41 bar steady 29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane
Waning Crescent Moon of Growing
Wet. Cold. Dreary. An inside day. I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today. Maybe Sunday.
Lunch with Tom Crane. We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant. The topic is mastery. The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination. The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong. Somewhere in the terms Zen master or Taoist sage or master gardener, even master craftsperson lies a life time of practice, the honing of a skill or a life way on the hard stone of experience.
We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters. I’ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind. We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them. This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.
I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone’s disciple. This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own. Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason. He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive. And he has.
This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question. Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple. The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough. A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.
We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self. I said I have been willing to trace my own journey by the vague outlines I feel in that part of me that participates in the greater universe, and which calls me forward to my own destiny. As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao. A good lunch on a wet day.
