{"id":548,"date":"2008-05-02T15:36:03","date_gmt":"2008-05-02T21:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=548"},"modified":"2008-05-02T15:36:03","modified_gmt":"2008-05-02T21:36:03","slug":"in-tutelage-to-my-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=548","title":{"rendered":"In Tutelage to My Self"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>41\u00a0 bar steady\u00a0 29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Crescent Moon of Growing<\/p>\n<p>Wet.\u00a0 Cold.\u00a0 Dreary.\u00a0 An inside day.\u00a0 I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today.\u00a0 Maybe Sunday.<\/p>\n<p>Lunch with Tom Crane.\u00a0 We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant.\u00a0 The topic is mastery.\u00a0 The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination.\u00a0 The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong.\u00a0 Somewhere in the\u00a0terms 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind.\u00a0 We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them.\u00a0 This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.<\/p>\n<p>I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone&#8217;s disciple.\u00a0 This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own.\u00a0\u00a0Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason.\u00a0 He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive.\u00a0 And he has.<\/p>\n<p>This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question.\u00a0 Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple.\u00a0 The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough.\u00a0 A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.<\/p>\n<p>We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao.\u00a0 A good lunch on a wet day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>41\u00a0 bar steady\u00a0 29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Crescent Moon of Growing Wet.\u00a0 Cold.\u00a0 Dreary.\u00a0 An inside day.\u00a0 I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today.\u00a0 Maybe Sunday. Lunch with Tom Crane.\u00a0 We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant.\u00a0 The topic is mastery.\u00a0 The &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=548\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">In Tutelage to My Self<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11,10],"tags":[4342,165,319,126],"class_list":["post-548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-and-spirituality","category-friends","category-woolly-mammoths","tag-friends","tag-self","tag-tao","tag-woollys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}