While we’re still reaching way back

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

MY BALD-HEADED, VERY-STRAIGHT boss and I were smoking dope together. He was smiling. Just like Eisenhower.

I DREAMED IN A FOREIGN language. Espanol, never French, on occasion.

MARY WAS SURROUNDED by death asleep next to Sara, who was driving a hearse to pick up hitchhikers. Mary, bless her, was running from the Devil, who wouldn’t harm Sara because she’s Jewish.

AN EQUESTRIAN BESIDE ME was riding a horse. Flashing a fantastic double-edged golden sword, she vindictively slayed three standing enemies, one at a time with a clean sweep, splitting them symmetrically, as if with a razor. They fell away. The first time was funny and unexpected. The next two, a warning that awakened me.

Ten major American religious dissidents

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Who says you had to conform growing up? Here are some people who made America the land of the free, not that I agree with all of them. Still, it really does come down to language and how we use it. Especially when religion and politics are mixed in.

  1. Samuel Gorton. Just plain onery in early New England.
  2. Roger Williams. Leading to a progressive movement then known as Baptists.
  3. Anne Hutchinson. Pointing the way to New England Quakers.
  4. John Woolman. A Quaker who worked ardently against slavery and other economic perils.
  5. Henry David Thoreau. It’s a Unitarian thing, ultimately.
  6. William Miller. The foremost of the voices that would become the Seventh-day Adventist church. Ellen G. White emerged as an essential proponent in its development as it organized in Battle Creek, Michigan, and then Takoma Park, Maryland.
  7. Joseph Smith. You know, the Mormons. Along with Brigham Young and Utah.
  8. Dorothy Day. Catholic Workers, a truly radical movement.
  9. Martin Luther King Jr. Civil rights and much more.
  10. Bayard Rustin. Gay Black Quaker ahead of his time on many fronts.

Who am I overlooking?

With ten years of blogging under my belt, let me say  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments
  1. You have a global audience. I remember being startled after posting a posting of a snowy New England day and getting a comment from the Philippines, “I’ve never seen snow.” In my life, I’ve always taken it for granted. And professionally, my daily journalism career focused on a well-defined circulation area, perhaps a single county or an entire state, depending on the newspaper at the time. My Red Barn posts, on the other hand, often get read on five or six continents.
  2. On WordPress, you’re part of a community. Sometimes posting can feel a bit like corresponding to pen pals in the old days. And it’s important to see what they’re up to as well and letting them know you’ve stopped by, too.
  3. At first, I didn’t understand “likes.” Yes, I was that naïve about social media. They do help me know who’s tuning in on a given day or topic, even though the number of hits now is generally lower than I had five or so years ago – I take it that’s one thing happening across the board. But I’m also surprised by the number of new likes on archived posts.
  4. Tags. They help invite readers. Just don’t use too many or too few. These days, I’m finding readers show up less frequently but then stay around longer, sampling other recent posts or digging into my deep past. I do find tags quite helpful in navigating the WP Reader for fresh voices.
  5. Categories. I find them quite useful in navigating the Barn, so I assume that applies for others, too. With the Red Barn’s unique merry-go-round approach to topics, I find them quite helpful in organizing the ongoing mix.
  6. Scheduling. Unlike most other bloggers, I often work on posts long ahead of their release. It’s one way to create time for my other projects, admittedly, as well as to juggle topics for a better rhythm of presentation. The practice also allows me to go back and polish a post before it goes live or to add from additional reflection. And paradoxically, it can also have me releasing in a more timely pace with the changing seasons – working “live” would actually put me behind the action.
  7. Classic editor, rather than the newer “block” format. Old-timers here at WordPress will definitely understand. Ditto for the Administrative working option.
  8. Reader’s comments are important. Some days they’re the best part of a post. But they’ve definitely declined, and I’m not sure whether that’s a consequence of the Barn’s current appearance or of its shifting round of topics or just something else in general.
  9. Photography. Despite a lifelong love of visual art, I had intended the Red Barn to be a text vehicle. But then photography crept in, first through a borrowed digital camera and then a cheap point-and-shoot Kodak leading to an Olympus and now an unbelievable smart phone. In short, I now list photography among my hobbies, even if it does seem like cheating compared to the historic and very real craft of light meters, f-stops, and darkroom developing of film. As for texts, length remains a puzzle – sometimes a longer “think piece” gets more hits than the bright briefs that seem essential on other social media. And photography on WP? Let me suggest it seems to be more thoughtful than gossipy or copped from other sources.
  10. I’m still ambivalent about the decision to branch out into related blogs. Should I have kept most of their posts within the Barn? Or would that have cluttered the mix? The genealogy of Orphan George does seem to demand its own bookshelf, as it were, as do the free poetry chapbooks of Thistle Finch, but I do wonder about the money-and-your-life project now archived at Chicken Farmer as well as the Quaker spirituality and Bible reflections at Sowing Light.

Oh, yes, it does take far more time than I anticipated, even when I had a backlog of poetry and correspondence for republication. And I do miss the Fresh Pressed selections in the Reader feed. But not so the self-congratulatory “awards” nominations that made the rounds.

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.

For tiny Dover, why all the hoopla?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As improbable as it would seem now, Dover was a throbbing center of dissidents and misfits in its early years, at least from the perspective of the Puritan authorities to the south in Boston.

Nor would I have expected a settlement inland from the ocean to be the one that took root, rather than the companion complex facing the ocean, but the Dutch trading post at Albany, New York, was even further up a river and survived.

There are good reasons that Dover became the center of action north of Salem, Massachusetts, and of Boston further south, not that you were taught any of that in your history classes.

I have to admit, it’s taken a while for the fact to sink in. Dover was the heart of the New Hampshire province, not that we see that today. Still, the roots remain.

My book, Quaking Dover, looks at the history from a minority viewpoint that leaves most of the last 200 years pretty wide open. Yes, there’s so much more to examine and include in the full picture leading to the rebirth of the community in recent years.

But what I’ve found is still pretty remarkable.

To think, it was such a humble and audacious start 400 years ago and counting.

It’s gonna be a big year!

 

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?