Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 2: New Years

When I think of New Years' and school, I always think of that giant parade we had in the snow, it seems so inherently like us to do something like that. But it's only happened once, that I know of. This year, I won't even be on campus for New Years--I wasn't for Christmas. I was with June's family, missing my family and school, because the alternative would have been for her to miss hers, and she did that already at Thanksgiving.


June's family doesn't quite celebrate Christmas, which sometimes makes me wonder why we can't spend Christmas with my family (who do) instead, but I can see why she doesn't want to miss her non-Christmas, either. It's this low-key, unofficial, non-religious day with a big, yummy breakfast and everyone getting and giving little stocking-stuffer type things with everyone else. It's lovely. It's family time. And I seem to be welcome. I could see learning to miss this myself, if one year I couldn't go.

Is this what growing older is just like? The more people and places you connect with, the more you wish you were somewhere else no matter where you are?

June's family was similarly low-key about New Years last year--we all just stayed up to toast at midnight with Champagne  in nice glasses, then we went to bed--but I hear they're planning a party this year. I'm looking forward to it.

And I'm thinking about things on campus, about the party they're gearing up for, and about which of my friends will be on campus then and which will not.

I'm thinking about something Allen said to me the other day.

June and I were on campus for Yule, of course, before leaving for a week and a half with her parents (including travel time--it's a long way), and in the evening, before the masters withdrew again to wherever it is they go outside of the school year, I asked Allen something about whether he was going to Charlie's for Christmas. And, I guess, there was an edge to it when I said it. I didn't mean there to be.

The thing is that I've always wanted to be part of what these people have, and there's a sense in which I always feel excluded. There are things students aren't allowed to join, there is Charlie being prickly and growling to keep others--sometimes me--and there is the fact I'm just not as close to them as they are to each other. I'm not really being excluded or rejected, but somehow it just feels like I am. Allen would say I'm being emotionally needy. And sometimes it shows.

And Allen can always tell.

I said whatever I said and he grinned at me fondly.

"I'm always amused," he said, "That you yearn so deeply for that which you already have."

Mastery Year 3: Part 7: Post 5: Thanksgiving

Happy (Belated) Thanksgiving.

As per our usual, we went to my parents' house. We'll go to June's parents for Christmas and New Years, she got enough time off for that. I've always kind of wanted to stay on campus for Thanksgiving, just to see what it's like (I understand that, as with Christmas, there's nothing formal planned, but sometimes there are informal gatherings), but it appears that won't happen. Every year when I have the choice, I choose to do something else.

My brother and his wife and kids came too, and all the various aunts and uncles, and all in all it was a fairly mundane good time. Nobody comments on my weird school anymore--in fact, I'm not sure my aunts and uncles know I'm still a student, since I'm not in a degree program anymore. When they ask what I'm up to, I explain I'm working part-time for a landscaping company while teaching a few courses as an adjunct at my old school. It's not un-true, and while it's not the whole and complete truth, it gives them a more accurate picture than the complete truth would. I've gotten much better, more graceful at explaining myself, just as Allen said I would. My immediate family knows the whole picture, and they've gotten pretty graceful about it, too.

So we ate and played and cooked and cleaned (not in that order), and not much that's specifically memorable happened.

Except.

Towards the end of the evening, after the aunts and uncles left (I mean the older aunts and uncles; June and I and Cecilly were all still present) and before the dishes and such started, the kids talked us all into playing hide and seek. Not that I needed much persuasion; I always liked hide and seek as a kid, and the only reason I don't enjoy it more now is that I've gotten so tall that it's hard to fit myself into any decent hiding space.

Anyway, I ended up seeking the first round, so I didn't need to hide anywhere. I expected to find my brother first, because he's bigger than I am and has the same problem but worse. Instead, I found him next-to-last. Where was he?

He was standing in a corner on a bucket facing the wall. I'd walked right by him dozens of times.

I've gotten fairly used to feeling stupid over my obliviousness at school, but I hadn't thought it would follow me home. I thought I was on vacation from that particular kind of mortification. I'd thought wrong.

Curiously, one of my nephews tried a very similar trick, standing still in a corner behind a bookshelf. He hadn't known where his dad was hiding, so I guess maybe it's genetic? But I found the kid instantly upon walking into the room where he was.

What was the man doing that the boy wasn't?

Answer; my brother wasn't behind anything. He was in a place where it was literally impossible to hide, and so I hadn't bothered to look there. That is, he was using Charlie's trick of being where nobody was looking, but he was doing it in a circumstance-specific way. Had I not been looking for anyone, and therefore focused narrowly on the kinds of places where it is possible to hide, I would have seen my brother.

Hmmmm.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 6: Labor Day

You know, I've never done a post on Labor Day before. I mean, about Labor Day, I'm aware it isn't Labor Day now.

Of course, there is a good reason; we seldom do much of anything about it. We've never had the day off, for example, though some of the masters usually take the day and leave their classes with substitutes. Joy, for example, does, so she can spend the day with her daughter. A few students who live nearby take the day to visit family, though I never have. There have been years when the Sprouts came on campus for the day, though this year they did not.

And of course usually Greg does one of his history talks. I've never attended it--until this year.

I went because Steve had been seriously considering leading it--he's already teaching History of American Labor Movement, along with all his other history classes, and Greg has been toying with the idea of turning over some of his talks to Steve, too. As Greg explained a while back (though he was actually talking about something else at the time), he wants to get things in order for his eventual full retirement because "it would be amusingly ironic if the campus Buddhist forgot he was going to die eventually."

But be that as it may, Greg decided to keep the talk for himself this year, and after hearing Steve talk about whether he could do the talk and how he could do the talk and whether he even wanted to do the talk, and so on, for the better part of a week, my curiosity was snagged--I had to see this famous talk.

It was interesting, though not surprisingly so in any way. I learned a few new things, but it wasn't mind-blowing for me. I guess you get used to well-delivered history lectures, after a while. We had it outside, on the Central Field, because the weather was nice, not so hot as it was last week--it doesn't look like Fall, yet, but Fall is coming. There weren't even a lot of mosquitoes as it's been pretty dry, lately.

But afterwards, as everyone was getting their things and heading off to do other things, one of the yearlings spoke up, more to herself than to anyone else, but we all heard her:

"Well, at least we did something for Labor Day."

"What more would you rather we have done?" asked Greg.

She turned to him, blushing a little, I think--I guess she was embarrassed that she'd said it aloud? Her words could have been interpreted as critical of Greg and the other masters. After a minute, she got her words together.

"Well, it's Labor Day," she said. "We're supposed to have the day off. To celebrate the American worker."

"And how much did you learn about the labor movement on your days off?" Greg asked.

So I guess we do something for the holiday after all.

Mastery Year 3: Part 4: Post 3: Fourth of July

Note: I'm writing this as though today were after the Fourth, not before it. Also, please remember this whole thing is set ten years ago. -D.

Why do we have Independence Day Observed? What's wrong with celebrating the Fourth of July on the July 4th, on Saturday? I suppose it has something to do with giving people who have the weekends off an extra day out of work, but plenty of people work on the weekends, so the relocation of the holiday must do nothing for them. That July 4th isn't the day independence was actually declared--July 2nd was--makes the whole thing seem ironic to me.

Anyway, we here on campus don't take off for Independence Day to begin with, so we just went ahead and celebrated on the 4th, an advantage because it meant my brother could bring the kids over for the day. Of course, the fireworks were still on Friday, we don't have any control over that, but I don't really care about fireworks anymore anyway. I do care about spending time with my family and I find I do care about American history.

I had some free time in the morning, so we found Charlie and got him to give us a project we could do with my brother's kids. He assigned us beetling, of course (more accurately, de-beetling--you go around and knock Japanese beetles off plants and into coffee cans of soapy water), but surprised me by choosing to prune hedges nearby. He didn't talk to us much, but I could tell he was being companionable. We all talked less because of his silence. Then I taught a workshop in the afternoon--unrelated to the holiday, I'm sorry to say--and then met up with my family again for dinner.

After dinner, as usual, Greg read the Declaration of Independence in the long evening. No particular discussion or lesson developed, we just all gathered to listen and it was nice. A couple of students played an instrumental version of the Star Spangled Banner, and my niece, Ruthie, who is seven now, melted my heart by singing along with her hand over her chest. It's a very pretty song, really.

"What did you do this afternoon?" I thought to ask, after the song, while everyone was dispersing. She didn't answer at first, then gasped and started talking very fast--she'd forgotten she had news for me.

"We went to Steve Bees' workshop--that's called auditing, did you know that? And it was all about the Founding Fathers, and this was the last day of it and they did a play that they'd practiced by reading and stuff and so everyone in the workshop played a different Founding Father and there wasn't a script, they just knew their parts and made it up as they went along--that's called improv, did you know that? And they all, all the Founders, got into a big fight, they were all yelling at each other, and my favorite were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson because they were friends and they died today except years and years ago, did you know that? We didn't know about the play, we just happened upon it by accident and it was SO MUCH FUN! Did you know there was going to be a play, Uncle Daniel?"

No, I did not. I hadn't thought to ask. Some people have all the luck. 

Mastery Years 3: Part 2: Post 5: Earth Day

"Are we doing anything for Earth Day?" asked a yearling named Adam. "I had thought we would, but I haven't heard anything."

I must have looked quite blank, because June laughed at me.

"Today's Monday, you know," she informed me. "In April, if you want be precise."

"I know what day it is!" I retorted. "I just didn't know it was Earth Day. It's Earth Day? Really?"

"Sure. My school's doing a whole big thing about it. We've been planning it for weeks." June, you might remember, has a job as an environmental education coordinator at a private school nearby. Sometimes she tells me about her work, but apparently she hasn't lately. I sat there, probably looking confused, a bit disconcerted by this apparent lack of communication between my wife and I.

"So, we're not doing anything here?" pressed Adam.

"We're not," I told him, "not that I know of, and we haven't before, but you can."

"Why not? I would have thought you would."

"Well, we will if you make it happen," said June. "Come on, be the change!"

But Adam shook his head.

"I'm not going to try to change anything until I understand why things are the way they are. Maybe there's a good reason and I've missed something." Smart man, Adam.

"You know, I don't know," I admitted. "We've never talked about it since I've been here. Maybe we don't need it? Unless you think we do?"

"I don't know, I'm just used to environmentalists celebrating Earth Day."

We were quiet for a while, eating, and then somebody brought up an unrelated topic, and we talked about that until they called for announcements at the end of breakfast. None of the announcements were particularly interesting, except that somebody said something about rescheduling a workshop on something or other, and I think that gave Adam an idea.

"Hey, Daniel," he said, just as we were heading up to put our trays away, "you lead workshops. Do you think you could do one about environmental stuff on campus? Like, why do we do the things we do here? How does it all work? I was thinking, maybe you all are already perfect and don't need Earth Day or whatever, but how am I supposed to participate if I don't know what's going on? Maybe if we knew more about how campus runs, we could figure out ways to run it better?"

And I stood there like a bell that had been struck, not doing anything but ringing. I'd been worrying there might not be much I could add to the curriculum, but he's totally right, I could teach that--and it's not a workshop, it's a class.

Out of the mouths of yearlings, I suppose.

Mastery Year 2: Part 4: Post 3: 4th of July

This post is for the 4^th of July. Odd circumstances prevented my posting it as scheduled.-D.

Today, Greg read the Declaration of Independence aloud. No big surprise there, he usually does a historical talk on the Fourth. Then he asked whether we believed the birthday of the country deserves to be celebrated. Instant intellectual pandemonium.

It’s not that everyone began talking at once, they didn’t, it’s that the answers came quickly, were many, varied, and in most cases assumed to be self-evident by their advocates.

“Of course it does, this is the greatest country on Earth.”

“Of course it doesn’t, the whole thing was a lie from the get-go. Thomas Jefferson owned people.”

“Adams and Franklin didn’t. They wrote the Declaration, too.”

“Whatever. Slavery was legal. Women couldn’t vote.”

“But signing the Declaration created the harmonic potential that manifested in universal adult franchise.”

“That doesn’t begin to pay off the karmic debt of owning people.”

“Or annihilating Native American groups.”

“Native Americans are still here.”

“Not all of them.”

“Or re-enslaving black people through the prison system.”

“Or discriminating against women or LGBT people.”

“Nobody has ever been denied the right to vote for being gay.”

“You can’t vote if you can’t live.”

“That’s a different issue.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Right or wrong, the founding of our country was still a Big Deal. It deserves to be observed.”

“Yeah, but as what, though? The country we pretend to be, or the one we actually are?”

“The country we pretend to be is also the country we are. Both are true.”

“That’s completely illogical.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“When it was founded, this country was the free-est in the world. You have to look at it in historical context.”

“No, it wasn’t. The Iroquois Confederacy was.”

“It’s still the free-est country in the world. We have our faults, but so does everybody else.”

“Some countries have fewer faults than we do.”

“Have you ever lived in any of these supposedly free-er countries? They’re socialist.”

“Have you ever lived in them?”

“Wasn’t the United States founded mostly by Freemasons? How many other countries can say that? George Washington himself was a weather witch.”

“He was not.”

“He had to have been.”

“He owned slaves, too.”

While all of these ideas were flurrying about, Greg stood still and upright, his hands behind his back, his iron-grey hair clumped to his scalp by sweat because he still wore his long-sleeved full uniform while standing in the sun. Steve sat off to the side, equally attentive, looking less like a recalcitrant student and more like the teacher he can be.

When the flurry simmered down, Greg looked at Steve, and Steve spoke up.

“The tradition of patriotic, principled resistance that the Founders enshrined is what we still use to fight against the wrongs they took for granted,” he said.

My nephew, Paul, who had wandered over from one of the camp activities to stand by me, tugged on my shirt.

“Why do we have fireworks in July?” he asked. “The days are so long, it takes forever to get dark.”

“Sometimes they have fireworks in December, too,” I reminded him. “For New Year’s Eve.”

“That is a much better idea,” he said.

Mastery Year 1: 8th Interlude

Happy New Year, both past and present! Daniel of 2017, here, though it may well be 2018 by the time you read this. Usually I do an interlude before the sabbat, but since very little of note happened on campus in January of 2008, I'm going to take my traditional narrative break, and it seemed silly to put to or three posts in Part 8 before the break when I could just continue Part 7 instead.

I'm going to continue posting in January, but I'll use those posts to wrap up some loose ends. The problem is that I didn't originally plan to write about my years as a candidate, so I didn't think carefully about how I was going to tell the story--and then I launched my way into it, still not thinking. The result was a disjointed narrative that left some important threads out. What I should have done was to use June's yearling experience as the basic framework for the entire year, with our marriage, my work as a candidate, and the tension that developed between me and Charlie as important sub-themes.

I should also have introduced several of the yearlings, and several of the senior students who arrived during my Absence as characters, and followed the development of my fellow candidates more closely. Most especially, I should have talked more about Ebony, not only because she is my friend and her presence very much mattered to me, but also because there was some initial tension between her and June that I should have explored. It was not that either was jealous over me, they both knew better, but neither quite knew what their relationship with each other should be. It took them some months to really work that out.

All this is water under the bridge, of course, as I can't fix the past, but going on into the future, I'd like to cover some things for which the aforementioned missing stories provide needed background. Hence, the posts of January.

What were June and I doing in January of 2008? She attended Zazen daily and group therapy weekly and finished up some things for her masters to ensure she had everybody's votes to graduate. She also worked closely with Sharon to begin the process of accepting enrollments for the children's summer camp, which she would direct as an ally. I visited my special spot in the woods daily and wrote my poetry and caught up on editing and re-editing my earlier poems. I had long discussions with Sharon about what workshops I might offer over the first month and a half of the coming year, and by the end of the January I had a full slate of workshops designed and turned into her for addition to the schedule. I also did a lot of reading and a lot of wandering around contemplatively. I spent several long weekends at home with my parents.

And, of course, I generally avoided telling June about the Ordeal. That was hard, but I managed. With certain repercussions, which we worked through.

What did we do New Years' Eve?

New Years' Eve we had our traditional low-key party, just most people on campus collecting in the Great Hall for drinks after dinner. That year, we also had some great cookies, bourbon balls, fruit cake (I like fruit cake!) and assorted other munches that many of us, me included, ate way too much of. Some of the masters wandered in and out, but none stayed very long. As usual, Greg spend the most time with us, almost an hour. Nobody got drunk, and none of us got entertainingly goofy with exhaustion, either. We did not go outside and have a parade, as we did my first year, which was just as well as the night was very cold.

Maybe twenty minutes before midnight, I went upstairs to look for something, I forget what--it may have been a copy of one of my poems that I wanted to share--and couldn't find it. I went rifling through my books and papers and drawers and boxes and piles to no avail, and I lost track of time.

Finally, June appeared at my door and got my attention by flicking off the light. I looked up to see her almost silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. She had a glass of hard cider in each hand.

"It's almost midnight," she said.
"How almost?" I asked.
"I don't know. I don't have a watch."

So, we stepped out onto my balcony and waited. The night was still and crystalline and salted with stars. We got colder and colder, and wrapped our cloaks about each other like the wings of a pair of bats. After perhaps five minutes, noise bloomed along the horizon, distant cheers, celebratory gunshots, and a few fire crackers. We could not hear anything from downstairs, the building being very well insulated. Of course we'd closed the door behind us.

We toasted each other and the new year, there on my balcony, in the starlit dark.

Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 3: Thanksgiving

Note; in 2007, Thanksgiving fell on November 22'nd, so I'm making this my Thanksgiving post, even though it's written as though Thanksgiving had already happened.-D.

My first Thanksgiving as a married man.

I hadn't thought much about this particular milestone, it's not like we weren't together last Thanksgiving, and it's not like Thankgiving really changes much, depending on whether you're a bachelor, but it turns out it matters anyway.

For one thing, it matters practically. Now that we're married, everyone seems to assume we'll spend the holidays together--it doesn't feel like I'm bringing a guest to dinner anymore--but at the same time, fewer people expect that I'll necessarily spend Thanksgiving with my parents. June said she wanted her turn. Her parents wanted their turn. But I like spending Thanksgiving with my family. I hadn't really anticipated that this would become an Issue. It's not like we never go see her family.

In the end, we decided the question is moot--her parents live farther away, and since June is a yearling, she can't take much time off away from campus. So, we're doing Thanksgiving with my parents again. But I expect next year she'll have to get her turn. It will be fair.

June donated her car to the school in partial payment, so we're once again a carless couple. On Wednesday, we got a ride with another yearling going our way, and June got to join her little support group of Women Who Love Kretzmans to discuss the baking of pies, while I went out for a drink with a couple of guys I knew back in high school. I know that sounds horribly sexist, me going out and leaving my wife home cooking with the other womenfolk, but it's what she wanted to do. Kit would say that "feminism is the radical proposition that women are people--it doesn't mean we people can't bake pies."

The next morning, I sat zazen with June--I hadn't sat in a long time, but I wanted to keep her company. As usual when I sit, I had the momentary urge to get back to a regular practice, but these urges are never strong enough for me to actually follow through on them. Then my brother and his wife and their kids came back over (they had stayed in a hotel--there's getting to be a lot of them), my uncles and aunts and this time two of my cousins and we all filled the house with cooking smells and small children shrieking, that the largely disregarded sounds of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then we had dinner.

Thanksgivings are much more enjoyable now than when I was a novice, especially that first year when everybody looked at me like I had two heads and my one uncle got mixed up and thought I was studying to become an Episcopal priest. It was like suddenly running into culture shock in my own family and it was horrible. That doesn't happen, now. Partly it's that they're all used to my association with the school, partly it's that I've gotten better at talking about it so that the place doesn't sound weird to people who really aren't interested in it, like my uncle, and partly it's that I'm not the only one in the family involved anymore--my brother's kids are sprouts, my wife is a novice, my parents invite Kit and Allen over coffee the day after Thanksgiving....

But it's more than that.

I did dishes after the big meal, as per tradition, and June dried them. Everything seemed familiar and good, and I passed a platter to June to dry and thought 'this woman is my wife. I get to stay with her." And she told me the platter still had soap on it and that I needed to rinse it again, and that was the fourth time she told me such a thing, so I daubed soap-suds in her hair and she put the platter down and chased me all around the kitchen, and I don't know what she was planning on doing when she caught me because I caught her first and we spent minutes at a time there in the kitchen, kissing, playing hooky from dishes entirely.

The next day, in the evening, Kit and Allen came to pick us up--and for coffee. They'd already dropped off the kids and Lo, but Kit's husband, Kevin, was with them. My Dad hadn't met Kevin before, I don't think, and my Dad seemed a little uncomfortable around him. My Dad needs to get over his crush on Kit, every part of how he handles it is ridiculous. At least Mom has quit taking it seriously.

Kevin never goes anywhere without his guitar, so he let my parents talk him into playing and singing a few of his songs, mostly stuff he performs with the Blue Pixies. Allen and I stood off in a corner watching my parents listening to live pagan folk punk, some love song about a man and a rather more literal (male) fairy. And they seemed comfortable with it, somehow.

"This almost looks normal," I said, to Allen. "It's like, school used to seem like Avalon, or something, but the worlds don't seem that different, now."

"I bet you feel like that even with your uncles," he said. "Even with people who have never heard of the school, and wouldn't like it if they did. Am I right?"

"Yeah. It's like the different parts of my life are merging. I don't get culture shock out here, anymore. Why?"

"It's because you carry the school within you, now," he said.

Mastery Year 1: Interlude 7

Hi, all, this is Daniel-of-2017, and I am genuinely curious how I only got through four posts between sabbats this time. Wasn't it just Mabon a few weeks ago?

It's not just that time seems to be flying, though that happens, too. It's that there are six weeks between sabbats, so why did I only get four weekly posts in? The problem must be that I posted for Mabon late, whereas I'm posting a little early for Samhain. I don't want to simply pass the organizational buck to the next season, after all. I want to prepare for this holiday early.

Samhain is harder to forget about than Mabon or Lunasadh, or several of the others, because it coincides with a mainstream holiday, Halloween. It's funny, I know a lot of Wiccans who really like Halloween, who see it as very much an extension of Samhain, but as I started noticing my first year on campus, the two holidays are very different. Samhain honors and celebrates the dead as beings who are still part of our lives, people who are welcome to come have dinner with us, if they can. The symbols of fruit (pumpkins, apples, pomegranates) and seeds (corn, acorns) and gorgeous fall leaves (rather delayed, in the case of this year--our area has been well above normal in temperature for weeks, now) all hint at sweetness, fullness, and the promise of regeneration. Samhain is about the thing that does not die at death. In contrast, Halloween, with its symbols of bones and blood, tombstones, and scavenging rats, focuses very much on the things that die.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with celebrating Halloween, but it's not really my thing, especially since there's no rule that says you can't celebrate Samhain and eat Halloween candy at the same time. But I am kind of surprised that so many people like both holidays--something about being "witchy."

I'm not sure what else to say. I'd planned to spend a few more weeks talking about the end of June's school year and the progress my fellow candidates were making, but then again, I also planned to talk about some of the novices I met that year, especially the yearlings who made up most of June's new friends, and here I realize I've introduced NONE of them as characters...most of what I plan doesn't happen, but then things I didn't plan do happen, and that's usually better.

In any case, I do remember being sad about the annual eclipse of the faculty--the masters mostly leave campus after Samhain, and those who remain are not generally available to talk to students. I was, at the time, in a difficult middle position where I was genuinely friends with some of them, even close friends, and yet when they distanced themselves from students in order to take a break from working, they distanced themselves from me, too. Too, I had spent so much of the summer and early fall feeling angry and rebellious at Charlie, and as a result, he'd become angry at me, and it felt like just as we were starting to get along again when he went away.

Of course, that's the one scary thing about Samhain and all it represents--however early you start preparing, in some sense it is always a surprise. There is never enough time

Year 4: Seventh Interlude

Hello.

I'm sitting here--in 2016--listening to Jimmy Buffet singing (on  recording, of course):

So this is Christmas
(war is over)
Another year older
A new one just begun.

War is not over, of course. Neither is climate change, or the vast specter of the threat loomed by Donald Trump. I have a hard time with Christmas sometimes--saying that Jesus is born and now everything will be great and it just isn't.


But Christmas is a good time to remind ourselves of these values and to recommit. As long as the line is not crossed into feel-good delusion, it is a positive thing.

And recommit we do. We, as a community, have made a decision to re-open the school as a school with its own campus. We don't know yet what that will look like, but it won't be the same as it was before--our original model was too vulnerable, as events showed us, so we'll have to embed the school inside some kind of larger project, to give it greater protective camouflage. It will probably take us some years to work out our plans and raise the necessary money, but we've set the process in motion--this year's returning of the light, if you will.

We've made this decision because, just as the outer world has grown to resemble our community more over the past few years, we now fear the two are getting less alike. Living out in the world as we do, it's going to get harder and harder to not be influenced by that shift--or to not be exhausted by the effort of constantly maintaining deliberate cultural dissonance. Re-creating our counter-cultural bubble gives us another option.

Not that we want to hide in the bubble. We did that before, and we've come to think that was a mistake, a shirking of responsibility. But we need a refuge, a place to recharge and to center, a place to radiate from...when you want to work (or play) outside in the winter, you need a warm refuge nearby, an assurance of safely. Otherwise, all your time and energy must be occupied with survival and you can't to the work or ply you came outside to do.

Anyway, at the moment we--June and Carly and I, and my brother and his family--are at my parents' house. Since June and I have switched our attention to Solstice, visiting our parents for the holiday has gotten simpler, since we don't have a family Christmas to compete for time and attention. If June had only been raised Jewish, holiday planning would be simpler yet (I mean because the grandparents would not be in competition over us for the same holiday). Except this year, of course, since Chanukah and Christmas coincide.

Thirteen years ago today, I was also at my parents' house. I got a ride from another student (I forget who) the day after Yule, and stayed at home for something like two or three weeks before returning to campus--we were supposed to spend most of January on campus because of vaguely described duties related to graduation.

I'm going to simply skip over those weeks in my narrative, then spend January in a series of posts that don't have much to do with the date. I explained a little about that already.

But for now, I wanted to talk a little about something Steve Bees told me when we met up again on campus after the holiday.

Steve could have gone home to Ohio for Christmas, but then he wouldn't have been able to spend much time with his girlfriend over her college break. So instead, he stayed on campus except for Christmas itself, when he went to Charlie's sister's house, with Charlie.

When he told me about going there for Thanksgiving, I didn't think to ask a lot of questions. This time, I asked whether Charlie was any different when he wasn't on campus--but I couldn't get Steve to understand what I meant. Eventually, I tried asking what the holiday was like and he told me the story and so I finally extracted the information I wanted.

Charlie and Steve arrived n hour or so before dinner on Christmas Eve and all his grand-nieces and -nephews reacted as though Santa Clause had just shown up. Charlie did bring presents, but they also wanted his company and competed for his attention. Throughout the evening the other adults (sister, Maria, her husband, brother, Mario, and various grown nieces and nephews) all treated Charlie as the guest of honor--and he responded. And he wasn't grumpy or growly at all. He was relaxed, good-natured, and slightly self-centered, accepting the attention as though it were his due and happily lecturing everybody on whatever topics came into his head. I remember his sister once told told me "he's always been the center of us," and from Steve's description, he still was.

In contrast, Charlie's brother, Mario, hardly spoke. He wasn't unfriendly, Steve said, just quiet. The only time he spoke that Steve could really think of was when Charlie and his sister were speaking Italian in order to not be understood by the kids and one of Maria's grown daughters said "that's not not going to work for much longer, Mom, the kids are learning Italian in school." Mario spoke up to say he didn't understand why the whole family stayed so fixated on Italian.

"They're American," he said. "Italian won't get you anywhere. Americans should learn Spanish or French. Or, these days, Farsi or something." Mario is the only one who retains an Italian accent and who remembers even a few words of their fathers' dialect. He doesn't speak Italian otherwise. Charlie and Maria are fluent in the Italian they learned in school, which was not the same dialect.

Charlie replied, in Spanish, something like "where can I go with my Spanish but not my Italian? There are Italians in Mexico and Spain, yes?"

(Steve told me the English translation he extracted from Maria later. I'm guessing it was something like donde puedo ir con mi Espanol pero no mi Italia? Hay Italianos in Mexico y Espania, si? But that's my high school Spanish guessing.)

Mario replied, in his high school Spanish, "Yes, but the Italians who emigrate to Mexico and Spain learn the language of their new country."

And one of the grand-nieces giggled, clearly understanding the somewhat playful exchange, and Charlie turned to his sister and said "sounds like St. Nickolas is going to have to use Latin," in Latin. "Or French," Maria said, in French.

"Actually, I understand some French," said the grand-niece, in Italian.

Steve was much impressed.


The whole family, including Charlie, went to Midnight Mass, and in the morning spent approximately 426 years opening gifts, given how many people were assembled there. Then, after brunch, the kids played with their new toys and Charlie and Mario played video games with each other--recapturing their boyhoods, except of course when they were boys, video games did not exist.

Then, who should show up mid-afternoon but Allen, Lo, and their kids. They stayed for dinner and actually stayed the night--the kids all merged together into one indivisible group of cousins (related and otherwise) and Allen joined the gaming brothers for a while.

Steve hadn't known that Allen and Charlie were friends. I had known, but I didn't know they spent Christmas dinner together. Steve said they were nearly inseparable the whole evening, except when Allen tried to involve himself in making dinner. After the meal, Charlie played his tin whistle for everyone.

So, was Charlie different when he wasn't thinking about being a teacher?

In some ways he obviously wasn't. In other ways...I have a hard time imagining him playing his whistle so openly on campus, nor does he normally go on about the things he knows without being asked. From Steve's description, he sounded more relaxed, less self-conscious, and more social than I'd ever seen him. 

Year 4: Part 7: Post 5: Thanksgiving

Yes, the math doesn't quite work out for this post--more than a week went by between this post and last week's post.-D.

I went home for Thanksgiving again. I kind of wanted to take someone home with me, someone who didn't have a family to spend the holiday with, since that's something we do, but I didn't start asking around, making myself available early enough. Everyone who needed someplace to go already has some place. There are many magics around the school I still don't understand, and one is how to make myself available as a helper--people come tome when they want to talk, but not when they need help of any other kind, and so my generosity remains more of a theoretical thing. That bothers me.

I also wanted to make Thanksgiving...more religious. Like, maybe do a Thankyou Doll, since I've heard Charlie does one for Thanksgiving as well as for Mabon. Or do a gratitude service of some kind. Something more than just chatting over dinner about what each person is grateful for. What whatever could have been, I didn't get that organized, either, and the meal went along just about as it normally does.

The only odd thing is that my uncle, the one I had such a hard time with a few years ago, wasn't there. He travels a lot for work, and the plane he was going to take home on Wednesday night was cancelled due to some weather problem. He decided he didn't want to spend Thanksgiving morning on an airplane. I can't say I blame him, but I was surprised at how much I missed him, considering what a pain he can be.

I actually stretched my visit for over two weeks, by catching a ride home with one group of people and catching a ride back with another. I'm going to spend most of January on campus this year, since I've been told there are things I'll have to be there for as a graduating student, so I'm compensating, both financially and socially, with longer trips home over Thanksgiving and Christmas. My ride back, of course, was Allen and Kit, this time without kids or spouses. And this time they stayed for a while.

They've come in for drinks when they picked me up before, two years ago, but that was different. That was my parents self-consciously inviting in people they weren't sure they'd understand or like. But since then my brother and sister-in-law have spent Litha on a picnic blanket next to both Allen's family and Kit's. They've said hello when they bump into each other when my parents come to campus to visit for the day. They've bought and listened to a CD recorded by one of Keven's bands because Kit sings on a couple of the tracks. And so this time my parents invited my teachers in as friends, of a kind. Or at least prospective friends.

My mother had actually suggested, earlier in the day, that I call Allen and Kit and invite them to stay for coffee and dessert. They said yes.

Specifically Kit said "Oh, lovely!" and Allen said "Dessert. I'm in favor of dessert. Also coffee."

So, they came in. They both praised my mother's baking (there was a rather gooey single-layer chocolate cake, served with a choice of coffee-flavored or caramel-flavored ice cream, the pies from Thanksgiving having been eaten already, plus some left-over cookies, mostly oatmeal butterscotch or gingersnap) and politely answered my parent's questions, some of which were strange, and asked a couple of polite questions of their own--how were the grandchildren, how were Cecilly's college applications going, how was work, that sort of thing.

At one point, my Dad asked whether Allen and Kit were married. Evidently, he'd forgotten meeting Kit's husband two years ago. Mom hadn't forgotten, and she looked at Dad in surprise. Allen and Kit looked at each other, then turned to my Dad and, simultaneously, one said yes and the other said no.

"We are married, but not to each other," Allen clarified.

"We're not a couple," added Kit.

Dad laughed uncomfortably and apologized.

"Don't apologize," said Allen, "I'd be honored. Kit, here, is a catch. I simply caught a better one." He was teasing.

"Not as good as the one I caught," teased Kit right back.

"Hmmm, are you suggesting I try your husband?" Allen asked.

"If you can lure him away," said Kit. "I don't think you can."

Two years ago, my parents might have taken all that literally and terrified themselves with the thought that my professors were sex fiends. Actually, I don't know that it couldn't be literal--lots of people on campus are in open relationships, and I really don't know anything about how Kit and Allen arrange their sex lives. Nor do I care. But they didn't mean it to be taken literally, and my parents took it as a joke and busted up laughing.

Ice broken, my parents and my teachers started swapping stories of what Thanksgiving had been like when they were kids. My parents are older, but not that much older, and they had childhood experiences in common. Eventually, Allen talked some about his brother, who liked helping prepare the meal and had his responsibilities which he guarded jealously, and who was inexplicably frightened of the balloons on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The creation of both the cookies and the cranberry sauce had to be scheduled so that the brother could do them without having to be in the house while the parade was on. He couldn't even bear to hear the balloons described by the news anchors. He'd throw an anxiety-fueled fit.

"Why didn't you just not have the parade on?" my mother asked, sensibly.

"Because I'd throw a fit if we didn't," explained Allen. "We had opposite preoccupations. But really, I didn't know the parade bothered him. David was older than I was. I think I was very young, and not paying very much attention, when the tradition was established."

"Your mother must have had her hands full," my Dad said.

I remember, later, Kit in the living room with my mother, old records playing, teaching my mother to swing dance, while my Dad and Allen sat together at the dining room table sipping bourbon and watching the women through the doorway.

"Of course, you realize now I'll have to learn to dance," said my father.

"There are worse fates, said Allen.

I said very little the whole night.

At around ten o'clock, Kit suddenly realized the time and said "we need to stay or go now," and of course that song popped into our heads, and we all had to sing it and get goofy, but in the end we decided to go and I followed Kit and Allen out to the car. Allen had group therapy the next day, so he was staying on campus, but Kit would go home after dropping us off. It was her car. I have no idea where Keven was.

Once we were in the car and had been driving for a few minutes, I asked whether they really just liked my parents, or if they were trying to make friends with them on purpose in order to pull me further into the community. In other words, was what I had just seen socialization or magic?

"That depends," said Allen. "Is the magic working?"

Year 4: Part 7: Post 4: Problems

And, election-related interruptions over for the time being, our story continues….-D.

Last night, Steve Bees’ girlfiriend, Sarah, stayed over. She’ll stay over again tonight—she’s here to get more of a feel for the place, I suppose, plus, of course, they don’t get to spend a lot of time together. This morning she joined us for breakfast in the Great Hall, where we had oatmeal, fresh corn muffins, butter, cheese, and several different kinds of jam. There is no fresh milk and, today, no eggs. There are no large tables in the Great Hall, and only the one in the Bird Room, so we made a picnic of it around a small table by the door to the library and we ate looking out the window. There was snow last night, the first of the year, and it left a light dusting, white on the sere, winter pastures, that melted as we ate.

When I say “we,” I mean Steve and Sarah, Kayla and Nora--that is, the Nora who started when I did, not the yearling--Eddie, and me. There were a lot of other people eating breakfast in the Great Hall that morning, of course, but we couldn’t all eat together because what I said about the tables.

“So, what do you think?” asked Eddie of Sarah.

“I’ll take it!” she replied, referring to campus, to our community.

“Well, leave some for us!” Eddie said, laughing.

“Don’t worry, we’ll share,” said Sarah, looking at Steve as though she meant to divide the entire school equally between the two of them. She would not stop flirting with him for more than a few minutes at a time. He gazed back at her with a mix of awkwardness and pride. I think her presence made him feel vulnerable among us in a way he normally doesn’t.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said, smiling.

“You’re lucky,” interjected Kayla. “I’ve seen people whose partners didn’t like this place and that didn’t really work. Not long-term, I mean.”

“Kayla!” said Nora, as though Kayla had said something embarrassingly direct, the way children sometimes do. Nora has been going through a phase of treating Kayla like a kid sister lately.

“What?” protested the kid sister, “It’s not like we don’t all know they’re an item!”

“This corn bread is really good,” said Sarah, changing the subject. “If I were you, Steve, I wouldn’t ever leave this place. I wouldn’t graduate, the food’s too good.”

“Maybe I won’t,” he said, still smiling.

“No,” she said, her mouth still full of corn bread, “because I am not you, I’m me, and I will kick your ass if you don’t become the awesome lawyer we both know you were meant to be.”

“You see what I have to deal with?” exclaimed Steve, in mock exasperation.

“Nice problem to have,” I told him.

“I want that problem,” said Eddie.

“So, go out and get yourself a girlfriend,” said Sarah. “You’re a handsome guy.”

“He knows that already,” I said, in a stage whisper.

“Which girl, though?” said Eddie. “They’re all so wonderful, I want all of them. That is my problem, and that’s why I don’t have your problem.”

“That, too, is a nice problem to have,” I said.

“I know, it’s glorious,” sighed Eddie, licking fruit preserve off his fingers and looking over his plate for the next thing to eat. Rumor has it he has slept with at least a quarter of the female population of the school. None of them are complaining, it’s just that none of them want to share him with quite so many others long-term.

“You’re really going to do the lawyer thing?” I asked, of Steve.

“Sure. I actually got in.” He meant into one of the law schools he’d applied to.

“Really? Congratulations! I didn’t know that. I didn’t think anyone was taking applications for next fall, yet, though.”

“They’re not. This one starts in the spring. What are you doing?”

“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “I’m getting a masters’ degree in conservation biology and see where things go from there.”

“Is that a deer?” Sarah asked, looking out the window. We all looked, watching as the deer—there were actually three of them—walked up onto the Flat Field and then behind the yew hedge, headed for the Apple Orchard.

“The two smaller ones are her fawns from this past year,” I commented. “I see her a lot. She likes it here on the main part of campus, maybe because there’s no hunting.”

“It’s going to be so weird next year when you’re not here,” said Kayla, to me.

“Imagine how weird it will be for us?” I countered.

“Actually, I don’t think it will be weird at all,” said Steve.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Kayla’s used to you being here, so campus will seem weird without you, but we’re not used to seeing Kayla at grad school. We’re not used to grad school at all, so however it ends up being, that’s how it will be. It won’t seem weird at all.”

“That’s true,” I said, but I wasn’t really sure.

“Think about this,” he said, “when you first left home for college, who was that weirder for, you or your parents?”

“I don’t know. My parents, I guess. It didn’t seem weird to me at all. I never thought about that before.”

“I bet your parents did, though.”

“Steve, you continually open my eyes,” I told him, and meant it.

“And you mine,” he said, and clearly meant it.

“What are you all doing for Thanksgiving?” asked Nora. I already knew she was going home to celebrate with her mother, still an awkward thing for both of them.

“Going to my parents,” I said, shrugging a little. I always go home for Thanksgiving.

“I have a sister,” said Eddie. “She’s not a shit, like my parents are, so I’ll have dinner with her.”

Sarah’s eyebrows went up at that, but Eddie didn’t elaborate. The rest of us already knew why Eddie called his parents shits, and that they had called him worse, but we didn’t explain, either.

“Well, I’m going home, too,” said Sarah. “I’d rather stay here with this one, but I have obligations this year.” And she didn’t elaborate.

“I’m going with Charlie to his sister’s place,” said Steve, and I looked at him in surprise.

“How’d you get that invite?” I asked.

Steve shrugged.

“Last year I gave Charlie a ride there and back—Maria lives pretty close to Sarah—and this year when he asked if we could do that again, I told him Sarah would be out of town this year, he invited me to celebrate with him. Sarah—I mean, the farm manager, Sarah—and her family are going, too.”

“He’s never given me an invitation like that,” I said, and I’m afraid I sounded more jealous than I wanted to.

“Maybe you didn’t need it,” Steve told me. “And that is a nice problem to have.”

Year 4: Part 4: Post 3: Science!

The 4th fell on a Friday in 2003. This is written as though today were the following Monday.-D.

Happy 4th of July.

As has become usual, I all but ignored the holiday and made no attempt to go see fireworks. Greg didn't even do his traditional talk--he put it off until Saturday--because Friday evening is reserved for the dorm dinners. Any day you can eat in your dorm, there's food provided, but Friday is the day actually set aside for us to connect as a group over a meal. We took our food out to the Edge of the World and had a picnic. Afterward, we played Ha-Ha, which consists of lying down in a row, with each person's head resting on the next person's belly, and the first person says "Ha!" then the next person says "Ha! Ha!" and so on, until sooner or later someone cracks up, and then you all laugh. And your head goes up and down with the laughter of whoever's tummy you're lying on.

It was nice.

But I've realized I've gotten almost half-way through the summer semester without describing any of my classes. I have three, not counting Reiki and manifestation, two with Greg and one with Charlie.

The class with Charlie is Science Literature. When I first saw the name, I thought it would be like Literature of the Land, which I took with Charlie last year, or like Earth Science Literacy, which was a required class my first year. It's neither, and the course description made clear it would be neither, but somehow I was still surprised by how much itself the class is.

Charlie had it start with a short skit, acted out by students borrowed from another class.

One student stood in the middle, wearing a lamp-shade on her head. Two other students had a conversation about the Lamp-shade Woman, speculating about what she was and how she worked, asking questions of her, and trying things out. Eventually they worked out that 1) she was an Oracle, 2) that she would provide an oracular reading to anyone who gave her $53,000, and 3) that she was usually wrong.

Then, another person walked up, asked about the lamp-shade, and was told by those in the know that the woman was an Oracle, but not to bother consulting her.

"How dare you dictate what I believe in!" the newcomer exclaimed. "I will resist your tyranny and seek the truth however I see fit!" and he left, arm-in-arm with the Oracle.

"Dude, we were just trying to save you $53,000," one of the others said.

The whole point of the class is to teach us how to read and use the scientific literature so as to avoid acting like the newcomer who went off with Lamp-shade Woman. Charlie says that science is a conversation in which people share and discuss what they know about how the world works. He says that whether we're interested in science as such or not, we need to know what science is and what it does and how to take advantage of it, so we don't mistake intellectual laziness for an openness to truth.

"There is nothing iconoclastic or or occult about not bothering to get up off your bum and find out what other people know."

So, we're reading and summarizing and discussing scientific papers from a variety of disciplines, and each of us has to do a literature review on a chosen subject by the end of the semester--except, instead of actually writing out a formal review, like we'd do if we were scientists in training, we're just supposed to write a summary of our findings and then write out the story of how we found our findings, and share that story with our classmates.

We're doing some writing, too--Charlie gives us descriptions of experiments and data and we have to write it up--but that's just so we can really get a feel for how this type of writing works. He isn't having us do experiments.

"Do, or do not do," he says. "I won't have you pretend to do science."

Year 4: Part 3: Post 7: Memorial

Reminder to readers: this narrative is set 13 years ago, so at the time of this post, the invasion of Iraq had just been prematurely declared successful and the war in Afghanistan was causing a slow but steady trickle of coalition causalities. -D.

Memorial Day is one of those occasions when we don't get time off from classes and we don't have a campus-wide celebration, but Greg does a talk on history and we are all strongly encouraged to attend. This year, though something was different--this year, the US is quite clearly at war.

It's curious how, today, we are both more connected to the outside world than normal and more out-of-step from it. On the one hand, we're talking quite deliberately about current events--politics, news, what's going on in the Middle East and why. There are days when it feels like we're living in a bubble, some idealized Avalon, a world all our own. Today is not one of those days. On the other hand, in the larger world, today is the cultural first day of summer--and we already had that, back on Beltane.

My Dad always has a big outdoor party on or near Memorial Day. As I've said, he's a serious grill-freak, and while he never actually puts his grill away for the season--he's cooked Easter Dinner on it, some years--in the summer he likes to have these parties, with big mountains of meat and even vegetables, for our friends and neighbors. Memorial Day is the first one.

My Mom enjoys the parties, but she disapproves of the way such things take over Memorial Day, distracting from the real reason for the holiday. She disapproves of the commercialization of Christmas and President's Day and all the rest of it, for the same reason. But I've told her that I don't think Memorial Day is really a case of commercialization. I think America is trying to celebrate Beltane, the beginning of summer, and just doesn't have a better day for it. And summer is worth celebrating. She likes that idea and says it may be true.

Anyway, Greg gave his talk this year in the Chapel after dinner--usually he does it outside on the central field, but today it was raining, a light, gentle mist that wouldn't let up.

He told us about the history of the day, like he always does, how it began as a day to decorate the graves of the Civil War dead, and talked some about the different ways people have conceptualized the dead of wars over the years--as heroes and as victims--and about the importance of seeing them as individuals.

"Each is an individual, personal death, and each was an individual life, with his or her own reasons for going to war, embedded in and reflecting the various cultural and historical threads of the time," he said.

All that is about what he's done in previous years. This year he said more. He talked about an individual dead soldier, Lori Piestewa, whose death was made public last month. She was the first American woman to die in combat in Iraq and the first Hopi woman to die in combat abroad. She interested Greg for several reasons, he said--first, her death was high-profile enough that a fair amount of information about her is available, obviously important if you want to do a talk on something, though Greg isn't sure how much of the information is true.

Second, she was Native American, allowing Greg to talk about the long and complicated history of Native Americans in the US military, a story with some interesting parallels to the history of Japanese-Americans in the US military, a subject obviously close to Greg's heart.

Third, Piestewa was Hopi, and as such largely pacifist, as Greg is. He said he had not been able to find out how she reconciled pacifism with going to war, but he speculated about some possibilities, including the fact that joining the military is often the only option for young people from poor families who want to get ahead. And poverty and race are strongly linked in America.

"Ostensibly," he finished, "the invasion of Iraq has succeeded, the war is complete. And yet fighting continues and there is no sign of the weapons of mass destruction we supposedly went in there to find. The war in Afghanistan continues. In the two wars combined, over 260 American soldiers have died so far--a small number, overall, but there will be more. How many Iraqis? How many Afghanis? We don't know. They won't tell us. Maybe if we pay more attention to these things there will be fewer wars."

And he sat down. Steve Bees stood up.

Paying attention has been a major part of Steve's education, so far. Steve, as I've said, asked Greg to help him build a better awareness of social justice issues, especially the real challenges and concerns of poor people and people of color. He's trying to break through the obliviousness that he says comes with growing up as a white, cis-gendered, straight male. Greg is Buddhist, and as such is very concerned with both awareness and compassion. Apparently that translates into making Steve learn a fantastic amount of historical and anthropological detail--when the Invasion of Iraq began a few months ago, Greg set Steve to learning the geography and history of Iraq as well as studying who joins the US military and why. As Greg says, perhaps if we pay more attention, there will be fewer wars.

Anyway, Steve is also Kit's student. He's been taking voice lessons from Kit and has made a lot of progress over the past year. And so, after Greg was done speaking, Steve sang. He sang a single Don McLean song, a Capella.

And the rain fell like pearls on the leaves of the flowers
Leaving brown, muddy clay where the earth had been dry.
And deep in the trench he waited for hours,
As he held to his rifle and prayed not to die.

The song went on for several verses, simple, vivid, without much overt editorial comment and with very little melody, almost musical talking, rising and rising in intensity and then falling again to the simple, stark last line: he's gone.

Year 4: Part 2: Post 6: Fools in April

We've just had April Fool's Day. I forget whether I've mentioned it before, but the first of April is interesting around here because the community encompasses not one but several ideas about what it means.

I don't want to make this sound like a bigger deal than it is. Most of us just go about our business--it isn't a major school holiday or anything, just a few people playing pranks or doing other things, just like anywhere else. Usually one or two of the pranks are funny enough--or disastrous enough--that the whole campus finds out and everybody talks about it for days. Most pass ignored except by those most immediately involved.

My second year, Space Alien Steve was a yearling, and rebelled against the campus dietary choices by keeping his own stash of Frosted Lucky Charms. The cereal became kind of A Thing with him, he refused to share, and people started teasing him about it. It all came to a head on April 1st that year when someone--we never found out who--stole his box of Lucky Charms and removed all the marshmallows, then replaced the box in its spot on his dresser. Suspecting nothing, Steve came to breakfast, box in hand, poured himself a big bowl, and proceeded to freak out. He stood up in the middle of breakfast and started shouting "where are my marshmallows? Who took my marshmallows? Bring back my marshmallows!" But in his very melodrama it was obvious that on some level he appreciated the joke. He was making a clown of himself. And the marshmallows turned out to be hidden in an otherwise empty milk pitcher on his table, a nice touch, since none of us were ever able to figure out how it happened. He kept talking about his marshmallows, trying to track down the guilty party, for days. It was great.

Last year someone tried to play a prank on Andy--I forget what it was, other than that it was classic April Fools in that it involved someone lying to him and then saying "April Fools!" when he reacted. That did not go so well. Andy was completely taken in by the lie and it really upset him, and then when he found out it was a joke he actually started to cry. The thing is, we all basically like Andy, but Andy himself doesn't know it or can't believe it. He is estranged from his surviving family and he lost all his old friends during his long years of using drugs. I guess, on some level he's convinced he's going to be rejected again, so he takes any hint of disrespect very personally. And I know he always felt very self-conscious as one of the few Christians in the community. The prankster hadn't realized that and felt just awful afterwards.

Anyway, but, as I said, pranks aren't the only thing that happens here on this day. Ideas about what the First of April means include:

• Pranks are ok all day
• Pranks before noon confer good luck, but playing pranks after noon is bad luck
• It's bad luck for the victim to not find the prank funny
• Pranks are never ok, and the whole tradition is stupid
• The tradition is a remnant of paleolithic Laughing Festivals and so the day is a good time for jokes of all sorts
• The tradition goes back to making fun of people who were slow to accept the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century
• The tradition goes back to a form of Saturnalia in France in the 13th century, which was eventually suppressed by the Catholic Church, and is therefor a good time for drinking and raucous behavior
• The tradition is Christian in origin
• The tradition is pagan in origin
• The tradition is actually part of Ostar
• The tradition is actually part of Beltane

Greg says that most of these ideas are at least partially based on misunderstandings of history and shakes his head at it, but he makes no serious attempt to intervene.

"Far be it from me to enforce a singular, approved truth," he says.

This year he said something different, speculating at breakfast that the day may be called "April Fools'" because so many people behaved foolishly on it. I've heard he was considering doing a talk on the history of the day to try to set the record straight, but gave it up as a lost cause--in any case, he seemed to be in A Mood over it.

Allen, who was sitting at the same table with us--I think he and Greg were deliberately eating together, whereas the rest of us were at that particular table only incidentally--seemed to be in a different kind of mood.

"That's not what I think of," he told Greg, in an odd, distracted voice. He was swirling around a cup of something, milk or coffee, I think, and looking at it as though he expected something important to rise from its depths.

"Oh?" said Greg.

"You remember the idea that the fools of the Middle Ages were actually autistic, right?"

"Yeah, sure. The Holy Fools of Russia."

"April is also Autism Awareness month," Allen explained, still in an odd voice.

Year 4: Interlude 1

Hi, all, It's Daniel-of-2016 here.

Happy St. Patrick's Day (I'm writing this Thursday night), although as far as I know, none of my heritage is Irish. My last name sounds German, but I really don't know much about where my family is from. Perhaps I'll ask my parents, see if they know. Anyway, June's family isn't Irish, either, but we're celebrating anyway. Largely, I think, because June and I are bored and needed an excuse to do something different.

Not that “bored” means “having nothing to do,” you understand. We have a three year old. But we got bored with our typical version of busy and decided to do something else.

What we did was to invite over a pile of people and serve pizza (it was Pi Day earlier this week, after all) and green cupcakes and watch The Secret of Roan Innish.

The guest list—you’ve heard of most of them, Allen, Lo, Alexis, Kayla and Aidan—but Steve Bees wasn’t married thirteen years ago, so I haven’t told you about his wife and their two kids. I don’t know Sarah very well (this is not the same Sarah as the farm manager from school, obviously), since she’s seldom healthy enough to socialize much, but our families have spent a lot of time together because their younger son, Charlie (yes, named after my teacher) is just a year older than Carly and they play together. Their older son, Sean, is almost eight and is sort of an unofficial kid brother to Aidan, who was a Sprout with Alexis.

Anyway, we actually got take-out pizza, which I hardly ever do, but we made the cupcakes from scratch. Not that Carly actually cares what the cupcakes are as long as there is icing on top. She actually iced all of them for us, after we showed her how, while telling us this long, involved story about how she had supposedly had cupcakes in all different colors, “pink and gween and lellow and puple,” when she had a St. Patrick’s Day party when she was our age. She says that a lot, “when I was your age,” and I have friends who are convinced it’s evidence she has past life memories, but actually that’s what she does with phrases she hears but doesn’t understand. For a whole week she found a way to introduce almost every statement with the word “technically.” We’ve been following the primary coverage, so she’s started talking about “superdelegates.” She has no idea what any of these things mean.

I'm thinking of bumping back up to two posts per week, though I don't know if I'll have time. After all,I’ve started to teach workshops and things for the group of new students we have, plus a group of us are trying to get this interconnected group of businesses off the ground, and none of this is paid yet so I have to keep doing everything else I was doing for money before. Plus, as I said, I have a three year old. So, we’ll see.

I like to add some extra information about the narrative during these interludes, but nothing jumps out at me right now. Maybe it’s because I’m tired. My attention has been pre-empted by My Little Pony cartoons, “gween” icing, and the prospect of little naked seal babies beaching their cradles upon formerly abandoned islands.

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.