Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 7: Yule

Please note that Yule took place the night of Friday, the21st into Saturday, the 22^nd,, so I’m writing this post a few days ahead of time. Hanuka had already completed a week earlier, which is why I don’t mention the holiday in the post, despite it being Hanuka now. So, happy Hanuka.

June had never celebrated Yule before, a strange thought, given how she’s embraced the particular brand of paganism popular here. I sometimes forget, now, that there are still things about this place and its culture she doesn’t know. Ironically, that makes it a little easier for me to keep the casual secrecy that renders so much around here a delightful surprise—I just assume she already knows what’s coming.

And so, June not only got to experience Yule for the first time, she got to do it without any warning from me about what it would be like. And I got to watch.

Yule dinner, as usual, was a quiet affair, there being only about thirty-five of us on campus this time of year, and ten of those 35 weren’t at dinner because Kit had scheduled her teaching coven’s ritual at the same time. Perhaps because Kit wasn’t there, Charlie showed up. We all sat together at the long, dark table in the Bird Room and he and Greg presided over the meal like the fathers of some very large family.

It was an odd meal, and not just because of Charlie’s company, but because we actually had Boar’s Head, a famously difficult thing to cook—it’s the Dish of Kings because only kings could afford to have it made. But Sadie can handle it, and had. She’d made us the dish once before, for Yule, but it’s not a common thing. It’s not simply the roasted head of a pig—it’s the skin of the head, with some of the facial bones for shape, stuffed with a mixture of pork, lamb, various organ meats, and, indeed, bays and rosemary, and then the whole thing roasted. It’s delicious.

Sadie didn’t eat with us—I imagine she was at the masters’ party upstairs—but, as I said, Greg and Charlie did, and when the dish was brought out, Charlie, who was in an unusually high-spirited mood, sang the Boar’s Head Carol in a rich, strong voice none of us had ever heard before. I’d heard him sing once, years ago, but then he’d been singing quietly, respectfully, not this boisterous celebration.

Afterwards, we all sat out by the lit tree and around the fire place and drank hot chocolate and mulled cider and talked in small groups. Charlie took his whistle out and played a few tunes, all of them seasonal and ancient sounding.

Then Kit and her people swept in, bearing the lit Yule Candle, and Charlie put his whistle away as though he’d never had it out. More than ten students had come in with Kit, as the coven had members who hadn’t been on campus earlier in the day. The pace of the party picked up. Someone unpacked a fiddle. More people started trickling in, hanging up cloaks on pegs to drip from the wet, sleety snow falling outside.

“I thought we were going to bed early so we could watch the sunrise, or something?” asked June.

“You can go to bed, if you want,” I said.

“Not a chance,” she replied, and went to go pour herself some eggnog that had appeared from somewhere while nobody was looking.

I spotted Charlie sitting off by himself, looking as though he worried it might rain on his head. I joined him.

“Getting a bit noisy for you, isn’t it?” I asked.

“These things were more fun back when I was drinking,” he said, with a trace of his old growl.

“I do not drink...wine,” I said, in my best Dracula accent. He laughed.

“I suppose there are compulsions worse than mine,” he admitted. “I suppose I would have gotten tired of partying by now, anyway, even if I were still drinking. If I’d lasted this long.”

“Do you miss drinking?” I asked, amazed to find him so willing to talk.

“I miss being young,” he replied. “Being a young drunk has its perks. Being an old drunk….I doubt I’d like it.”

“Charlie, I can’t picture you as a young man, going to parties.”

“I used to do a lot of things you’ve never seen me do, Daniel.” He winced as the volume of the music increased.

“Why are you at this party,” I asked. “I mean, I’m glad to see you, but….”

“Occupational hazard of living in a community, Daniel. I like people, contrary to popular opinion. I like some social contact. But around here, when I find any people, there’s usually a whole pile of them.”

A pile of people was right, for they kept coming. Senior students and candidates and recent graduates, many of them carrying instruments. We pushed the furniture back and the evening evolved into a dance party. I saw Charlie talking to a few other people, enjoying himself, in his own way, even laughing, but after a while I didn’t see him anymore. He’d slipped out while nobody was looking. I remember June, slightly tipsy, laughing hysterically, I’m not sure what about. Was I tipsy, too? I can’t remember. Is that a bad sign? Maybe I was just tired and silly. I wasn’t drinking that much.

Around three AM, the snow stopped. We could hear the wind whistling around the corners on the Mansion and the branches of the elm on the east side. Rick came in from a walk (he doesn’t like piles of people, either) and reported that the temperature was dropping.

“We’re going to dance the sun up, aren’t we?” asked June.

“That depends,” I told her. “Do you want to dance?”

She laughed and threw her arms around my neck and I really liked that. We danced for a while.

Around six in the morning—the world outside the window still looking as dark as ever—some of the senior students took charge of organizing the trip up the mountain in silence to see the sunrise. How were these students chosen? When I was a senior novice, no one ever asked me if I wanted to perform that duty.

“I thought we were dancing the sun up?” said June.

“You can dance your way up the mountain,” I told her.

She didn’t, especially. We actually got separated in the dark, on the way up, the snow crunching under our feet, the stars bright and the air cold. Up on the mountain, we found each other in the dark, and she sat on my lap and I wrapped her in my cloaks and we kept each other warm.

The sun came up and the masters sang and played and the world turned gold and pink and white.

When we got back to the Geat Hall, the Sprouts and some of their other family members (including, to my surprise, my brother and his kids) had arrived and transformed the place, filling the room with bowls of chocolates and candied fruit and nuts and oranges, and setting our gift bags here and there, and readying steaming pots of hot chocolate, coffee, and mulled cider, oatmeal and miso soup.

We spent the day playing and eating and more or less being unusually tall kids and June asked me why we’d never celebrated Yule on our own when we were in grad school—why hadn’t I introduced us to this?

Of course, for most of my Absence, I spent the holiday season, including the solstice, with my parents, not with June. But I didn’t celebrate Yule while I was away. I kept forgetting. I’d mean to, and then realize it was yesterday. There was no community.

I missed it here.

Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 6: Making Magic

Every year, while the yearlings are otherwise occupied, senior students, especially those on the landscaping crew, decorate the Great Hall for Yule. When everyone wakes up the next morning, the decorations are simply there, as if by magic.

Allen would say it IS magic, that the amazing does not cease to be amazing just because work has gone in to accomplishing it.

I've gotten to be one of the "elves" doing the decorating, and I'd hoped to do it again this year, but Charlie had another idea.

"You wouldn't mind occupying your wife tonight, would you?" he asked me. I'd found him inspecting one of the spruce trees growing next to the Mansion's front door--an odd place for spruces, they aren't native here. I'd say they must pre-date the school, but they don't seem old enough. I think he was considering decorating them, too. "She has a talent for noticing things," he added.

Well, anything for Charlie, right?

I occupied June's attention rather effectively and she did not notice anything out of the ordinary until we came down to breakfast the next morning and found the Great Hall completely made over.

The decorations from the Fall were still up (except for the Thankyou Doll, who has long since been given honorable burial, and most of the pumpkins and squashes and apples, which have been eaten), so dry grape vines still crept up columns and across the ceiling, candles--tall tapers--still stood in silver holders. Decorative gourds in odd colors and strange shapes sat in state in bowls in in corners, here and there. Dry corn stalks still guarded the doorways. Bowls of candy still tempted all and sundry. But in among all of that, interwoven and over top of it, were garlands of pine and long strands of English ivy (an exotic Charlie battles to good purpose), vases full of cut winterberry holly branches, wreaths made from trimmings from area Christmas tree lots, strings of large, piles of fleece symbolizing snow....

And the Tree, the Yule Tree, in the far corner hung with strings of large, red beads, white and gold ribbon, golden balls hanging like fruit, and an entire flock of fantastic, blown-glass birds. And lit for the first time this year with brilliant warm white LEDs.

I knew it would all look even better at night, with everything lit and twinkling, and a fire lit, but coming down and finding it in the morning like that was amazing, even though I had known perfectly well it would be there and very roughly how it would look.

I turned to June to take in her reaction. She stood there with her mouth open for a few seconds, then, being a person who does, indeed, notice things, turned to me and said,

"You had an ulterior motive last night."

"I did not!" I told her. "How do you think all this happened? This is the result of the magic we made."

Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 5: Watching Snow

It snowed for the first time last night. Of course, the snow melted before morning, but I was up a little late, reading in the Great Hall, and I looked outside and saw it and went outside to sit on the Great Hall steps. Once outside, I could hardly see any of it, because we have no outside lights, only some light slipping through the curtains of the windows of the Great Hall behind me, but I could hear the silence of the snow. I could smell it. I hadn't bothered to even put on my cloak. It wasn't even that cold.

June came out and joined me.  I hadn't known she knew I was outside--she wasn't in the Great Hall when I came out. She wasn't wearing her cloak, either, and leaned against me for a bit. Sitting together like that felt illicit. We haven't been able to spend much time together all year.

"Are you glad you came?" I asked, meaning to the school.

"Are you glad I came?" she asked me, instead of answering.

"I wouldn't miss it," I said. "I miss you, though. But I think if you had not come I'd miss you more. This way, we have the same sky." Same sky, same culture, same friends (mostly) same home. I meant more than I was saying.

"Same snow."

"Yeah. You didn't answer my question."

"I'm glad," she acknowledged. "I think I would have lost you, otherwise."

"Is that the only reason?" I can't say she's wrong. I hope she is.

"No, but it's a reason, and it's a good reason. I like it here, but I don't need to be here. I need you, but I don't need this."

"I hope that changes," I told her. "I hope I don't stay the primary reason why you're here. I don't want you to come to resent me for keeping you from someplace you'd rather be."

"Give me some credit. If I had any thought that might happen, I wouldn't have married you. For one thing, if there's some place I decide I really want to be, I'll ask you to come with me. And we'll see how it goes."

"The year is almost over."

"Yes."

"We'll be able to spend as much time together as we like."

"Yes."

"Will you move into my room? Or should I move into yours?"

"Yours, I guess," she said. "You're more attached to your room, I guess. You've been in it longer. Do we have to move in?"

"Don't you want to?"

"Well, I was thinking we could alternate. They're small rooms, for two people to share."

"We could, I think, but you'd have to pay the room and board fee."

"You want me in your room, don't you?" she asked.

"Yes."

I sat, listening to the snow, feeling June's warmth against my arm and side, and thought about the day, years ago, when Ebony and I watched the snow in the light of a flashlight and how magical her sight, and the sight of her, seemed. I don't fall out of love, I don't think. I still find it sad that she and I didn't work out, even though June and I are an infinitely better match. I'm crazy about her. Wholly and truly. But the bittersweetness of the memory sharpened the sweetness of sitting with my beloved in the present tense, cast a beauty over it somehow. Also, my butt was getting cold.

I leaned my head on the top of June's head and we sat together like that until we began to shiver. Then we went inside.

Mastery Year 1: Part 7: Post 4: Anniversary

So, I'm back on campus and it's quiet here. I have said the same thing before, on other quiet weeks, and will likely say the same thing again in the future. I like weeks like this. It's one of the reasons I've stayed on campus this year, June being the other reason. I like getting up in the morning and going for a walk in the brown and grey winter woods as the dawn comes up. I like watching birds go about their business in the underbrush, or, later in the day, following the tracks of deer back to the beds they left around the same time I left mine. The campus gets quiet and I get quiet, too.

But there is human company available, when I want it.

Usually, I seek company by going to the Great Hall and seeing who's there. Curiously, someone always is when I want to find somebody, even though plenty of other times I find the place deserted. Almost always. Today was an exception. I found myself alone and sat down on the couch for a bit.

I felt a little cold and a little tired--I'd just come back from a long walk. I sat there, not thinking, for a bit, the way you do when you need a break, but then gradually thoughts began to form. Images, more than words or ideas. I was staring at the floor in front of the couch, remembering the day I watch Rick sleep for a few hours on the very spot, and Greg's Cat, who hardly ever let anyone touch him except for Greg, slept curled up on Rick's body.

For some reason, I reached out and touched the space the cat had occupied, as though I could pet him. As if he would have let me.

"I miss him, too," said a voice behind me, and I jumped and looked over my shoulder to find Greg. He'd walked up without my hearing, or at least without my noticing. I greeted him. "You were thinking of my cat, weren't you?" he asked.

"How did you know?"

"Because you evoked him. I saw you interacting with him. I can't see him, but, in a way, you did. Didn't you?"

"I suppose I did."

"Everything is impermanent," Greg asserted, with some humor, "even impermanence."

I wasn't sure how to respond to that.

"Today is the day, you know," he said.

"The day?"

"Yes. It has been a year, now, since Greg's Cat died. Hit by a car, remember?"

I remember him telling me about it. I wasn't back yet, when the accident happened.

"I'm sorry," I said, because you do.

"What are you sorry about, exactly?" Greg asked, smiling. He was not chiding me for expressing sorrow, just challenging me to identify why. I frowned. I had no answer. "Life goes on," he added. "And then sometimes it doesn't. He was the only being ever named for me, and I don't suppose there will ever be another one. In another ten or twenty years, I will likely not be named for me, either."

I suppose he referred to the prospect of his own death.

"Does being Buddhist make these things easier for you?" I asked.

"I don't know," he answered. "I've never not been Buddhist, so I have no basis of comparison. But nothing can make grief hurt less than it happens to hurt. Nothing makes life cease to be painful. But it is possible to ensure that life remains meaningful. Buddhism does that for me. I don't pretend to know whether it can do so for anybody else."

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: Part 7: Post 2: Leaves without Leaving

I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to be doing this winter.

On the one hand, there's an argument to be made for staying on campus all the way through. June has to stay, because she's a yearling, and because she's graduating at Brigid, and I don't want to leave without her, and I still have my poetry writing assignment. But, on the other hand, I'm sure I could arrange something for poetry the same way as I arranged to go home for a while when I had the sleeping outside assignment. Most of the other candidates have left campus, and staying costs a hundred dollars a week in room and board that I'd like to not have to pay. June is busy finishing up some final assignments and actually has very little time for me. My family misses me.

I'm trying not to think about what Charlie would want me to do. He isn't in charge of my life, and I've got to learn how to think and act like a grown-up with respect to my studies here. What do I want to do? What would be good to do?

Ollie has left campus to go rejoin Willa, Andy is living above his bicycle shop and only comes in a day or so a week to visit, Eddie and Ebony are both here, but busily working at something, so I hardly ever see them, and both will leave campus right before Thanksgiving and stay gone until Yule. Rick is here, and staying through, but he's spending most of his time living outside--he eats our food, he's not hunting and gathering, but we don't see him. I feel very much left behind.

The Dining Hall and Chapel Hall are both closed down for the season. The Mansion is a bustle of activity at breakfast and certain other times, but mostly it's quiet. It's not yet cold enough yet to have the wood stove on all the time, so people aren't clustering in the Great Hall the way they will later in the winter, and there are great blocks of time when just nobody is about.

In one of these blocks, this afternoon, I found myself with nothing to do and no one to do it with, so I wandered outside and up to the barns and sheds, on the working end of campus where hardly anyone who does not have business there ever goes. Joy's oldest horse, the grey one with spots, looked up from his hay and regarded me as I passed.

I ended up out near the cider house and the slaughter house and the smoke house, buildings enclosed in a tight, tall fence to keep the coyotes and bears from investigating too closely. The have the various compost piles in there, too, to take advantage of the fence, and nearby I found a massive pile of autumn leaves.

We leave the campus leaves where they fall, for the most part, but our neighbors don't want to do the same, so Charlie has a deal with them where we collect their leaves and bring them on campus for mulch. Teams from the farming and landscaping crews go down the road with the horse cart and bring the loads up here, load after load...it takes a long time. I think they're about done, now, most of the leaves are down, the crescendo of autumn color fallen now to a whisper, and in any case no new loads were coming in today. The crews must have been busy doing something else. There was a big mountain of leaves sitting there, by itself, just outside of the fence, left to wait until it could dry out enough to be crushed into compostable mulch.

I looked at that mountain for a bit and then I crawled into the pile, wrapped myself up in my cloaks and hoods and cowls for warmth, and fell asleep amid the fragrant leaves. I woke up, hours later, alerted by the first dimming of daylight and cooling of evening to the fact that it was almost dinner-time. And I was wholly and completely happy.

Which, I think, answers my question. 

Oops

Hi. I just plain forgot to post yesterday. Nothing's wrong--it was June's birthday, and we had a big, whooptido party that took most of the day to set up, we had a great time, and then long about 11 pm last night I think "oh, crap, today was Monday, wasn't it?"

And unfortunately, my time budget it such that I can't catch up this week. I have a number of deadlines looming. So, with regret, I must simply say "see you next week."

-D.