Yoga clash …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rudrananda Ashram here, with its businesses. As the locals say, a third of the town is owned by the university, and another third by the ashram. The bakery, restaurant, construction, property management, framing and art gallery. [Starts to sound like Cassia’s family in my novel What’s Left!] Phonebook had numbers for all of these but not for any classes. And there were no vibes.

Has about 70 members, said a girl with a pleasant, pre-recorded smiling voice, hint of tension. And another 40 at Big Indian in the Catskills.

When I first stopped into Rudra Gallery, with Kat, we were hit by cold words of business being spoken into a phone: an orange-sweatered, burr-headed Taurus, or so I assumed from the corpulent body and luxurious surroundings as he held forth in his court of very expensive, carefully selected items displayed for sale.

I inquired about some Tibetan prints, how much, after complimenting the quality, and he proceeds to tell me “This is a Buddha and in Buddhism, uh, they believe that everything comes from the Void, or nothingness, and all of this around him comes from that, it’s his own world.”

I went on acting dumbly, while inwardly Kat was splitting a gut.

I had a feeling I had seen this guy before, perhaps as a visitor in the Poconos ashram, but he did look like two older guys in my Scout troop, too. [Turns out he was a year younger, but got into yoga about the same time I did.]

I sized him up as a creep. He strolled around in self-importance. When he began explaining another tanka to me, in a patronizing manner, trying to impress me with his thin knowledge, I mentioned how confusing these names got in going from Tibetan to Sanskrit. I replied that we knew this cosmic conflict better as Shiva, “Think about that,” and we left.

He wanted us to come back in, but I later recognized he was trying to suck me in with his vibes: they weren’t pure but of an occult power sort. He’s no swami, despite the orange. [He changed his name in 1978, to Swami Chetenananda.]

We went on to a leather store run by a good-energy BS 6-5 Aquarian “businessman” who was enjoying people as an extension of his job. We were his first customers of the day and just had a good time talking. On a later visit, we bought the broad belt with its huge, shiny sun buckle, which always garnered praise.

As it turned out, the yogi in question left a trail of financial and sexual scandal along with division in his movements to Portland, Oregon. And I was wondering if my judgments were too harsh?

In retrospect, how pivotal this becomes in my gravitation toward Quakers. I needed a circle where I could meditate. 

~*~

Another almost connection involved Thubten Jigme Norbu, assistant professor of Uralitic and Altaic studies, a lama teaching Tibetan. With Walter Kaufman just did a book on Tibetan chants for IU Press.

Turns out he was the brother of the Dalai Lama. As for all of those Tibetan readings I had done in Fostoria? And here he was, commuting to campus on the same bus I took occasionally.

~*~

Each spiritual practice must be rediscovered and reinvigorated by each generation. This is a responsibility of the Teachers, otherwise known as Elders.

A true Teacher lets the Seeker find the Truth for himself, but lends the Seeker strength, especially to admit when he’s deluding himself, which is all too easy.

What is the difference between the ashram leader with his commercialism and my struggle to survive in the world and yet be a swami?

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Pitcher plants after a goodly rain

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

An ascent of Mount Washington in New Hampshire in 1974 and then in the high country the Cascade Mountains starting two years later introduced many magical arctic flowers to my awareness, along with prickly pear cactus in the desert to the east where I lived and worked for four years.

The fly-eating pitcher plants, found in arctic peat bogs in our corner of Maine and New Brunswick, continue that exotic delight.

 

Back to a personal refuge

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A recent post here told you of my early encounters with the Leonard Springs. The then largely unknown wooded ravine soon served as a kind of personal refuge for me just beyond our house. It became a microcosm of something much larger in my emerging awareness.

For the chapbook of poems originating in those explorations as well as a supporting photo album, go to my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore. Do take a look.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.

Old associations on my birthday

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Bumped into Nikki yesterday at the Gables [once a hamburger dive but turned hip]. An awkward moment, but Kat went on to class while I tried to chase down my first lover. How strange the interval of time.

Yes, there was unfinished business to bring to closure, if only we could.

Running into a few others from the past?

MG: “You used to weight twenty-seven pounds” meaning me but she’s married now.

KP: “Just hanging out,” divorced after five years.

“We just got bored”

Now intrigued by my mysterious, ineffable changes, she’s finally wanting to touch me.

I do remember her showing me a photo after an artsy shoot and her joking about having “banana breasts.”

~*~

By dwelling on the other side of downtown during my return to Bloomington, we were introduced a much different landscape than I had known in my residency on campus. Here’s an example from the southside of town by Vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

Like a breath of fresh air

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Learned Audience, those who recite the word ‘prajana’ the whole day long do not seem to know that prajna is inherent in their own nature. But merely talking on food will not appease hunger, and this is exactly the case with these people. … Talking alone will not enable us to realize the Essence of the Mind, and it serves no purpose in the end.” – Hui Heng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, “having taken his seat and asked the assembly to purify their minds collectively.”

The Patriarch again: “Do not talk about the ‘Void’ all day without practicing it in the mind. One who does this may be likened to a self-styled king who is really a commoner. Prajna can never be attained this way. ….”

How I feel listening to so many sermons or radio-evangelist preachers.

“Prajna [Truth] does not vary with different persons; what makes the difference is whether one’s mind is enlightened or deluded.”

 

I never saw her in a skirt until her wedding

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the small-town paper, Marcy made all the difference. She was also a future Pulitzer Prize winner.

With her camera she cut through all the crap to find something of real value in the people.

Her signature touch often blended humor and compassion while giving a glow to black-and-white images of daily life. What she found added up into a larger statement over time.

Photographer Burt Stern was one of her inspirations of the hard work to strip an event down to a simple, direct image and underlying message, albeit his were often of commercial intent.

In those days, please remember, ours were mostly black and white shots, though her darkroom technique did wonders with the grays.

I noted her remark about a coworker’s husband who had no concept of aesthetics – a photographic silhouette, to him, meant something went wrong. He saw everything as “good” or “bad” reduced to a scale of “I like” or “don’t like.”

Yes, “good people” (like us) versus “bad people,” who may simply be different rather than evil.

It’s been a problem across much of humanity, though consumerism cashes in on it.

Sticking to what you like means taking the easy way out, rather than aiming for greatness or achievement. Many of the things I value in my own life started out as dislikes – opera, contemporary classical music, asparagus, lamb, meditation, beer …

I suspect she was the inspiration to make the protagonist in the novels that became Subway Visions, Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and What’s Left a photographer rather than a writer. It was a step away from glorifying the writing trade. Besides, I had seriously considered becoming a visual artist but settled on writing instead.

“The camera itself creates and destroys illusion.” (Source long since lost.)

 

Why were those rocks adorned?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I became fascinated with Native petroglyphs, or carvings in stone,  largely through reading scholarly reports when I was a social sciences research associate at Indiana University. The readings had nothing to bear on my paid work, but they did touch on some of the poetry I was engaging. I had no idea I would actually be viewing these in the wild barely two years later.

And here I am, 50 years later, living in a landscape at the other edge of the continent and aware that Native petroglyphs and petrographs, or painted images,  are found hereabouts, though their precise location is kept secret.

Here are ten points I noted from the field notes.

  1. Were the drawings (petroglyphs) made during ceremonies before an important hunt? Did the hunting leader draw them? Or were they done by the young, during puberty rites?
  2. A given rock surface had “power” to bring good luck. If it worked, he drew again on the same rock. Others, seeing this, added their own pictures.
  3. Dummy hunters were erected as piled rocks.
  4. Pictures were used only when food, or the particular animal, was hard to obtain.
  5. In the sheep cult, the immortal sheep had certain supernatural powers.
  6. Salmon ascended the streams to benefit mankind, died, and then returned to life as a race of supernatural beings who lived in a great house under the sea. When the time came for the run, they would assume the form of fish to sacrifice themselves. (Sounds to me like prototype Jesus.)
  7. Eskimo keep the bladder of a whale, seal, or walrus they have killed and kept that in a jar of water all winter. Come springtime, it is taken to the edge of the sea, poured back in, and its soul is told to swim far out where it will find one of its own kind about to be born.
  8. The cult priests, or shamans, talked to these animal spirits.
  9. Did the advent of the bow allow excessive hunting?
  10. Appearance includes desert varnish, a patina where high summer temperatures and thunderstorms were found together. Lichen will grow in the drawings but not the surrounding rock.

 

My, how the town and campus had changed within a few years

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Bloomington has brightened so much: the new public library, buses, Dunkirk Square, Musical Arts Center and Glenn Black Laboratory …

That Tuesday afternoon [December 10] when I went for “a little hike,” over the hill, “to catch the sunset” … sink holes all over, found a dirt road “Xmas Trees ¼ mile” and took it past forest and a bottomless gorge and on and on … taking the next left actually took me further astray, until finally, I passed a few houses and asked someone, “Excuse me, how do I get to Leonard Springs Road?”

He either laughed or looked at me as a dope.

“It’s right here.”

I didn’t get home till 7, well after dark. Kat was very worried, actually went out looking for me.

Turns out my little walk was 7½ miles. “Around the block.”

I drew a map, which I later filled in with details.

[Gee, don’t think I had another walk like that till Marconi Station on Cape Cod decades later.]

~*~

One of the things I encountered on that walk was abandoned limestone quarries, which I would soon view as common features tucked away in the woodlands beyond town. They typically flooded in. Here’ are some examples by Vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

 

 

~*~

Other explorations? A long drive, including Spring Mill [Madison?], Paoli, West Baden Springs, Washington, Amish country, and Bloomfield. But we were back home by 5 and had dinner at Michaelangelo’s up the street on our side of town.

A mention here of Mennonite, though I still knew next to nothing about the faith. We did pass two lovely white-frame, clear-window, “severely simple” meetinghouses, no name attached. The second had an outhouse behind.

Windmills gave the Amish away, before the lack of utility lines did.

White houses and barns.

Clotheslines in January: solid, somber colors or white.

The radiant face of a middle-aged woman on a buckboard who turned to us and waved.

That woman’s face stuck in my mind.

In its first decades, Paoli was known as a Quaker town, the seat of Orange County, named for the one in North Carolina. Included Lick Creek (later Paoli), Newberry, and Beech Grove Friends meetings.

So much Greek Revival / Greek Temple Revival through southern Indiana.

What struck me was the order – mathematical, geometric, classical – of Paoli in its design and construction. A step beyond the state of log-cabin and rough-cut stone development at Spring Mill as wealth built up into brick homes.

The old wire bridge across White River at Hindoostan: farm-style fencing rather than railing along the sides, three boards on each side as a single lane over a flooded river, in places too widely spaced for our Bug, in others, the bottom boards have broken through. Unbelievable, looking back, that we made it.

Hindoostan settled 1818, vacated 1828: “terrible death” outbreaks of Yellow Fever or cholera. Never resettled. Bluffs nearby.

More formally, Hindoostan Falls. Originally on the stagecoach route.

Nearby, in forest: “Greenwich, 1778, first – in Indiana.” Didn’t get that vital part in driving past.

Vincinnes, founded 1732[!]

Clarksville, founded 1784 by George Rogers Clark, Indiana’s oldest American community; the man hated Indians and wished them all exterminated.

Patoka, 1789.

New Albany, on the Ohio River, was state’s largest city in 1840.

Madison, also on the river, founded 1805, was largest city in 1850.

New Harmony, originally a commune, 1814.

~*~

Spring Mill State Park, an 1816 village of log cabins and a great stone mill a marvelous beauty. Caves and sinkholes all over. As a kid, my family camped there several times.

The great eerie hall of Baden Springs. Decay, the polish gone, earth sinking, buildings crumbling: “new hotel” built in 1901 after fire claimed the first. Who would want to wear a suit and tie while on vacation, even to gamble? As for the waters of the spa? Such formalities!

Caves as vertical shafts of cold air rising and fogging in an otherwise barren field: 66 recorded caves and pits in Monroe County, meaning around our home.

US 150, approximate site of ancient buffalo trail from Louisville to Vincinnes, in 1840 became Indiana’s first toll road. Meaning the earlier ones were private?

Lost River: out and then back into the earth, blind fish and crayfish, endangered by flood-control projects (Orangeville).

Back from the road, facing a creek and hillside, Union Primitive Baptist Church, plain cars still there at 1 p.m. Two doors, men’s and women’s. Plus outhouses.

Further on, Hebron Valley Baptist, 1822.

The eerie silence of caves in a fog: “Do not enter this pit without permission.”

Not sure quite where:

Three caves, two days – strange beauty of the muddy sculptural underworld. The twisting rooms, cold reflective water returning whatever light we introduce. Dripping from ceiling.

Southern Indiana is laced with caves, including Mayfield’s situated a couple of miles from our home, not that you could see it. Photo from 1907 by Arthur Mangun Banta via Wikimedia Commons. Wyandotte was another, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

Brown County thick with stupid gawking, the contrast of neatly-creased shorts and black Orlon socks and oxfords gawking at rural life and earlier eras punctuated by rough log cabins.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.