Recently I found out that my alma mater, BGI has closed. It took me a while to process this, but I wanted to share my first day of school there - because it was THE first day of that school and it was a little... different.
Most of my first days of school are completely lost to me. I can just remember how these shoes fit the first time I tried them on (like a little latex foot-corset with a marshmallow bottom) but even that’s a stretch.
Also there are first days of school and first days of a NEW school, and the latter are particularly poignant. I had a lot of those. Five before grade six was done. Among them were a Waldorf school where I learned to knit and play a wooden flute, and an experimental classroom-less scrum where I learned about houseless fear and not-belonging. But business school? - that was some first day.
My ex-wife had an old friend, John Anderson who, as part of the process of separating from his wife (a successful Chicken-Soup for the Blah Blah author) had gone on walkabout all the way up the coast of North America into the bowels of Puget Sound to the Discovery Islands landing finally at Cortes Island, home of the We Wai Kai, Kwiakah, Homalco, and Klahoose First Nations. Why he did this is unknown to me, but I believe his target was Hollyhock and probably he was hunting up something to further his thinking on alchemy and the soul.
That would have been very ordinary for John. For a long time John had been a student of Oscar Ichazo and a member of his Arica school/community. Ichazo was one of the original creators of the Enneagram. The Enneagram, by the way, is like a really foul horoscope from which there is no escape. There are so many enneagram books that more or less say, “Well, here’s your core wound and how it keeps you from creating true connection and contentment and... yeah, you’re pretty much hosed.”
I don’t like enneagram books.
I just wish the things weren’t so frickin accurate. You ever get that sense when you’re reading a particular something, that you are being described waaay too personally and intimately, out there in the open, for anyone to see, and surely everyone who reads this and knows you is saying to themselves “...Oh yeah! That him totally!”
I hate it when that happens.
I digress.
I think it was at some event at Hollyhock that John met Libba. Libba Pinchot is something between a unicorn and a white witch. She is as sweet as she is smart - and that is very, very sweet. She also has a gift for connecting to your heart, connecting YOU to your heart, and planting there, in the fertile, tender soil of your freshly turned soul, dreams of her own devising. She’s like the movie Inception run amok. And her Dream was to teach a cadre of elite change-agents to co opt the force of profit for the furtherance of good. She conjured for John a vision so compelling that when he shared it with Sara and me a few days later I was ensnared right along with him.
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