--and when I say "produced," I mean it appeared apparently out of nowhere.

"Harry Potter!" I exclaimed. He nodded.

When I first got here, I'd just read some of the Harry Potter books and they formed my image of what magic, and a magical community looked like. When I talked with Allen a few weeks in about magic and he asked me why I'd come to the school, I'd confessed to him that I wanted to live inside a Harry Potter story. I didn't mean literally, I just meant there was some indescribable quality to those stories that I wanted. He didn't laugh at me. He understood. And, all these years later, he'd remembered.

I thought for a minute.

"I've got it," I told him, quietly. "I mean, I'm doing ok with manifestation with Joy--I think she's going to give me her signature in that area soon, but that's not it. That's interesting, I suppose, but it's not wonder. But when I'm outside and I see something...it could be a little bug, or a bird, or a deer, or a new plant...it doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes...it might as well be a unicorn--or a hippogriff, or whatever. Something mythological.And, at the same time, it's so real. More real than anything normally is."

Allen nodded.

"Unicorns were real," he commented*. "They were a species of large, extinct rhinoceros. Magic isn't just real--the real is magic. That's why I'm a rationalist magician."

"The real is magical. Yeah. That's like something Charlie would say. It's like...realler than real, like the world suddenly opens itself up to me and I can see what's actually there, not just any plant or bug or squirrel, but that particular plant or bug or squirrel just...opens itself to me. It's intimate."

I was starting to babble, to repeat myself, and still I felt as though I hadn't quite explained it. And yet Allen nodded.

"That's why you can see me when I'm invisible," he said. 

*That Siberian unicorns shared their habitat with humans is a recent discovery, and hadn't yet happened when Allen and I had this conversation in 2003, but Siberian unicorns themselves were discovered in the 1800s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve held even more tightly to his composure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joy laughed at that. Kit frowned.

Year 4: Part 1: Post 6: Better than Chance

Campus is getting recognizably springlike.

The snow has mostly melted away, and while I'm fairly sure more is going to fall before the end of the month, it's good to see the grass again. Nothing much has greened up yet, but the red maples are flowering and many of the other trees' buds are swelling--the sort of things I wouldn't have noticed a few years ago, but now I look for it. The weather's cold and raw more often than not, and even the warm days are warm only in a relative sense, but relative warmth matters,and it's nice to be able to sit outside in just a sweatshirt and enjoy the sunlight.

I was doing exactly that the other day, sitting on the Mansion porch enjoying the sunlight. I'd been planning on going in to work that morning--my job with the landscapers off-campus was supposed to start up again this week, but my boss called at the last minute and told me not to bother. There's something wrong with the plumbing at the shop, so he decided to delay starting the season while he fixes it. And since I'd cleared my schedule in order to work, without work I had nothing to do but sit in the sun.

But instead of getting warmer, I gradually got colder. I'd spent the night outside in the cold damp and then I'd overslept until nearly breakfast time so I couldn't get a hot shower, and I couldn't really get warm after the chill of the night.

Anyway, so I went inside and wandered into the library, where Aaron was playing cards on a computer. It was an odd thing for him to do--we don't have an unlimited supply of electricity on campus, and we all have a habit of not using power unless we really need it. So for Aaron to be using a computer, rather than a deck of cards, to play cards seemed odd. But maybe he was waiting while the computer did something else in the background. Aaron does a lot of work on the computers. He's comfortable with them in a way most of the rest of us aren't.*

I stood behind him and watched. Of course, he was playing Solitaire, but it wasn't the kind I was familiar with. There was more than one deck involved and the layout pattern was different.

"What are you playing?"

"Spider."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. They say every game is winnable. It's not true, but most of them are. It's more skill-based than most solitaire games."

"What skill?" I asked, genuinely curious. "What does it involve?"

"You move cards here, you move them there." He kept playing as he spoke, as if his mind were only half on the conversation. That was ok with me. It didn't seem like a very important discussion. He continued. "The thing is, it's not really direct. You can't usually win just by making the obviously helpful moves. There aren't enough of them. So you move them here and move them there to gradually get closer to the circumstance that will allow you to win. Like this. There are no obviously helpful moves, but if I do this and this and this, I free up some extra cards and get closer to opening up an empty column. That puts me in a better position to use whatever comes up in the next deal."

"Like life?"

"Yeah, kind of."

"You could teach some kind of magic course that way, couldn't you? Playing life like a spider solitaire game, making oblique progress towards your goals by rearranging this and that and gradually opening up room so you can make the most of luck?"

Aaron seemed to take the idea at least semi-seriously, nor did he seem at all surprised by it. He did chuckle a little bit.

"It wouldn't be a very encouraging magic, though," he said. "I mean, I'm doing well to get a win rate of 4%. And in real life there's no 'undo' command."

"You have a point."

"Yes, I do...but there's a long history of using cards for divination. Playing cards and Tarot cards aren't that different. And a Solitaire card game is kind of like an active, moving, Tarot spread. A passive, receptive activity is divination, an active, manipulative version of the same activity is magic."

I thought about this for a bit.

"Well, what would be the win rate without skill," I asked. "What could be expected from chance? Seems to me, the measure of magic is not how often you succeed, but how much more often you succeed than you would otherwise? Maybe life is just plain hard?"

And Aaron stopped playing his game for a moment to look up at me.

"You're getting pretty clever, you know that?" he said.






  
* Campus seemed to be about ten years behind the rest of America as far as electronics. This was in 2003, and while the rest of the country was more or less online all the time, the school was only starting to explore integrating computers into our programs. There was no rule addressing it yet--that came a few years later--but the campus culture effectively discouraged personal electronics, including cell phones.--D.

Year 4: Part 1: Post 5: Mysteries

The new school year is into the swing of itself. now. They hired for the campus jobs the other week, they've evaluated the new students and posted individualized graduation requirements, and Charlie has started his traditional round of workshops and seminars--which I'm helping him with.

One activity I haven't done before was the Graduating Novices Meeting. I really had no idea this even happened and I could not figure out why it should be a secret. I mean, all we did was gather in a group along with Allen and Greg, talk a little about how we felt about our impending graduation, and listen to Allen and Greg talk about how the year would go for us and what the graduation process actually is. Apparently, we'll meet like this about every month. Every group of graduating novices does this.

So, why the secrecy? I asked.

"Because we want you to know there's more going on than meets the eye," said Allen. "Which is true, there is, but not everybody realizes it. We figured the best way to make it obvious was to do a lot of things around campus and not tell you."

He's right--there's always an air of mystery about this place, of vagueness and mutability, as though the stairways and corridors might move when we're not looking, as though house-elves or something might be scurrying about their business just out of sight. I suppose we're among the house-elves.

There's thirty-four of us, plus four mastery candidates who are graduating this coming year, but they didn't meet with us. I hadn't counted us up before, but even if I had, I would have gotten the wrong number because there are two yearlings graduating too, two one-hit-wonders. It's interesting to look at us, all in a group, for the first time. Some of them I obviously know pretty well--the people I started with, the ones in my dorm (including my friend, Eddie), but most of the others I really only know to say hi to. That's kind of embarrassing.

Something I hadn't really appreciated before was that the entire groundskeeping team, except Zoe (a new hire this year--she was on the library team last year), is graduating next Brigid. Charlie will have to hire and train almost a whole new crew. So, really Zoe is not just training to be a team member--she's training to be a team leader, like what Lou was. The leader acts as a supervisor when Charlie isn't available, handing out tasks and making sure everything gets done according to Charlie's standard and nothing is forgotten. It's usually the most experienced person on the team, but we all started at the same time, except for Zoe. I had thought Charlie might pick me, because I had some landscaping experience before coming here, but he picked Donna. I suppose that makes sense, since horticulture is really central to her studies.

Even without leading the groundskeeping group, I really feel like I'm here in a way I haven't before. Like, this whole time I've felt like I'm arriving, and now I have arrived. That feeling of having already left is gone (I'm really glad) and now I'm just really aware that I'm one of the people around here who really knows what's going on. I've been here longer than almost all the other students, I help out with a lot of Charlie's workshops and things, and I know so much about the place, but the identity of all of the trees to where the masters' secret doorway is...and yet I'm thinking about what Allen said about the value of not knowing things.

I caught up with him this morning when we crossed paths in the Great Hall.

"Allen, I don't know all the secrets around here, do I?" I must have sounded worried about it because he laughed.

"No, you don't."

"But what if I did? What if...you and the other masters know all of them, don't you? I mean, you run the school. Does it seem less magical to you, knowing everything?"

"We know what we do," Allen said, "but we don't know what you're going to do."

And he walked off, still laughing gently.

Year 4: Part 1: Post 3: Manifesting Love

As usual, I face the problem of writing in the persona of my younger self about things my younger self would not have talked about. By my fourth year on campus I knew there was no point in pretending for my friends, but there was still no way I would have admitted to being a virgin in a public blog! So, in the following post when I say I'd never had a serious relationship...my relationship with Ebony was pretty serious. It just wasn't sexual. -D.

Well, Valentine's Day has come around again and I have no one to give flowers to. As you may recall, Kit organizes this thing every year where you can have roses sent to people on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be anyone romantic, but I'd feel weird about sending roses to someone I didn't have those kinds of feelings for. Last year I sent a rose. This year I didn't.

I thought about it. I could have sent one to someone I still have feelings for, but that would obviously be a bad idea for everybody involved. Or I could have sent flowers to a couple of people I think are cute, but, I don't know, that seems juvenile somehow.

I'm almost twenty-three and I've never been in a serious relationship, and the truth is I don't really know how to get in one. I mean, I'm not a bad-looking guy, but I'm awkward and a half. What, do I just wait for the right person to show up? Isn't there more to it than that?

As I've said, the magic modality I've chosen something called "manifestation," which is something like positive thinking. Basically, you identify what you want to happen and then have faith that it will and then it does. Sometimes. I've given serious thought to trying to manifest romance.

The problem is that even though I've been practicing manifestation for well over a year now, I'm not sure it's actually real. It seems to work--the things I try to manifest usually happen, one way or another. But I don't believe the explanation that Joy provides.

She says that manifestation is another aspect of systems thinking, the idea that everything in the universe is connected and can influence everything else. She says that it is just another version of transforming energy, just like coal, which is cold and dark, can be transformed into heat and light--which she says is simply a higher vibrationational incarnation of the potential inherent in coal.

The problem is that burning coal is not an example of anything being converted to a higher energy state--it is actually conversion to a lower energy state. Coal has more energy, and less entropy, than carbon dioxide and when you burn coal the energy it held is lost forever. We covered this in class--more than one class, actually. I don't understand why nobody seems to remember this but me. Where is the causal mechanism that connects my mind to whether the hiking shoes I want are on sale? That is something I "manifested." I wanted a new pair of good hiking shoes, but couldn't afford them. Then I had an urge to go back to the store and look again, and there they were, deeply discounted, available for the exact value of a gift card I'd gotten for Christmas and happened to have with me that day. But how can "subtle energy" or "systems thinking" connect my wanting hiking shoes to whether the store puts them on discount?

I asked Charlie about it the other day. He was hand-picking aphids off a potted plant in the warm sprouting room off the Greenhouse.

"Charlie, do you do magic?" I began. He looked up at me over the rims of his glasses. He's far-sighted.

"Magic isn't a do, it's an are" he said. "The world is magic. We can be magic. That's the point, or part of it."

Strange how I've been his student for years but he never put it that way to me before, but then, I'd never asked. We'd only ever discussed our work in spiritual terms, saying that he was teaching me the skills of a naturalist so I could "get to know God." Now he was defining it in magical terms as learning to become part of the magic of the world. Either way, it's the same thing.

"That's not what Joy would say," I told him.

"That's why there's more than one of us teaching," he responded.

"How does manifestation work?"

"Surprisingly well, from what I've heard."

"No, I mean how does it work? By what mechanism? Because it doesn't work by the one Joy explains."

He smiled slightly, pleased, and then returned his focus to the aphids.

"There are two possible mechanisms I can think of," he told me. "Both may be in play. Either your intention influences your choices on a subconscious level--we generally know more than we can articulate--or confirmation bias leads you to remember those events that seem to manifest your intention more clearly than those that don't. However, the latter is not a good reason not to engage in the discipline."

"Why not?"

"Because if nothing is ventured, nothing is gained. Optimism is encouraging."

The last of the aphids squished to green paste between his fingers and he blew at the plant, a kind of final cleaning, like an artist blowing pastel dust off of a completed drawing.

I don't at this point see how that helps me with my woman-troubles, but it's something to think about. For now, the most helpful thing might actually be something Greg told me years ago--that his version of magic, alchemy, is all about transformation, and that transformation changes things but it's seldom possible to know what is going to change or how.

The night before Valentine's Day, I helped Kit and several others cut and trim the little tea roses she grows and then we delivered them to the recipients' door-ways to be found, as if by magic, in the morning.

I didn't give any roses this year. And yet I gave all of them.