Category: Personal Journey

As an introduction, here’s a suite of dreams from long ago

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

MY BUDDY’S IN A TEN-GALLON HAT and riding an elevator at his old high school in Brooklyn as we go to watch his honey in a swim meet. We get out at the top floor and there’s a river, where all the girls but one are swimming upstream. He hops in, swims downstream to a rock with a girl sunning on it. She starts screaming, and the other girls turn to come to her rescue. He watches as his pistol sinks in the water. He swims through the rapids to his horse only to find the other girls already there, holding rifles.

 

WE’RE IN A VICTORIAN-ERA ghetto at night. She wants to go to church. We go in amid a semicircle of people and sit down with friends. I take a break, get up, step outside to meet a city transit bus, kiss a girl, go back in to sit next to him, shamefaced a bit. My chair, a folding metal chair, is sideways, out of kilter. She whispers, “Don’t move.” That’s when I realize there’s a dead body beneath me and a man in the balcony with a rifle pointed at me. The preacher in the pulpit is silent.

 

I’M TRAVELING WITH a seven-year-old blonde cousin through a suburb. She speaks fluent French. I don’t. Everybody but me speaks French. She is my translator as we journey.

Carefully unroll this scroll of dreams, please

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I HAVE NO IDEA OF HOW you dream or what fills your nocturnal flights, but I’m curious. Are there commonalities or do our subconscious thoughts run in much different directions?

My assumption is that there’s nothing more personal than the encounters that flit through our heads in our sleep. They visit us, unbidden and unencumbered and then entrance us before typically vanishing with little more than a trace, if that. Maybe they’ve elevated our heart rate in the process or left us in a cold sweat.

No doubt inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams but also some references to spiritual practices that urged paying close attention to the overnight phenomenon, I began recording what I could back in the early ‘70s and have continued the practice, however sporadically, through the decades since.

Through the coming year, I’ll be revisiting that ledger and posting bits in installments here at the Barn. Maybe that will even prompt you to share some of your memories and related insights.

I make no pretense of knowing precisely what meaning, if any, many of these have, by the way, but I’ve long felt that make for some great yet private movies. As for their frequently surreal nature? Sometimes it’s even entertaining.

~*~

A FEW YEARS AGO, I wondered whether in a Judeo-Christian tradition this would seem occult. The Biblical perspectives did open my eyes – to my surprise, in a mostly positive awareness:

  • Genesis 20: God speaks to Abilelech the king about Sara. Interestingly, this is the first dream in Scripture, and it’s a revelation to a Gentile!
  • Genesis 28: Jacob dreams of the ladder. Yes, up into the ether and back to earth, which can also be seen as the essence of a dream.
  • Genesis 31: Jacob tells of his dream of the goats and of how an angel of God speaks to him in the dream. So he hears voices in his dreams. Do you?
  • Genesis 37: Joseph proclaims his dreams, and his brothers react negatively.
  • Genesis 40-42: Joseph interprets dreams in Egypt.
  • Numbers 12: God rebukes Aaron and Miriam, telling them that when it comes to a prophet, “I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams.”
  • Deuteronomy 13: A testing about false prophets claiming dreams and to put the false dreamer to death. Watch what you say, then.
  • Judges 7: During the night (i.e., a dream or trance) “the Lord said to Gideon” and then Gideon hears someone else tell of a dream that yet another interprets as victory ahead and Gideon praises God.
  • 1 Samuel 28: The Lord does not answer Saul, even by dreams.
  • 1 Kings 3: The Lord appears to Solomon at night in a dream.
  • Job 7: Job to God, “even you frighten me with dreams.”
  • Job 20: False advice, “Like a dream he flies away, no more to be found.”
  • Job 33: Elihu’s false advice arising “in a dream, in a vision of the night.”
  • Psalm 73:20: Sweeping away enemies like a dream.
  • Psalm 126:1: “We were like men who dreamed … our tongues were filled with songs of joy.”
  • Ecclesiastes 5:3: “As a dream comes when there are many cares.”
  • Isaiah 29: “When a hungry man dreams that he is eating, but he awakens, and his hunger remains … as a thirsty man dreams that he is drinking.”
  • Jeremiah 23, regarding false prophets claiming dreams: “I am against prophets who steal from one another words that are supposedly from me!”
  • Jeremiah 27: “So do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your interpreters of dreams, your mediums or your sorcerers who tell you, ‘You will not serve the king of Babylon.’”
  • Jeremiah 29: “Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them [the false prophets] to have.”
  • Daniel 1-2: “And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds,” introducing Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.
  • Daniel 4: Nebuchadnezzar’s interpreted.
  • Daniel 7: Daniel’s dream of four beasts.
  • Joel 2:28: “Your old men will dream dreams.”
  • Zechariah 10:2: About “false dreams.”
  • Matthew 1: An angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream.
  • Matthew 2: The three wise men were “warned of God in a dream.”
  • Matthew 27:19: Pilate’s wife has a disturbing dream and warns against judging Jesus.
  • Acts 2:17: “And your old men shall dream dreams.”
  • Jude 8: “Filthy dreamers defile the flesh.”

In these texts, the “dreams and visions” often come directly from God, even to Gentiles. Other times, they come by way of angels.

~*~

THAT SAID, I OFFER the series largely unedited, allowing its flashes and visions to speak for themselves. I have, however, changed some of the names and places to maintain a degree of separation from real-life people and locations, not that in a dreamscape the person I associate with the action actually resembled the one in the vision. I have no idea what prompted many of them, although there are times I’ll include a real-life context in my record.

Dreams are a world of their own. Agreed?

Yes, I live just a mile or so from New Brunswick

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Have to admit “New Brunswick” sounds more exotic than simply “Canada.” Most Americans know where Canada is, after all, but have to think twice when the province is mentioned.

The deep channel between Eastport and Campobello Island, New Brunswick, is called Friars Road, named for a rock formation dubbed the Old Friar. It stands at the foot of the bluff that’s part of the international park honoring Franklin Roosevelt’s former summer estate.

Equally exotic for this Ohio boy is living on one of the Fundy Bay islands, even if we don’t have to take a ferry to get to or from the mainland.

If I’m counting right in the satellite images, mine is one of the one hundred most easternmost houses in the continental U.S. It’s likely I’m even the most easternmost Quaker in the country.

Was this once part of a sardine cannery? Or the steamship terminal? Yes, that’s more of Campobello Island, New Brunswick, on the other shore.

Been here two years now, too, and it’s still amazing me. 

Three contradance highlights

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

All of them regard waltzing, rather than the facing lines that give New England contradances their name.

I should mention that there’s something special about waltzes, which usually come just before the break after the first hour or so and definitely at the conclusion of the evening. In fact, one girlfriend would always grill me about my waltz partners on those nights she decided instead to stay home.

The first memory here involves a dance at the town hall in Bowdoinham, Maine, always special in my experience, especially those when the band centered on three families of musicians.

At the break, as I was conversing with a lovely potential dance partner, I noticed that a young fiddler, maybe six years old, was still on stage and teaching an even younger fiddler some music. It was enough for me to say, “Hey, it’s a waltz, let’s dance,” and we did, soon joined by others. I looked up and saw the amazement in her eyes. You know – If we play, they will dance – as an epiphany.

~*~

Years later, elsewhere, I was telling that story to a fantastic young dancer as we waltzed.

Her eyes lit up.

“So you’re the one!”

~*~

And then, at a Bob McQuillan retrospective honoring the rerelease on CD of an earlier LP, the partner I had for the waltz was named Amelia.

Coincidentally, the same as my step-grandmother, fondly recalled.

And the waltz was titled “Amelia’s Waltz,” composed by Bob for the daughter of a beloved band member.

The same one, it turned out, circling with me and ever so light on her feet.

~*~

I’m getting teary as I relate all this, but there you have it.

Hunkering down for winter

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We’re quickly approaching the longest nights of the year, which are truly long here in Eastport. Accompanied by the most truncated days of the year, when the sun barely clears the horizon. We’re just a hair shy of the 45th Parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. These days, it can feel even further north than the map shows.

The experience can be especially harsh here, now that the Summer People are long gone and most of the stores and galleries are shut for the season while those that remain open do so largely on limited hours. You might see a stranger or two in town around sunset, looking for a place to eat, and the best you can do is tell them to go to the IGA and get there before the 7 o’clock closing. Pizza slices or deli cuts plus a six-pack lead the list.

Even more, we know big snow, escalating ice, and profound cold are still ahead, as well as a blustery nor’easter or three.

We don’t even have a retail scene to crank up the holiday hoopla. Nor do we have anything resembling a nightlife, apart from a few cultural performances. Bless ‘em, especially after the Covid shutdowns.

Needless to say, social connections are especially important. For me, that includes singing in Quoddy Voices and worshiping with Cobscook Friends Meeting.

Also anticipated is a big stack of reading, both books and magazines, and concerts streamed from the Pine Tree State and beyond.

I’m already looking forward to the invasion of family for the holidays.

How do you adjust to such seasonal change?

 

Oh, for the glory of pickles!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

Not everybody shares my delight in pickles, at least the kind you put on sandwiches, but I pile them on, when I can. I’m not much for lettuce there, by the way – I prefer that as a separate salad.

I like the crunch and acidity the pickles add, or even the sweetness, depending on the variety.

My wife grew up in Mount Olive, North Carolina, where many of these originate today.

My eyes were opened to this reality the year we went largely vegan when we practiced the Eastern Orthodox feasting for Advent. The hardest part for me was finding snack food. (Well, that plus a satisfactory creamer substitute for my coffee and something in place of cheese and … the list goes on.) Fortunately, my wife makes a great humus, and the wraps can be filling, though bland over repetition. And that’s when the pickles took center stage. A row of the green orbs in the torpedo was truly heavenly.

Not that I stop there. When we’re out to eat, the rest of the family puts their kosher pickles on my plate. Not that I’ll argue.

And then there are the summer pickles, meant to be consumed shortly after the cucumbers taken from the garden and put into canning jars. Sometimes it’s a challenge to keep up with the harvest. As if I’m complaining.

Only in the past few years have I begun to appreciate other kinds of pickles – beets, green beans, and eggs, for instance – dishes that used to appear on family dinners at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Especially on big events like Thanksgiving and Easter. Just how far back in our heritage does that go through generations of farmers?

Anybody else love that pickled ginger they serve with sushi?