Category: Personal Journey

Here I am living in a most photogenic terrain

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Others have pointed out that most of the places I’ve resided in have been rich in natural beauty. While I’ve dampened that with an argument that you can find beauty wherever you are, or at least visual stimulation, I do have to concede how rarely that’s the case.

Many places, in fact, are brutal on the eyeballs.

Part of the attraction to Eastport for me was, after all, its access to wilderness and a rugged shoreline. Good shots seem to be waiting everywhere.

It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m overwhelmed by the number of solid photos I’ve been taking. How on earth is one supposed to organize them, much less share them?

It’s not like the old days of light meters, F-stops, film, or even focus, either.

Digital makes it a snap. All you have to do is look and see something.

And, yes, sometimes the camera – or cell phone – sees something more.

Eastport is a pedestrian-friendly village with old houses and storefronts, meaning more variety and detail than you’d find in the average drive-by suburb. It’s surrounded by forests, shorelines, and streams that present more opportunities. No wonder we see people pointing their lenses everywhere, and not just for selfies.

Where are all of these images going to go, anyway?

Turn around and it’s history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We were watching a movie the other night, one from the early ‘90s, I believe, and I realized most viewers probably didn’t recognize what the rotary-dial phone was, much less the busy signal.

It’s the sort of detail I had to watch carefully in revising my novels about the ‘60s, ‘70s, and even later, and it’s something I have to address in much of my poetry, especially when I’m reading pieces to a younger audience. Like the time I had to describe “transistors,” which were as big a leap forward as microchips a bit later.

Quite simply, authors of “contemporary” fiction are unintentionally writing history. Life is changing that fast.

On a related front, I comprehend very little of the dialogue in the online serials and movies we’re streaming. They’re not sentences with subjects, verbs, or supporting color. They’re often not even logical, in a traditional sense. They’re even contradictory. I certainly couldn’t recreate it.

I first noticed it back in Dover when listening to the young lifeguards together and wondered how on earth I’d diagram their communications.

Even worse, I hate feeling left out. Is there even a trail to follow? Anyone else with me here?

Lost in translation

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I have to meet a Quaker representative – AFSC or FCNL or some such – at the airport. Not actually an airport, but more the sense of waiting and greeting. A sunny, springtime morning, a little before 8 a.m. She {maybe an elderly he, the two overlap} is to make a presentation before a public-school crowd. We’re running late, which becomes a problem because I have to get a second Public Friend and am caught in transporting the two. Am supposed to get the second at 10, but the first is still at the lectern.

I greeted the first using “thee,” then realized she had no idea what was happening, so I added: “I guess it’s been a while since thee’s been addressed in Plain Speech.”

 

The joy of paying bills online

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime readers of the Red Barn know my identity as a neo-Luddite, someone who resists many technological advances for ethical reasons. You know, let’s keep people employed.

But after some of you encouraged me to move ahead on the banking front, and heeding your advice, I’ve made the leap. And now I’m asking, “When is the last time I wrote a check?”

Actually, it was for cash, only because I’m still resisting the ATM option. I do like face-to-face, especially in a small town, OK? And I believe an awareness of personal spending is important.

That said, among the unanticipated consequences of the shift is the fact I no longer need to keep a separate ledger, except for the checks I actually write, and my wife has instant access to those numbers, too, for our shared expenses covered there. (I won’t get into the details of our domestic bill-paying, but it’s worked for us.)

It’s also led to my using my credit card in many small-transactions instances, much like my younger daughter,  rather than cash. As she does for a cup of coffee.

But now there are new questions, like what am I going to do with all of these commemorative postage stamps I ordered as a bargain online? In response to Donald Trump’s destruction of the U.S. Postal Service?

Why can’t I just eat?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We’re at some kind of barbecue. A social setting, quite possibly extending from our Smoking Garden. I keep trying to put something on my plate – a sampling of this, a portion of that – but things keep spilling to the ground. Maybe I even miss my plate altogether. You’re trying to offer me something extra special you made, but even it fails to reach my mouth. But instead of being angry, you’re quite sympathetic and understanding, as if you know I’m sick or getting there.

Did I hit a moose way back when?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It was dark and very cold that night, with snow piled high along the freeway.

Now that I’m getting familiar with deer, I realize that the critter I nicked with the right fender was much larger than any of the deer I see these days. They seem rather small, actually, apart from their appetites.

Still, that encounter could have been much worse. I have to consider myself quite lucky. A few feet one way or the other, the beast could have come crashing through my windshield.

Just one more fact of living where I do.

Way out of my hazy league

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One sequence involves covering a political convention. Miami? Savannah? Charlotte?

THE FIRST PART takes place in a large room with gauzy tea-color curtains and a slight breeze, likely a hotel ballroom. I see a friend from my high school days across the room but she does not see me and moves from the scene before I can break off the conversation I’m in.

THE SECOND SCENE is in a makeshift newsroom, lots of lively activity – Hugh McDiarmid may be running the show. I meet a young brunette (short hair), and there’s her coy, smiling reaction.

THINGS HEAT UP, but now I’m watching a young male with her (that is, somehow I’ve distanced myself). She’s ready for something wild – perhaps in a room just off the newsroom – a storage room? But the male, realizing how little he knows her, discovers he doesn’t have a condom and a wild pursuit follows … asking his coworkers, Do you have a …

THERE’S AN INTERLUDE of being out, as a team, covering the story and then trying to phone the newsroom, which is working out of borrowed space in another newspaper. (Part of the chain? Professional courtesy?) The switchboard has no idea what we’re talking about … until someone says something about … ?

One commute I can’t complain about

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Some Sunday mornings, my drive to and from the Quaker meetinghouse a half-hour from my home is a meditation in its own right.

Even in fog or snow, it can be refreshing.

Much of the road is through forest, plus stretches along Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays and their tributaries. The route also passes through a tribal reservation and a national wildlife preserve, which does sound a bit exotic though I take it as routine.

Eagle sightings are common, and I have had to stop for deer or turkeys in the middle of U.S. 1. Once I even spotted a moose far ahead on the pavement.

A radio program of classical choral music on a CBC station that comes in quite clearly is often also an element, depending on my mood.

Do you remember the freedom you felt when you first learned to drive? Some mornings, especially when there’s no other traffic, that elation returns.

While I’m tempted to proclaim “What could be more glorious than this!” I will also note many of the scattered homes I pass resemble junkyards – poverty in Washington County is a constant – so there’s a reminder of that reality, too. I suspect there are more dead cars and trucks here than people.

As an added touch, there are no traffic lights, either.

I’ve been meditating for more than 50 years now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Well, I haven’t been living as a monk in a Himalayan-mountain cave any of that time, but it does sound more impressive that being a “meditator” or someone who practices in a contemplative religious tradition that long even when it’s only once or twice a week.

The thought came to me in Quaker worship the other Sunday morning, the center of what has remained my spiritual discipline and community after the yoga-based version faded away over the years – even my rising before dawn to sit cross-legged in front of a small altar and its candle before I tackled poetry and then took off for the paying job for the rest of the day.

~*~

While I can no longer park myself on a cushion on the floor in the Asian style but rather settle in much more loosely on an old meetinghouse bench – do not call it a pew – the bigger change has been in the focus of my sitting.

The goal of the yoga exercise was to transcend, leaving behind mundane awareness altogether. Somewhere you might encounter your past lives, even. If not that, then a natural high, as an advanced version of a drug trip. At least an awareness of an altered state of consciousness that might even address authentic ethereal reality.

Instead, in the Quaker vein, what I’ve found is a time of being mentally and emotionally renewed and even gaining clarity into my daily engagements.

Or, as one quip goes, some of the best barns in New England were designed during Quaker Meeting. In this case, meaning the hour of shared and mostly silent worship.

~*~

The half-century mark also takes me back to my first Summer of Love, detailed my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, a book that has scenes triggering the erotica filter, should you try to order a copy.

While I was preparing to live in the yoga ashram to our south back then, I experienced my first summer with a daily exposure to the outdoors, including swimming in mountain lakes, often naked, Upstate New York. It was a time of great struggle, discovery, growth, and redirection for me.

And at the end of all this, at the closure of our hour of silent worship here in Maine, one Friend (aka Quaker) voiced an insight from a Native perspective that when it comes to time, the focus is on the past – it’s the only one we can know. The future is the one behind us, rather than ahead. Not that there’s that much ahead for me in this lifetime.

~*~

Still, it’s was a kind of day that had me wondering, can life be any better than this? (Even with those aches et cetera of aging.)

Pressed for time?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A spate of dreams no doubt reflecting my {obsessed} drive to finish exterior painting projects before cold weather sets in. For example, I oversleep work, get to the office with just an hour left to edit and paginate wire pages. And then I discover they’ve moved the office, so I’m running through a building, up the stairs, opening doors, hoping to find the terminals and colleagues. (Recent Virtual Earth searches suggest the Review-Times building has been demolished and moved into the smaller addition; also, our quarters on Leonard Springs Road have been leveled, for a McMansion.)

Other dreams where I’m simply racing something, whatever …