Category: Personal Journey

ROOTS THROUGH THE SKY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Ours was not the journey of Ulysses. There had been no dramatic battle. No obvious defeat or shipwreck, either. We weren’t accompanied by our own troops. I intended to make my home here, at the edge of wilderness, and venture into its realms, rather than circle back toward some faraway but faithful woman or goddess.

With the exception of my spouse, who also traveled with me, I was fleeing my own people and hoping that strangers would be better, or at least different. Crucially, I would continue to enter the back country to be reminded of some mystery, as if on this edge of the continent some faithful remnant was making a final stand in defense of Old Ways handed down through practice from antiquity. Still, you could look at the ground and be disgusted here, too, to find white fibrous butts, the thimbles of broken cylinders left behind wherever man goes, along with the larger, inescapable debris. Look up and see contrails of airliners and military aircraft. You could scoff that in vapor-lighted cities, where cancer is the predominate cause of dying, few inhabitants are aware of the flickering stars or the planets in their orbits; the populace is ignorant of the very lunar phases you will so closely follow here. Taunt them, arguing that Jesus is the only bum welcome on their streets and parking lots, and accepted in their midst only because he’s conveniently dead. Maybe he’s not all that welcome, either, if you look closer. Meanwhile, vandals spray-paint his name on forest boulders alongside highways, as though a word alone can distribute clear-cut salvation. Ponder the contempt for both creation and creator. The Old Orders dismiss superficial religion. There’s fasting, and then there’s starvation. The soul knows a hunger, one that comes at the beginning of prayer. Some practitioners know this opens a furrow their horses help plow. For now, I would venture into high places to be reminded of the ancient interplay of dualities. Not just good and bad, but the overlapping harmonies as well. Make my rounds, however quickly at first, acknowledging the slower nomadic practice.

When I packed for this move, I preferred boxes over baskets. Something squared, for paper and recordings, especially. Typewriter. Electronics. We weren’t transporting dried berries or salmon. Blankets cushioned furniture and china. The cardboard presented fewer overlapping harmonies. Learn to weave baskets and I might learn something of the Cross. Especially in its curving.

Handle with care, all the same. Let go of one, something shatters. Or the other, something bounces. Baskets stack differently than boxes. See which one fits a squared room better. Which one, a hogan, wickiup, tipi, or kiva.

Step outside. Turn to the four directions. Then name them.

MALE / SUN
FEMALE / MOON.

Turn again.

AIR / FIRE
EARTH / WATER.

Once more.

SPIRIT / LIGHT
FLESH / SHADOW.

Draw out their colors according to tradition or your own intuition.

Soon the divisions break down, into Yin/Yang swirling.

This is where prayer begins its dancing, even without Kokopelli’s piping.

In such turning I was brought to the edge of my intellect. Facing the expanse toward the horizon, my knowledge of geography, geology, botany, zoology, astronomy, and survival itself proved defective. The edge and depth of my emotions, too. Return to my religious texts and I’d find a different story. Not the one taught to children, but more sinister dimensions. Walk far enough away from the village or highway into open fear, admitting this experience might break me. This Dedicated Laborious Quest draws on all my ability — mental, physical, and psychic — until I’m forced to pull strength from some kernel of infinity within myself. As you pull, roots come forth. Draw them from the emptiness within the basket. The emptiness waiting on the horizon’s circle, as well. More roots, reaching out like cosmic rays through the sky, are visible only to the spider — these beads on a rickety filament.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

TURNING NORTHEAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

two blocks from my apartment, on the way
toward downtown
the Amoskeag Dam impeded the Merrimack
with a broad placidity I associated
with the upper Susquehanna
below it the roaring wildness of hydroelectric generation
or the snow-melt Yakima and its tributaries
why I didn’t just dump half my stuff way back
and start over before trekking through the marketplace
to rediscover how outrageously expensive all these goods
I need at hand can be? at last, though, my belongings
began falling into place where old mills extended
an eerie sense all too similar
to what I had created in one novel
to say nothing of the French-Canadian hilltop
on the west side of the river, neatly occupied
by descendants of Kee-beck, and an air of Kerouac
oh, how I’ve come through calculator-town
foundry-town, shoemaking-town, college-town
fruit-packing-town, sawmill-town, meatpacking-town
car-assembly-line-town, blast-furnace-town
summer-resort-town, and spice-grinding-town
on the harbor
to this ghost of a textile-town on the river where
the warehouses of my broken ambition overflow
once more, I arrived without a lover or children
for now, though
this life in a sleeping bag and cardboard boxes
fatigues and I long to get back to Owings Mills to pick up
the rest of my furniture and files so I can really move in
with essentials that include a toaster-oven and
the little red light on my answering machine,
items I’ve come to miss
but having a little cash in my pocket once more
feels wonderfully strange
and having seven book-length works
drafted and revised allows me to show something
more than a concept in my head or scattered notes
the arduous, tricky road to publication can take ages
usually eighteen months once a house accepts a work
and the contract’s signed, according
to the New York Times Book Review a few months back
In the meantime, my savings have gone
(the miracle is that they lasted as long as they did)
and it’s time to get back on my feet, financially

To continue, click here.
Copyright 2015

HOPING FOR ANOTHER ACCOUNTING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

She liked to bite fingers.
She braided my beard.
Her nose and big toe were square.
Her tresses were thirteen years long.

~*~

She devoured the translation like a cheeseburger
and refused to understand me.

She spent her paycheck
on clothes she bought on layaway
while she was one unemployed
good dresser who had to do something.

She said Kayak poetry review
looked like a Sunday school booklet
with a cannon on the cover.

~*~

She didn’t like the antique silver fork
with the engraved W
I’d bought for a dime

– the yellowed marriage
whose bride was no doubt long dead
held no treasure in her eyes.

Why else would we have it?

To continue, click here.
Copyright 2015

HOW ABOUT A SUTRA?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I revisit my copy of The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng, the binding falls apart. How appropriate! The price, $2.95, says everything: this is a volume that has been carried from one end of the continent to the other and back, with a world of spiritual practice and discovery in between.

A sutra typically is a Hindu or Buddhist teacher’s discourse for aspirants.

The scarab, a symbol of ancient Egypt, originates as a beetle, By extension, it also becomes a symbol of transportation in the hippie era, leaping from there to the Hindu and Buddhist texts and back.

Break away from routine – job, home, neighborhood and friends, the commerce of community – just long enough to let the mind clear. Don’t fill the silences with radio, conversation, any music or dialogue but your own. From somewhere deep in the nervous system, atypical even random bits of memory and observation rise in unanticipated sequence. What ought to have been obvious all along suddenly asserts itself, perhaps with bold surrealism or jarring candor.

In a flash, the mind dances, as it will, with whatever engages it. Field notes, the words themselves, appear unadorned, without apology. Here something other than straight thinking presents its original mental hopscotch.

To a generation of Americans, the Volkswagen Bug represents cheap, easily repaired, carefree transport – often accompanied by adventurous first-time experiences and personal growth. In ways, the plain VW depicts a break between the routines of schooling and establishing families and careers to follow. A time, too, of spiritual exploration, with a flowering of Yoga and Zen, especially.

Here, then, the machine serves as a vessel into the Void, where the mind glimpses and tastes “all this fleeting world: a star at dawn; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream,” in the words the Diamond Sutra (Vajrachchedika).

Listen to this teaching. As Hui Neng insists, “Mirror-like Wisdom is pure by nature.” And persevere!

~*~

Ripples in a Bejeweled Prayer Flag
Ripples in a Bejeweled Prayer Flag

Well, these are all at play in my newest poetry collection, Ripples in a Bejeweled Prayer Flag. Take a look at Thistle/Flinch editions.

A DESERT AND A SEA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

A hundred miles inland from the nearest port, we encountered a three-legged tree. Until looking closer after being told the house beside it was built a century earlier by a retired sea captain, you’d have no clue a whale jaw had been leaned against the young trunk, where they grew together.

Irrigated, of course, this being desert.

The question remained. Who was farther from true home?

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

 

 

NAGGING QUESTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 16 Comments

I’ve been trying to avoid one nagging question: How does your faith make you a different person? How has it changed your life? Followed by: How do others perceive this?

The old Quaker testimonies presented faith as a matter of the way we live. Our “sufferings” for our beliefs. (It matters THAT much!) The days when Friends lived “under discipline” – language and clothing as outward expressions – remaining inescapable.

So what about today? How does being Quaker (or whatever your faith) make you not just different, but a better person than you would have otherwise been?

~*~

Seasons 1

For more of my reflections, click here.

 

FROM IN THE FLESH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Thinking about weather means thinking about air and about what’s invisible. Air, of course, being our most pressing physical need. We inspire – breathe in – as well as expire, or at least exhale, for now. It’s a rhythm, as are the seasons. While we don’t see it, we feel its presence as wind and view its action on leaves and open water.

Of the ancient elements, air was invisible and heavenly, countered by visible earth, fire, and water. The weather, of course, invokes all three. Fire, not just as sun but as lightning as well. Water, coming down as rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog; mounting across the sky as clouds, swirling, dissolving. Earth, absorbing them all. Everything, full of mystery.

Our hearts instill not just rhythm but constant drumming, working to bring these elements together – air in the lungs, with the liquid stream of life drawing food from the stomach and intestines, in turn to create body heat and the electrical impulses of thought and muscular action.

In one of my seasons of soul-searching, I finally came to address the “earthy” dimensions of spirituality head on. While the Quaker queries and advices touch on some of these as matters, they do so as points of conduct, without necessarily delving into the lingering and underlying dynamics. There’s a longstanding tension in religious teachings between the goodness of the Creation and the evils of “the world” or our “natural inclinations.” As I would find, the biggest conflict occurs deep within our individual psyches, as we attempt to resolve the fact that we are essentially animals, and thus doomed to die, while also being spiritually aware, with a knowledge of good and evil. The is, of course, the curse of the Garden of Eden, that the price of knowledge also imposes a continuing pain. Otto Rank, one of Sigmund Freud’s two principal disciples, delves profoundly into this dichotomy and argues that the fear of death, and not sex, is the central issue in the human condition. He also contends that religion provides the only sane response to this condition.

At the interface of the animal and the spiritual we can expect the most profound perceptions to emerge, and the further the perception reaches into both the animal and spiritual experience of a person, the stronger its impact. In this sense, mysticism does not withdraw from life, but offers opportunities to more fully encounter it. Once again, we find ways the Spirit becomes embodied in our lives and our world. How it takes flesh. How the abstract reveals itself in concrete decisions and actions, as well as thoughts and emotions.

One of the central themes running through the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and early Quaker teaching is that God has an alternative way of living – one that is at odds with general society or many human impulses. Conflicts arise immediately, of course, because we are essentially social animals who require other people for our own survival. How much are we willing to suffer to preserve this alternative stream, and how much are we willing to bend? Part of the answer depends on our place within a People of God, as Jews, early Christians, and early Quakers have all seen themselves through periods of intense persecution. (In fairness, let me acknowledge that the vision of drawing away from the surrounding society is also found in a number of other religious traditions, although not necessarily with the ideal of becoming a People of God or of embracing the “earthy” aspects of the human condition.)

In our own time, we sometimes speak of “parallel universes” that resemble our own. At a stoplight I glance over at the car next to mine and see the woman driver is scratching spots on a large lottery ticket. I have no idea what makes this so important to her at this given moment, why she didn’t take a few minutes when she first bought it, or whether she’s running late for her next appointment. For that matter, the attraction of lotteries largely eludes me, while Quaker discipline and frugality give me reason to avoid them. It’s one of those flashes where I begin to wonder if I’m living in a parallel universe within the United States of America, if not this planet Earth. I view military events, crowds in shopping malls, celebrity news, NASCAR racing, stadium concerts, new automobile showrooms, funeral home calling hours, McMansions, strip mining, and a host of other activities with the same bewilderment. On the other hand, I’ve begun to appreciate baseball and football, at least as they apply to New England, and once owned a used BMW that initiated me into car culture, of sorts.

That’s not meant to cast myself as “holier than thou,” but simply different – somewhere between American consumer society, on one side, and the Amish and old-order Brethren, on the other. If I begin sounding too cocky on the “holier than thou” front, my wife and children are all too willing to point out my failings. Humility is part of the earthy half of this spiritual equation. We are, after all, only human. In our own ways, at that.

~*~

For more of my Seasons of the Spirit reflections, click here.

A RATHER CHECKERED CAREER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For someone who has engaged in a writing life his whole adulthood, I’ve had a rather checkered career as a reader. After a precocious outburst in the classics – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in second- or third- or fourth-grade (not as class assignments, of course – who knows what we were reading there), I found myself largely oblivious to fiction. My attention turned to history and biography (the Landmark series, especially) and then science and politics. Non-fiction, with a sense of content. Fiction came later, in high school, curiously through political fiction – Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, 1984, rather than any of the traditional British canon. Throw a little Shakespeare in, and I was off – into journalism. (Let me mention that Huck Finn was much harder reading in my junior year of high school than it had been when I was younger; as a novice reader, I wasn’t tripped up by the strange spellings of dialect.)

In college, for whatever reason, I developed a passion for Samuel Johnson. Not for his moralizing as much as the sarcasm, I’d say, as well as a fascination with the baroque richness of his style. Maybe it was just the force of personality projecting from the writing. And then came Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac … the widening stream.

Surprisingly, a major turning point occurred in the span when I had the fewest opportunities to read – my years living in the ashram, a monastic community in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Out of the practice of meditation and reflection, however, I began to approach literature in a new way. The quietude opened poetry to me, both as a reader and a writer. The experience also introduced me to mythology, with the Hindu stories being more fantastic and meaningful than anything I had encountered in the Greek and Roman stream. Later, I was able to leap from this into the stories of the Bible as well, returning me to my previously unknown roots.

Others have written of being a promiscuous reader. I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to reading that way – at least, not any more. One of the ashram exercises, in fact, was a “reading fast,” meaning written words, rather than food. It’s all a matter of focus. That is, when I’m eating, I want to choose to concentrate on my food rather than a text. When I’m traveling, I want to see where I’m going. (Airport terminals, on the other hand, or stretches before takeoff, are another matter — they are among those place of limbo.) Later, when the newspaper first comes off the press, I found I could no longer focus on the stories – not after a shift of heavy editing. If anything, my head was so full of disjointed stimulation I needed to slow down to savor what I’d already encountered. For that matter, I prefer walking to jogging, with its restoration of a natural pace. I rush too many places and deliver on too many deadlines as it is. When I enter someone’s home for the first time, I must take care to pay attention to them more than the spines on their bookshelves. Now what were you saying?

I read, then, with greater focus these days. More selectively. I can no longer have classical music playing in the background. (It used to provide a barrier for noise from my family or neighbors.) Now, I immerse myself in what is before me. The text, then, as in scripture.

~*~

Out of all of this, my own work emerges. As a writer, I strive to create a linear progression. That is, the parts must advance is some sort of logic. Curiously, in my own work, I am often inspired by a Hegelian model – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – as drawn from cinema theory. On a wider scale, my earlier interests surface in new ways, resulting in something more akin to a matrix or spiral or collage than a straight line. I have been called a Mixmaster, with good reason. On top of it all, in my many moves about the continent, I’ve found myself exploring the soul of each place – something wine aficionados consider, in a smaller range, when they discuss terroir.