Category: Personal Journey

Cleaning out the pantry

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Our Eat Vegan Before 6:00 approach to Advent, adapted from Mark Bittman’s book, has led us to a refreshing side activity. We’re trying to use up a lot of items we already have in our pantry rather than shopping for more.

We’re digging out a lot of legumes and grains and beans that got pushed to the back, for one thing, as well as home-canned fruits and vegetables, for another.

This “use it up” strategy is actually fun, extending to other parts of the household. It’s boosting efforts at decluttering. Do we still need this or that? Do we know somebody who can use it? Does it go into our yard sale now planned for May?

To be honest, we still have a long way to go. Guess I’ll just have to use more jam on my toast in the morning.

You don’t have to take it as gospel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Despite of having read all of the Bible – and wrestled with many of its passages – I had never read it straight through until a few years ago. (Rather, it had been piecemeal. Seeing it in the larger structure presents some unique hurdles and troubling assumptions, as well as an evolving comprehension of the Holy One and faithfulness. )

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been retracing that experience with a new post each week at my As Light Is Sown blog. My reflections, as you might expect, are quite unorthodox, and in the books of the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament), they’ve been augmented by heartfelt insights and confessions by some wonderful Jewish poets and novelists – not  the stuff commonly encountered in Christian circles. You don’t have to be a believer to be engage with these stories. Think of them like Shakespearean or Greek drama, if you will, filled with human drama.

It’s a much different approach than reading it as law, one filled with more punishments than rewards. No, this is essentially about life itself.

I’d love for you to join in the series – and look forward, especially, to your reactions and comments.

As for those dreams

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My wife’s long dreamed of living on an island and had come close to making that a reality. She’s still pained by the way that came apart, back before she met me. Well, indirectly it’s a reason we came together.

So here we are, finally with a destination that’s technically an island, one connected to the mainland by a causeway rather than a ferry.

As for me, Downeast Maine – the lands and waters east of fashionable Acadia and Bar Harbor – reminds me of the Far West, with its long distances to anywhere, the wilds and wildlife, and opportunities to explore nature. But our destination also has a lively arts scene, one that reminds me of Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula, back in the early ’80s.

Leaving the Pacific Northwest crushed a passion and way of life, something I’m feeling rekindled in this new setting.

No, it’s not Alaska or the coast of British Columbia and there are no glacier-glad mountains, but the vibe’s right. For that matter, I’m not up for that degree of isolation in my life at this stage.

Somehow, though, this is exciting.

~*~

For us, it’s not quite as simple as packing everything onto a boat and landing at a new dock.

Instead, we’re relocating in stages, eventually merging two households into one. Two households with barns, to an old Cape without one.

Whatever we keep will be strategic, for sure. And yes, it will still be lined with books, lots of them.

One more thing on the plate

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Covid caused us to put off last spring’s anticipated yard sale, which was to help us reduce some of our excess possessions. Now we realize if we sell this house before May, when the yard sale seasons begins, we need to choose whether to move our excess items to our daughter’s and have a yard sale there or to take them to Goodwill or the dump instead.

Quite simply, do we feel we’re up for investing the time and effort in preparing and conducting a sale? (As well as the tedious job of cleaning up afterward?) How much do we want to reasonably rake in if we do?

In either case, I don’t want to pack up a bunch of stuff “to get to later,” meaning sometime after hauling it five hours northeast. Or wherever.

Note to self: Energy applied now saves double or triple that amount later.

Facing up to downsizing

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After nearly 21 years in the same house – the one with the small red barn – we’ve come to a difficult decision.

It’s time to move on. Not only is the place too big for just the two of us – remember, there were once five us of living here – it’s also eating up too much of our retirement budget and time. We can’t continue to watch our meagre savings shrinking. For that matter, we can’t even keep up with the gardening and cleaning routines, not if we’re going to indulge in the other desired things on our proverbial plate. An estimate for reroofing the house may have been the tipping point.

We’ve run the numbers of having others renting space here or trying to swap what we own for something smaller close by, and we do love the community, as you’ve gathered from reading the blog, but no enticing alternative has jumped out. Dover’s simply a very hot housing market at the moment.

What has caught our fancy, thanks to a daughter’s investigation, is a small down-on-the-heels city on the ocean at the other end of Maine – one with an active arts community and a nearby Quaker meeting. It is as far from where we are now as is Manhattan in the opposite direction – a five-hour-plus drive. Half of the townships you pass though in the last two hours of that route are uninhabited, except for the black flies, mosquitos, and moose.

Even without that prompting, we still need to sort through our possessions and cull what we can. It’s not just clutter, either. So much of this is essentially frozen time – things we thought we’d want to get to someday or debris from the past, souvenirs we probably won’t ever revisit again. (There’s more on decluttering on my Chicken Farmer blog.)

The key question we’re asking ourselves, “Is this something I’ll need or use in the next five years?” Or, for that matter, really miss.

And so, independently, we’ve started. No matter how liberating the task ultimately becomes, getting there is often painful.

In our case, it’s a multistage process, as I’ll discuss in future posts.

We’ve started with the books, mostly, because there are so many of them and they occupy the most space. They’re also heavy to move.

After that we get to clothing, kitchen goods, garden and home maintenance tools, our personal collections.

For me, that leads to writing supplies and files, concert program notes and playbills from events I’ve attended, my vinyl, CD, and tape recordings.

 

Here’s another consideration of your worldly possessions

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

If your house caught fire, what would you miss most?
Or, if you had time, what’s the first thing you would you save?

You know, that Dolley Madison thing of grabbing the portrait of Washington when the White House was burning. (OK, a slave actually deserves the credit, but back to the point.)

I have to admit that having so much of my work now backed up in the cloud, rather than on paper, greatly refocuses my response here.

My journals would be a big loss – there are too many to take them out all at once.

Other people would top the list, and after that, whatever’s closest at hand, probably starting with my laptop.

Random thoughts while sorting through what’s been squirrelled away

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

When we first moved to our home, I had dreams of converting the loft of the barn into my own palatial writer’s studio, replete with shelves of books and a bank of filing cabinets. I recalled what critic and English professor Jack Barnes had done at his farmhouse in Hiram, Maine, and was envious. In some ways, it would have been an extension of how I’d transformed what normally would have been the bedroom in my rented townhouse on the highest hill in Manchester before making the big leap that included this barn.

Several things changed during the two decades since then.

One was the shift from paper to digital, not exactly planned but let’s say inevitable, by stages. Submissions to editors and publishers no longer required printed manuscripts, for example, and with that came less need for envelopes, filing drawers of copies and correspondence. That in itself has meant I’m needing a lot less physical space to work in.

Another was our entering an empty-nest situation as the girls moved away and then my mother-in-law passed.

Financially, of course, converting the loft to year-round use was an expense I could no longer justify. Besides, why would I want to be isolated there when I had the top of the house to work in?

Realistically, my aspirations of becoming a successful author – meaning a sustainable income from royalties, workshops and appearances, and editing or coaching – never materialized. Along with that went my need for what would have been, in effect, a large office.

~*~

So here I am, in what became a kind of seasonal treehouse, one filled with things that didn’t fit into our house itself, not all of them mine, by a long shot. I’m blowing off dust and spiders while sorting through boxes, cartons, and shelves before the weather gets too cold to work up here. See this as plugging through time, past, present, and future. How many opportunities have I blown or got buried by other demands on my attention? How did we do as much as we did? Whatever happened to so-and-so? Still, I feel no impulse to reconnect in person. The time for that has long passed.

As for the open area on the floor? When’s the last time I’ve done hatha yoga? Yet one more anticipated activity that never came to fruition.

~*~

Down from the wall comes an Amish hat, the one with hole in the crown. It no longer fit that self-identity anymore, not the Plain Quaker style and practice. Out it goes, then.

Same for the three-D topographical map of the Cascade Range and Yakima. I won’t be hiking those trails anymore. Anything I do will be somewhere in Maine. Besides, if I want to check a detail, these days there’s always the Internet.

I had come to a point where I couldn’t imagine how anyone could live without a barn, or so I joked, but now I’m about to be reminded it’s possible. Others in our entourage, however, are scouting out storage units as a way of buying more time to do triage on their own possessions in the developments of any pending deal.

Anyone else using the DuckDuckGo search engine?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

Always a contrarian with an aversion to Big Brother, I’ve been open to alternatives to Google for online research. Still, it seems to come up with the broadest results.

Lately, though, I’ve been relying on DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/) as an alternative, largely on its promises to keep my wanderings more private. What I am finding interesting is the fact that it comes up with a different swath of results than Google does.

Yes, I still turn to Google, no apologies, but I do like getting off the freeway, if you know what I mean.

I am curious about other search engines other folks are using – and why.

What are your search engine preferences?

Unpacking the past, opening space to move on

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

I’ve been up in the loft of the barn, going through many of my goods that have been packed away here. These days, the temperature’s not too hot, and though the air’s chilly outside, the sun on the roof has this space comfy. The wind sends maple spinners tapping overhead, as well as falling leaves and twigs. For me, it’s autumn in more ways than one.

I’ve already gone through my spirituality/religion bookshelf in my studio in the house and pruned nearly a hundred volumes from it – mostly Yoga and Buddhism I’ll no longer be referencing in new writing. I look one last time at these field guides and backcountry maps from across the continent while hoping to find an appreciative reader to give them to. Any ideas?

Alas, I’m finding more books here in the barn, some of them adding to that pile, but also Whole Earth Catalogs, political science, poetry, marketing and agenting guides, art and history, Cascade Mountains trail books and photo albums. Each of them is a reflection of my life’s interests and pursuits, now in my past.

There are also picture frames we’ve never used, rolled-up posters, Quaker outreach materials.

At least I went ahead and burned the outdated assorted financial records a few days ago – credit cards slips, receipts, insurance mailings, and so on. Shredding them would have taken forever.

And then correspondence and photos. What to keep and what to release?

The point is that it’s time to let go and move on.

Soon to follow are the genealogical working notes and files. Four filing boxes stuffed with them. Everything I’ve gleaned is now up on my Orphan George blog. Another completed project, as far as I’m concerned. Yet when I open one of the boxes, I feel myself burdened with some constricting force, likely arising in a self-imposed obligation. No, the time has come.

Along with another filing box of poetry and fiction acceptances and correspondence. I discarded the rejections long ago. I hate to think how much I spent on postage and photocopying in that pastime or of the hours I devoted to it before I shifted my output to blogging and self-published ebooks.

More symbolic is my old backpack basket, at one time a status item reflecting my reaching first-class rank in Boy Scouts and, along with it, the right to weave the basket and attach it to the frame I made when I had earned second-class. It no longer fits and has long been battered in my moves across the continent. Besides, I won’t be backpacking again. With it, I learned to back light in my travels. Farewell, then, as I pack light anew.

Not everything up here is mine, but we are on a downsizing effort.

~*~

I have to admit feelings of failure, of seeing how often I was compelled to move away and start over just as something else was about to open. Of near-misses, too. Of broken relationships.

But there’s also the warmth of past friendships and support. Long, personal letters from busy people, for one thing, something that’s really from a different era than the one we inhabit now. Of deceased elders and mentors, especially.

I have moments of sensing this as a prelude to the aftermath of my own funeral, a kind of this-was-your-life sweep. As I do the work of clearing out things I’ve treasured that won’t mean anything to anyone among my family and friends, I spare them the task. There will be plenty enough as when I’m done, far as I can see.

It’s bittersweet, really, making room for what’s left. Nobody said it would be easy.

Some perspective on prime foliage

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Even though I grew up in a northern environment and its deciduous trees, autumn color was pretty much peripheral. We lived in town, after all, and I was essentially indoors at school or the like. Besides, much of the rural landscape around us was open farmland, with here and there a woodlot or riverbank.

My foliage awareness really took off a few months after graduating from college, when I lived in a small city surrounded by forested Appalachian foothills that turned ablaze at the end of September. Like Kenzie in my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, I was working a job that allowed me to get out of the office at mid-afternoon, when my free daylight hours were soon devoted to exploring the visions along backroads in what became a daily epiphany.

From town, it appeared the hills caught fire at their summits and the flaming color then ate its way downslope. And, as I heard, the forests themselves were a blending of New England varieties and those of the South, so we had the best of both worlds for foliage.

In the years and wanderings since, that’s been my standard, though I should question if it was really quite as vivid as my memory would boast. Having lived in northern New England now for 33 years, I’ve often thought our fall foliage was more subdued than its legend, perhaps apart from some spectacular locales like Sugar Hill here in New Hampshire.

This past week, though, has changed my opinion. In driving about, I’ve come across large swaths in full color – not the usual mixed green and bare mixed in – and properly illuminated, even in an early morning mist and fog, not that my camera would capture that. It soon becomes almost too much, too rich, for one’s eyes to handle.

~*~

That first autumn Upstate, I didn’t have a camera, alas. Later, living in an orchard, I was disappointed that the apple, peach, and pear trees turned mostly dun. Finally, what I attempted, with film, my first years in New Hampshire came out so-so, partly a failing on my not knowing quite where to go, when. Only when I took up digital photography, about the time I launched this blog, did I start shooting earnestly, especially my first autumn after taking the buyout at the office and heading into the hills a little north of us.

As I’ve revisited those shots, I’m struck by how often utility lines mar the image – that, and other things our eyes overlook, though the camera is far less forgiving. Those lines stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Thus, in the past month, as I’ve been shooting, there have been many fine examples of color I’ve out-and-out passed by for that reason.

Another difference this time is that I’m using my second camera, which has a “magic” auto-setting that intensifies the color. In alternating my shots with that and a more subdued tonality, I’m finding that the “hotter” one grabs more of what I’m feeling as I look, while the “cooler” option is closer to the reality … until the sun turns just the right way, which is what’s been happening the past week.

I am surprised our hundred-year drought hasn’t deeply limited the foliage. There was a walnut tree across the street that turned yellow one afternoon – maybe within an hour – but I postponed the shot. The next day was dull and wet, the light was just wrong. And the following day? The leaves had all fallen.

Well, it will all be gone soon. The phenomenon is a lesson in attentiveness and acceptance in the present.