Mastery Year 3: Part 6: Mabon

Mabon—the Autumnal Equinox—isn’t for a few more days, but I like to post before the holiday, rather than after, to build anticipation. -D.

Happy Mabon!

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

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

The performance art element of our holiday celebration is back, it always has a competitive talent-show aspect to it, and last year, besides the food (there is always some sort of comparative tasting event, plus a fantastic buffet showcasing the campus farm’s produce), the show was all about athletics. This year it’s reverted to art again. I suppose art suits us better, though art can include athletics, and Karen and some of her students did perform several sequences of martial arts forms.

There was also a pie-baking contest—twenty-some pies competed, each one presented along with a small tub of extra filling, for people who wanted to take a little taste of all of them for comparison.

The pies raised an old question—how are things like this contest organized? I hadn’t known there would be a pie contest, there was no announcement, no call for contestants, so how did the actual contestants know to enter? There are always parts of this place I just don’t see, even as there are aspects I do see that hardly anyone else does. I’ve been noticing that for years, and in years past the realization made me feel, first, pleasantly mystified (as when someone does a magic trick I can't figure out) and later awkward, foolish, and excluded. But this year I felt none of those things. I simply asked Sadie, the cook, how the pie-making contest had been organized and how the competitors had known about it.

"They knew about it because they organized it," she explained. "A group of them came to me a week ago and asked if they could use the kitchen and our supplies to make a buncha pies for the feast today. I said yes, and wrote it into the schedules. The staff saw my notes, and half of them wanted in." She shrugged.

I stared at her.

"Is that how it always works?" I asked. "I'm not missing announcements, there just aren't any for these kinds of things, because they're organized by groups of participants from the beginning?"

"Not always, sometimes you are just oblivious," Sadie told me and grinned.

"I'd almost rather be oblivious--the other is so prosaic," I admitted.

"Some magics are," she told me. "And then there's pie. Pie is delicious even if you do know the recipe."

"I suppose." Actually, I agree with her about the pie, I was just lost in thought. I was looking around the event tent at all the people milling around and eating and talking, and I was thinking about how they all knew things I didn't, and how I'd vainly thought I could crack the code if I asked the right person, but now it seemed there was no code to crack. The people who seemed more involved that I got that way, not because they were tapped and I wasn't, and not because they answered some call that I didn't hear, but simply because they took the initiative and I hadn't. I felt left out all over again, and left out by my own fault.

"I think you're closer to solving your problem than you think you are," Sadie told me.

"Huh? What?"

"Your problem. You want to know how this place works, right?" Of course, I had asked her that very question when I interviewed her over the summer. The fact that I've been interviewing people, actively researching how to school works is common knowledge.

"Yes," I said, cautiously.

"So there's a missing piece--these pies, the other contests, things that happen and you can't figure out how, right? So there's a question you're not asking. You already have the answer, you just have to ask the right question."

"Um," I tried to think. "You're gonna have to give me a hint."

"Alright. You know how the pies got made, but have you wondered why there was space on the table for them?"

And all at once I saw why that was, indeed, a puzzle, and in seeing that I solved the puzzle.

"Why was there room? Why is there ever room for all of these ostensibly unscheduled events? How does it all get coordinated?" Because I know in other organizations, too, there are small groups of people having ideas, but those ideas don't become projects central to the functioning of the whole without some kind of process. In any other school, the pie contest would have had to be proposed to and approved by the event director, who would then insist that a general call for submissions go out...here, there was no director and no approval. Things just happen, bubbling up as they will. And it all fits into a coherent pattern. The school works.

"The school works because each of you" I meant the masters "can see a different aspect of the whole, just like I can see some aspects and, I don't know, Eddie, can see other aspects. And you ask each other questions."

"Bingo," said Sadie. "That's what Friday night dinners are for. We get together and share what we know and think and want, and we keep each other on the same page that way. More or less. If there's a conflict, we can deal with it."

"I still feel really dumb," I admitted. "I could have been making all kinds of stuff happen around here, but I just assumed I needed an invitation or something."

"What would you have made happen?"

"I don't know."

"Well, there you go. You have other skills, and you have been using them."

"Speaking of which, don't you have to go to the Mansion, now?" I'd noticed, out of the corner of my eye, as Allen slipped away. Kit and Greg and both Joes had already vanished. Charlie was gathering his things. I knew the masters did something secret in the Mansion on Mabon and that students weren't even supposed to know that the secret existed, let alone what it was. I tipped my hand to Sadie on impulse, just to prove--to her? to myself?--that I wasn't the idiot I felt like. Her eyes widened.

"You're right. I'd better get a move on," she said. But if she farewelled me and got up, other eyes might notice and follow her. I knew that.

"I'm going to get myself some pie," I told her. "You can wander away while I go--eyes will follow me because I'll move first."

"You've been hanging out with Allen," she accused. I shrugged.

"You want some pie?" I said, standing up.

"No, thank you."

I nodded in acknowledgement and walked over to the tables, tripping over a chair as I went, though I didn't fall over or anything dramatic like that. A few people glanced at me. Sadie was gone by the time I turned around, pie in hand.

I wandered around with my pie (which was very good) and ended up settling near Hawk and Eddie. I'd mentioned Eddie earlier because he'd been involved with the Beltane celebrations for several years, without my ever finding out how he'd gotten involved. He must simply have volunteered. His being thus on my mind was part of the reason I moved towards him. The other reason was that Hawk had her hawk with her. She has to bring the animal out among people periodically, or she won't stay completely tame.

I approached and the others acknowledged me, but they were deep in their own conversation and the hawk seemed nervous about my being too close, so I sat some feet away and ate my pie.

"I wish Elmo was here," Eddie was saying. "I was never able to do this with him. He was never as far along as I thought he was." Elmo was the dog Eddie was training, until the animal made a serious attempt to kill him and Joy had to intervene with a gun. Eddie held out his hands and looked at the more accessible of his many scars.

"Do you think you would do anything differently?" asked Hawk, "If you had to do it over again?"

But Eddie just shrugged.

"I would probably get less involved emotionally," he said, after a bit. "But I doubt that would lead to a better outcome. It's just what I would do."

"You've lost a certain innocence," Hawk said.

"Yes. I shouldn't have. It's not like I didn't know some dogs are dangerous."

"But it hadn't happened to you."

"No."

"Before I came out," said Hawk, "there were people I thought loved me unconditionally. Had my back, you know? And they didn't. Now I wonder who else doesn't. Who else will leave me if they find out I'm not the person they thought I was."

"Aren't you?" I suppose Eddie was wondering if Hawk had still more closets to climb out of.

"How they hell should I know? I don't know what other people think. It's having no control that bothers me."

"Thinking I should have control bothers me," said Eddie. I knew Elmo was impossible. I thought I could train him anyway. Isn't that how the story goes?"

And they both shook their heads sadly.

"I don't think either of us are as good at loving as we used to be," said Hawk. "Sometimes I'm trying to teach my bird here to trust and I feel like a total hypocrite. She's sitting here calmly and I bate at every little thing. I have armor, not feathers, anymore." To bate, for a falconer, means to panic and bolt. When a hawk on a short leash does it, the bird ends up hanging upside-down from the leash and flapping helplessly. Panic accomplishes nothing, not even escape. Hawk has explained all this to me.

"Do you suppose we'll ever get better again?" asked Eddie. "Or is this....hardening permanent?"

"I don't know," replied Hawk. "I think if we can forget to protect ourselves, it's possible."

"Tall order," said Eddie.

"I don't know," suggested Hawk, "you were supposed to tame an impossible animal for work in therapy. Ever think you're the animal?"

Mastery Year 3: Fifth Interlude

Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.

Sorry my posting schedule has gone all to hell. The reasons are complex and I'm not going to get into them right now.

I'm also, frankly, struggling with the organization of the whole piece. I mean, I know what happened, but telling a story is never as simple as just saying what happened. In this case, the problem is that my final few months as a student were a weird combination of not much happening and too much happening to write about.

I, personally, continued talking to people, teaching workshops and courses, and generally learning about how the school worked. I achieved no sudden, dramatic breakthroughs. I didn't need any. I was just cleaning up loose ends in my education, and the result was a gradual but thorough deepening in my understanding and confidence, a kind of shift from perceiving the school as something that held me to seeing it as something I could hold. Important to me personally, but it doesn't make a good story.

Steve showed more and more evidence of having internalized being outside as a source of peace and strength, and he developed a better sense of what would come next in his process--work that he would do directly under Greg's supervision, not mine. He gradually graduated from me, which is an important thing for a student to do, but it doesn't make a good story, either.

Ebony was doing a lot of difficult emotional work--the cultural clash she had run into in Absence had been particularly intense and had beaten her up pretty badly, and so she was working on ways to be herself out in the "real world" without letting it get her down. Unfortunately, I spoke with her very rarely that year, and so had only a general and intermittent idea of her progress.

Eddie, having suffered the quite deliberately painful test of being set up to lose one of his dogs, was putting himself back together with the help of the masters, and was starting to see his way to working again, sadder but wiser, as they say. Maybe that would make a good story, but I can't tell it well, because Eddie preferred not to talk to me about his work for those months. He seemed to use me as an opportunity for an emotional break, and he spent our time together mostly telling me about which women he hoped to go to bed with next and why. Eddie never kissed and told, but he had no qualms whatever about discussing anticipation.

Raven G. and I spoke often and developed a friendship we'd never had before, mostly organized around trying to figure out what certain things Charlie said or did meant. He was her teacher, too, and we studied him like a shared religious text--not, you understand, that he was an object of veneration. He was a finger pointing at the moon.

See what I mean? How do I put all this in a meaningful story in blog format? I've been hoping something occurs to me, it usually does, but this time it hasn't.

In other news, we of the present-tense are getting ready to celebrate Mabon in a week and a half and also coordinating our participation in the Climate Strike on the 20th. Maybe I'll see you there.

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 5: Post 5: Birthdays

My birthday is coming up. I don't have any plans, yet. I suppose I'll let June and some of my friends here take me out to dinner.

I suppose I could make plans myself, ask people to do something, but I don't really want to. For one thing, I'm feeling ambivalent; I generally like parties and so forth, but after having been away from campus for a while and on that damn bus for another three days, I want to rest, socially and spiritually, dig my roots down in the soil and escape to my spot in the woods.

But there's something else, too.

I joined Charlie for lunch the other day, just like when I was a novice. He let me sit with him without comment and I made no comment, either, for a while. Then I spoke.

"Charlie, what do you do on your birthday?"

He shrugged.

"Same thing I do every day, take a walk in the woods."

"Your birthday isn't special?"

He looked up at me. He was sitting on the steps of the Mansion porch, I was half-sitting on the stone railing around the porch.

"Every day is special," he said, "If I walk in the woods." He frowned, looked away, and grumped a bit. "I suppose I'll let friends take me to dinner or something." He sounded extremely unenthused.

"Well, I am your friend," I said, laughing a little, "so I'll give you the present of not asking you to dinner."

"Thank you kindly," he told me, with some grumpy sarcasm in his voice.

"Why am I so persistently drawn to misanthropes?" I asked after a bit. "There's you, there's Rick...My friends just don't like people." Actually, most of my friends do like people. Charlie and Rick are exceptions.

"I'm not going to attempt to explain your proclivities," Charlie told me. But then his expression changed somewhat. "Actually, people generally get me wrong."

"Oh?"

"You want me to tell you a secret, Daniel? I'm not really a misanthrope."

"Oh?"

"The real reason I've given up trying to organize my own birthday parties is I can't find anyone willing to pay enough attention to me. Fox and the grapes, I suppose."

And he returned to eating, evidently uninterested in further conversation.

You think you know someone.

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 4: The Other Side of Magic

Steve's grandfather died, as expected. He's sad, of course. We're going to stay here a few more days through the funeral, then go back to campus.

There's no reason for me to be here whatever, except I rode out here with the Kellys in order to help them deal with the stress of travel, and now I'm waiting until it's time to ride back with them. It's an awkward position, as most people here don't really understand who I am or what my role is, given that I never met the deceased and can't quite remember his name (Edwin? Edward? Edgar? Ed-something). I don't really know how to talk to people under these circumstances. But I am here, and here is where I want to be.

I remember how, when I first joined the school, how blown away I was to be given my own little stainless-steel cup. We all got one to carry clipped to our uniform belts in case we got thirsty and wanted a drink in class or something.--we don't used bottled water or disposable cups. Just something about being given my own cup felt very welcoming, very generous. Since then I've seen other, more dramatic, acts of generosity. There was when Andy arrived and the masters got him into treatment for his various ills--a man they didn't even know, yet. There was Kit taking Hawk out clothing shopping, Hawk's first real public appearances as a woman. There was my own wedding, which took over much of campus for the better part of a day and a night, just as if it were a community holiday.

Now, this.

The funny thing is, it doesn't seem extravagantly generous, what I'm doing. It just seems normal. It seems right. Steve and his family needed something, I'm available, so here I am.

The weird thing about magic is it doesn't always feel like magic when you do it.

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

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

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

Somehow, I was chosen.

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

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

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

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

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

Mastery Year 3: Part 5: Post 2: Invisibility

It is entirely too hot.

Or, at Charlie would point out, I'm entirely too hot. "It," meaning the weather, is just fine, doing what it does in August.

My annual case of "lasts" has begun, my obsessive awareness of the approaching end of the school year. The beginning of the last semester, the end of the last summer, the last time I might see or do or experience this, that, or the other. There have been years when it was fairly mild, since I knew I'd be back the next year, it's just that I knew people who wouldn't be. The year I completed my novitiate it was very intense, as I knew I'd be entering Absence, three whole years away.

This year it's again different. I'm not going anywhere--I probably won't be living on campus next year, but I intend to remain fully involved as an ally. I won't really ever have to leave. And yet I won't be a student anymore.

I don't know why this bothers me so much. I've been gradually ceasing to be a student for a long time, now. I know novices mostly because I've had them as students, not as classmates. Most of my friends around here are masters or candidates. It's not like I want to be a student here forever, I'd get bored. And yet.

I watched Hawk flying her hawk the other day. I almost wrote "flying with her hawk," but that's what it looked like. Woman and bird seemed equally un-self-conscious, equally focused, and perfectly coordinated, as though they were a single organism and each could go where the other was. It wasn't then quite so hot as it is today, and the sky was a hard, pale blue with streaky clouds across it. Hawk stood at the Edge of the World and launched the bird, not at a specific prey animal--the normal thing in falconry, I understand, as falconers don't want their birds flying free without anything particular to do, lest they fly off--but there were birds in the canopy of the Enchanted Forest, and mice and rabbits and ground hogs in the pasture, especially near the cover of the apple orchard. The bird circled for a bit then dove at something I couldn't see, broke off the attack, and lit in a tree.

Hawk watched the hawk in the tree for a minute or two, then jogged towards the apple orchard and along its edge, through the tall grass where the goats and sheep haven't been yet this year.

Suddenly, a rabbit flushed out of the grass and ran out across the cropped pasture at the base of the Edge and the hawk dove but missed the rabbit by a hair (no pun intended) and the animal dove into a clump of goldenrod and hid. The hawk circled around and returned to the tree, but by that time crows had noticed the situation and began mobbing, calling more and more crows in. The hawk hunched its shoulders, seeming vaguely bothered. Hawk called out, offering a piece of meat, and the hawk flew to her glove. Woman and bird together left the scene, heading for the farm fields and the shed where Charlie butchers deer in the fall.

Neither of them had seen me watching the whole time. I was invisible.