Category: Personal Journey

ABOUT THOSE ROMANTIC MOONLIGHT WALKS ON THE BEACH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

If we can believe their proclamations, two things single women in this part of the country typically seek with a partner are romantic candlelight dinners and long strolls on a moonlit beach.

The dinners, we can suppose, are either at elegant restaurants or in his dwelling (where he displays his gourmet cooking skills to her fullest appreciation), either way with suitable wine in sparkling stemware. Let’s just hope he remembers to ask her beforehand if she enjoys his signature dishes. (Mea culpa, on my end.) I don’t think hamburger and fries, by the way, go with her candlelit setting.

From observation, let me add that the restaurants often wind up as intimidating experiences for the would-be couple. When my wife and I go out, we expect to laugh, to banter with the wait staff, to be entertained by the possibilities of food and ambiance. When we were reviewing dining spots, even the disasters turned into fun-filled adventures – OK, if we’d been paying full fare, we would have been justifiably miffed. As columnists, though, we got our revenge.

The nighttime beach, though, is another matter. Having had opportunities to spend time approaching midnight on local beaches, I can tell you few couples are found strolling there, much less romantically. Except for a few nights in prime summer – the days hovering around the century mark, the night’s nippy and windy. The moon, for its part, is in its fullest stages only a few nights each summer, and many of those are cloudy. Without a bright moon, it’s impossibly dark near the water – even spooky, with or without sea fog rolling in.

You can come to love the ocean that way, but it’s a stark environment.

For romance, though, I think you need a driftwood fire. Plus the right wine and a corkscrew.

Wine? It’s the one thing both events seem to have in common.

REVISITING THE PERSONALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

Finding yourself single after the dissolution of a marriage or the death of a spouse is bewildering, at best.

The loneliness and grieving can be nearly unbearable, and emerging from that into some kind of social scene is, well, a lot worse than high school ever was.

Trying to find the right place to meet appropriate potential partners is no less challenging. You hear all kinds of suggestions, from health club to Laundromat, and all of that’s problematic. These days, as a male, I’d look at a yoga studio, just saying …

Another of the complications is the fact – well, it was a quarter-century ago – that the available women were concentrated within the bigger cities, while the corresponding men were an hour or more away, beyond the suburbs.

In the time since then, a number of online dating sites have appeared, and I’ll let others relate their adventures and successes or failures.

But when I was available, the personals ads began to flourish. Out of necessity, I suppose. They even had their own free booklets, like TV listings.

Coincidentally, around the time I remarried, there was a blowup at my newspaper when the publisher went livid over a personals ad where one hopeful had described himself in opposite terms to the usual cliches. (He touted himself as fat, lazy, unemployed, and the like, as I recall.) It was enough to get me and now-elder stepdaughter (and fellow writer) to start reading the Boston Sunday Globe’s more varied ads for insights in the ways people perceived themselves or tried to portray their desires. Usually, they churned out short resumes full of contradictions or things only others could adjudge. “Beautiful” or “handsome” was common, usually preceded by “very,” but that’s something purely for the viewer to decide, thank you.

At any rate, a few entries would stand above the crowd.

One, for instance, described herself as a “Land’s-End kind of gal,” and you really do get a good sense of her in those five words. (We gave her ad a B+ or A-.)

The all-time winner, though, was along these lines: “Happy blue-eyed plumber in search of articulate, well-poised woman to bring (something) into my life. Children a plus.”

He alone could say if he was happy, and “blue-eyed” certainly told the reader about looks. “Plumber,” meanwhile, indicated responsibility and economic status. As for children? Few novelists deliver as much with such economy.

The ad, we noticed, ran just once.

 

THE UNENDING MYSTERY OF MUTUAL ATTRACTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 18 Comments

To my mind, one of the great questions about the human condition is just why an individual is romantically attracted to one person but not another.

We can start with physical attraction, of course, which opens a whole list of possibilities. Since I’ve always been a heterosexual male, I suppose my checklist would start with blonde, redhead, or brunette, although I must confess that on a few women, bald can be incredibly stunning. By the way, I happen to love long hair, which to my good fortune my wife possesses. We can move on to blue-eyed, true green, hazel, or brown eyes. And that’s even before we get to height or shape or … you get the picture.

Of course, things get really complicated after that. How much do we want the other to share our deepest interests, even to the point of being a mirror image of ourselves, and how much do we want them to differ? Where are the crucial points of commonality and mutual life’s mission – and how much deviation can we accept or allow? And just how do our emotional styles work together … or clash? What about our attitudes toward money, time, wealth, possessions? How much risk can we tolerate? And so on and on.

For me, keen intellect is essential. One who reads widely, at that. And then there is the spiritual side as well as strong ethics.

On top of it all, one of my measures, if pressed, would ask if this is someone I’d like to gaze on over the breakfast table. And, I could ask, is hers a voice I would always enjoy hearing. Would she always have fascinating stories and insights?

No matter how much I once tried to refine the list, though, something was always missing. In all my years between the collapse of my first marriage and the beginning of the one that counts, I came across a few women who were top candidates on paper but, when we were together, nothing clicked. So what was the missing magic? In the end, I still haven’t a clue.

I come back to this question of mutual attraction when I consider the Apostle Paul’s counsel, “Better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9), and ask, “What if heterosexual marriage does not quench the burning?” My examination of Scripture long ago led me to conclude that the ideal of Christian marriage is not so much the bearing of children but rather the “suitable helpmeet” and that, in turn, points toward monogamy and a unique kind of balance I see as more than an equality in the relationship. You can see where I’ve landed on that debate.

Of course, that also spurs another question – one that involves keeping the focus and the flame strong. Anyone have any suggestions there? These are, after all, central enigmas of our human condition.

FASTER! FASTER?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I hope nobody’s getting whiplash from the wide variety of my recent Red Barn postings. Much of it I’d scheduled ahead, anticipating the usual rhythm of the seasons. And then the book-length publications jumped in, along with a few other surprises.

As we bounce from one category to another, I’m feeling like somebody’s turned up the speed on a merry-go-round. Way up. As you might sense, life’s been getting chaotic around here. More than usual, that is.

But as I’ve been hearing from others, that’s not unique. Seems May, especially, has everybody on the run while much of the winter cycle wraps up and summer events start to kick in.

And we thought it was a long winter? Maybe (and I hope this isn’t too heretic) it wasn’t long enough?

Oh, and now I’m thinking of all those house painting projects still ahead. The ones I can’t put off any longer.

GETTING FLOCKED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments
Don't mock these humble birds. They're great fundraisers, as I remarked in a post the other day. Now he's the rest of the story, the one I thought I'd published long ago ... but hadn't.
Don’t mock these humble birds. They’re great fundraisers, as I remarked in a post the other day. Now here’s the rest of the story, the one I thought I’d published long ago … but hadn’t.

At a party one night in our Smoking Garden, a friend was telling about a fundraiser her church youth group had done back in Massachusetts.

“That’s a great idea,” I said. After all, she was a United Church of Christ pastor with all kinds of connections. “UCC,” for short.

Next thing I knew, a big sign and box appeared in our Quaker meetinghouse, warning Friends to buy flamingo insurance. This is New Hampshire, remember, not Florida.

One night after our party, our renowned sculptor Jane and her husband had come home to find her flock of pink flamingos missing from their yard and garden, but a sign stood in their place: “They needed to be quarantined.”

Uh-huh. I was as baffled as anyone that Sunday as we entered the meetinghouse and faced that big sign and its box of warning.

Here’s how it worked: you could donate any amount for insurance, but if someone else trumped that figure by offering more, you could still get flocked. And if you were flocked, there would be an envelope for another donation for their removal. In other words, you could get hit coming and going.

Then the plastic birds – and wooden cutouts – began appearing in Friends’ lawns. Folks living in apartments weren’t immune, either: the birds showed up strung around balconies or in the backseats of cars left unlocked or wrapped around cars that had been locked.

For the most part, it was great fun – even for the police officers called out to investigate rustling sounds in the night. We had no idea who was in on it, and nobody from our Smoking Garden party guest list was looking guilty.

When we were hit, one of our neighbors laughed and explained why she knew we hadn’t selected the birds as permanent decor: “You’re too organic.”

(Ouch!)

The Sunday morning the operation came out in the open, a guest to Meeting told me, “We did the same thing, down in Connecticut.”

“UCC?” I countered.

“Yes, how’d you know.”

“Just a lucky guess.”

So it had been the Meeting’s kids who were keeping the secret, along with a couple of very, very discrete adults. The money we raised went to the Heifer Project. Our children had to decide what kind of animals they’d send to the Third World – something big, like a cow, or something smaller, like a lot of chickens? And then they took a field trip to the project’s New England farm to check out all the options.

It’s a much better story than the one about my ex-wife’s two birds – the ones a friend of hers stole from my yard after the separation.

 Flocked

 our Lady of Pink Flamingos keeps taunting
“Have you been flocked?”

where’s it going, our summer of plastic flamingos?

 poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson

FUN-DRAISING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Looked up as I drove by a big green lawn the other day and saw it was dotted with pink. A bright pink unlike any flowers we grow in these parts.

Then I smiled, realized the house had just been flocked – there was even a note stuck on a stick.

In a flash, even at a distance (this was the kind of place that has a small pond between the house and the highway), I sensed the two dozen flamingos were all uniform, likely brand-new, unlike the motley band we “quarantined” for our own use all too many years ago now. Why, ours even multiplied in the course of their service – some of the dads were making new ones from plywood, rather than plastic.

Flocked, you ask? Oh, I was sure I’d told that story, somewhere.

 

THE SHORT VERSION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

Asked for a short theology, I’m likely to reply I’ve come to the conclusion God has a different way for us, individually and as a society, to be living.

It’s the story I see evolving in the Bible, for one thing. And in much of the history since.

It’s not hierarchy-based, for starters, and something quite different from nations, with their armies, as we know them.

We get a hint of it in the suggestion of the Jubilee, the redistribution of wealth every 50 years for the entire populace.

Maybe you’re already sensing I don’t draw a distinction between here and eternity, not the way Augustine did. It’s the “Kingdom Come, on Earth as it is in Heaven,” as Christians pray.

The long version, of course, is where all the details come into play.

MOVING TOWARD A NEW PERIOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

This miracle of being allowed to release so much pent-up work is impossible to describe, but it is fostering an incredible change within me. The publication of my novels as ebooks through Smashwords.com and the postings on this blog of so many bits from my archives are allowing me to enter a period of reduction – something I’m calling “decollecting,” when it comes to my books, recordings, manuscripts, extra clothing, and other assemblies. What I’m also finding is an opening to rethink almost everything and, like the layers of an onion being stripped away, of finding myself willing to rely on fewer and fewer answers … and more and more questions. Add to that a growing sense of wonder, in many cases, or of futility and cynicism, when looking at so many of the political and economic policies being followed blindly.

What I am accepting is that I require less and less material support. Maybe it’s the renunciation in my yogic past finally kicking in, or maybe it’s the tightened focus on what remains before me.

One thing I know as I view the trail markers before me: I’m not ready to kick back, for certain. Let’s see where this goes.

REGARDING ELK AND MORE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Monday morning, as I noted at the time:  

I’d thrown the kids off the PC, where they were watching an episode of The Simpsons, only to find out it was actually an assignment for the older one’s upper-level college course, the Sociology of Humor. [No joking.] And then I got around to some poetry submissions, including an acceptance or two.

Glad you like the work I sent. The elk poems arise out of the four years I spent in the desert of Washington state, bordering the “dry side” of the Cascade Range. They’re part of a series, most of which has already appeared in journals. I’m not a hunter, but living as I have most of my adult life in places near forest (even my time in Indiana and Iowa), I’ve had to acknowledge the existence of hunting as a fact of life – and the ways ancient hunting, with its religious/spiritual dimensions (the discipline of meditation, for instance, arises from waiting for the game), contrasts with modern “harvesting.” Even so, some editors have rejected the work out of hand – maybe they thought I’m a NRA member (quite the opposite, in reality – no guns for me).

Among the poems I’ve written are “After the Fact,” which comes out of Native American lore. It turns out that Gary Snyder also has a piece drawing on the same myth – “This Poem Is for Bear” – which acknowledges the aspect of the girl’s disrespecting the bruin before the abduction. I found another piece along this line of my work, “If a Man Goes Mad,” which works along a similar grain.

Finally, as I look back on the period, I reopen a longpoem, my American Olympus, based on a one-week camping trip with a now ex-wife and a former girlfriend who was visiting (who would have guessed they’d actually enjoy each other’s company). As it turns out, I still hear from the ex-girlfriend.