When you wish upon a star

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Back when I lived in the ashram (see my novel, Yoga Bootcamp, for a taste of the experience), I was surrounded by fellow monastics attuned to astrology. They never quite converted me, even while they gave me a respect for looking at individuals and events from any number of archaic and unscientific perspectives. Sometimes their observations were uncanny. Besides, how else do we get down to allowing for gut instincts or intuition, which at times proves truer than rational thought?

Not to rule out fact-checking and logic thought, but surfaces can be misleading and data, incomplete or in error. I can assert that from some very personal experience.

~*~

In the bigger picture, there were times in my life when nothing seemed to be happening and, then, whammy, everything fell together. Searching for a new job, for example, or sending out poetry submissions and getting only rejection slips for weeks or months before any acceptances, which came in a cluster from five journals on the same day. That sort of thing, on the road in sales, too.

As for the love life?

Look to the stars, right?

Among my New Year’s practices I began sketching out the upcoming astrological outlook as part my annual goal setting. Typically, the forecasts offered words of encouragement or even cheerleading. We all need that.

Sometimes they were reminders to look higher or jolts against continuing mindlessly in a rut.

They also countered those seemingly nothing days when I felt I was merely going through the motions, reminders that much was out of my hands, that all I could do was keeping sending out submissions or resumes, for instance, and be in place and visible when the current shifted.

Perhaps most important was the inner dialogue these prompted.

~*~

As examples? Consider one day, releasing “pent-up tension in the weeks to follow. You’re ready to plunge ahead with a project that has been on the back burner for months, or to finally take a big step toward freedom. However, you may encounter resistance from a worried partner. Serious negotiations may be the only way you can settle your differences.”

Or another, that “suggests that a close colleague or friend can assist you with this process.”

Uh-huh. I’ll have to dig into my journals to see what, if anything, happened on those dates.

Sometimes they were encouragements to polish up my appearance and image and self-confidence. At other times, warnings of a “wave of change, with unpredictable Uranus and transformational Pluto upsetting the order that you seek.”

Sometimes, the words seemed appropriate:

“Although you may be progressive in your thinking, Aquarius is a fixed sign, and you don’t always handle change easily. Unfortunately, the more you seek security by grasping at the status quo, the more sudden and shocking the changes will be. Above all, remember that during these hectic times, flexibility is your friend.”

That, or maybe a good therapist.

~*~

I’m not so sure how accurate my journal entries would be, by the way, especially when they track relationships. Did that old flame reenter my life during a retrograde? Did my flirty side offer opportunities for my love light to shine for a whole year?

What did I really learn? Don’t hold your breath.

~*~

More intriguing, though, is the two-year stay of karmic Saturn in a position to bring me “increased professional responsibilities and demands I work harder than ever before. … You get what you deserve – and if you’ve defined your goals and worked hard to achieve them, this can be the big payoff.” Well, it was accompanied by three big trines to balance “your dreams of material success with common sense and persistence to bring your ideas into reality. … This can be the culmination of many years of striving toward professional goals, which are now within reach. If you fall short, however, you’ll need to make critical decisions about whether to continue along the same path.”

This turned out to span the time I took the buyout at the office, began releasing much of my pent-up material on my new blogs, followed by my novels as ebooks. Neither the blogs nor ebooks had really been on my horizon, even though one novel had been released as a PDF edition by a pioneering digital publisher.

~*~

Revisiting these notes does feel unsettling. The practice simply faded away years ago, perhaps along with my big dreams. Or perhaps I had simply had it with so much of the gibberish.

Before leaving

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

discard piles of weekly magazine employment classifieds . dirty dishtowels, need replacing . ditto, the car . boxes stuffed with working papers, political reprints from college and later stint as academic editor . one more career detour, Swami . save file folders for reuse . don’t need any extra expenses now . former jobs, like former loves . what can you do at the moment? rat out pigeons from under the eaves, their smell of warm barn rot . dust and mop . Ajax or Comet the bathroom sink, tub, bowl . remake the bed after slippery sheets expose toes to night chill . clean the parakeet cage, heart yearning for its owner . how I’d love to trade that old English bicycle, with its flat tire and second gear that strips out, get a sleek ten-speed . instead, you need new blue jeans and pour a fresh motor oil in the Subaru . indoors, lay a wood fire but don’t ignite kindling, the coy display to signal a homebuyer . not all of the ash of this failure is mine

Is anyone else pestered by seemingly endless car warranty calls?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m assuming they’re robocalls, which I believe should be outlawed with horrendous consequences. Or even if live, rather than recorded, going for the throats of the higher-up perpetuators, rather than the poor offshore minions who actually speak into the phone from wherever.

But still, don’t they get the idea that I got the picture that they’ll never, ever, be this responsive if I pay up and ever need a repayment by way of a claim?

It’s an aging vehicle, after all, and will need some costly repairs. How much? The so-called insurance expects to be far ahead of any premiums in the long run, no questions asked.

Got any ideas on how to turn the table on this nuisance? My readers and I are all ears!

A quick take of my first year here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Whale watches, the ferry to and from Lubec, plus the Fourth of July, salmon, and pirate festivals were all fun. I even observed a beluga that lingered just offshore my first time out on the water here.

The island’s ten degrees cooler than the mainland in summer – I wore shorts only three times, all of them when I was off to run errands elsewhere. And supposedly the temps run ten degrees warmer in winter, though this house is still cold. We really do need to replace the windows and thoroughly insulate.

We missed gardening, apart from the little fenced-in patch in the front yard, but not the weeding, though the rabbits still happily devoured anything I brought in. Rather than squirrels as a menace, we have deer – especially when the wild apple tree starts bearing. They eat nearly everything in sight, including tomatoes, as I learned before reinforcing the rim of our little garden. Still, I nearly got a doe to eat a cookie from my hand one evening. My wife wasn’t so daring. And tomatoes? They really don’t grow well around here. But the oxeye daisies, basil, and lettuce continued merrily all summer.

None of the big renovations we’d anticipated got done. Contractors are booked out a year in advance, and the one we had lined up backed out before tackling the roof that our insurance company wants replaced pronto. Well, even if we had gotten started, prices on building supplies did more than double. We’re hoping they drop – soon.

Merrymaking at Mare Mount

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Speaking of juicy.

Sandwiched in between the arrival of Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at the Massachusetts Bay colony, we have the libertine plantation at Mare Mount, or Merrymount, on Boston’s South Shore. It’s a provocative whiff of how New England life could have turned, had Thomas Morton successfully warded off the rival raiders.

The very name “merry” at the time was often a synonym for sexual trysting. As for Merry-Mount? It couldn’t have been more graphic.

Unlike Plymouth, this settlement was prospering and welcoming misfits.

Think of hippie. Maybe even commune. Dancing naked with Natives around a giant maypole, one that’s flagrantly phallic. Not just pagan but also reflecting some lingering Devonshire traditions taken to an extreme. (Significantly, for comparison, most of early Dover’s settlers came from Devon, not the East Anglia of Puritan culture.)

Thomas Morton, founder of Merrymount and a thorn in the Puritans’ side

That’s the short version, though there’s much more sketched out in my upcoming book.

And after Merrymount comes crashing down, its founder finds shelter in Sir Ferdinando Gorge’s Maine, not far from Dover.

No, early New England wasn’t all stern Puritans, not by a long shot, no matter how much they tried to keep a lid on.

Nearly two decades later, facing the Quaker outbreak, did Puritan authorities fear the Friends movement might trigger another Merrymount in their midst? As I’ll show, Quakers were anything but quaint and respectable when they show up, though I can assure you they stayed sober rather than make merry. Ahem.

But they were still an alternative to the Puritan rigidity.

 

Spiritual but not religious?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I know, it’s something I would have claimed for myself, too, way back when.

And it is a common identity for many today.

But after five decades in a disciplined tradition, here’s how I’ve come to see it:

It’s like the difference between a one-night stand and marriage.

Or between lust and love.

Quakers preferred clear glass windows. These are from another tradition embodied at the Lubec Congregational Church.

On a less flip note, I’ll admit that a problem with a lot of religion arises when it comes second-hand, even as speculation or shallow platitude, rather than from a personal experience of the mysterious divine. And also when it’s approached as law, with its thou-shalt-nots and rewards or punishments, rather than a relationship with the Wondrous Other. (I’ll leave the particular definitions open, for now.) I’ve called the latter approach “thinking in metaphor,” for good reason.

You can see how the theoretical or law-and-order approaches can mess up a romantic relationship. Ditto with the practice of faith.

By the way, I cherish religion that addresses daily life, in the here and now, more than in an abstract hereafter, though I’ll also agree with Freud’s disciple Otto Rank that religion is the one means we humans have with dealing with our ingrained fear of death.

To my eyes, this one is surprisingly secular for a church sanctuary. It’s unabashedly intended to be merely pretty.

As the saying goes, God is in the details, and I can be quite critical of various traditions and teachings, including my own. Missing the mark, in a Jewish translation, is one definition of sin. At those points, turning – the basis of the word “repentance” – is required. But I’ve also come to cherish what one old Quaker called “mutual irradiation,” those places where humble practitioners of different disciplines cross paths and inspire each other.

Admittedly, I do come at this from an essentially mystical community that requires individual awareness, one that’s sometimes referred to as an Alternative Christianity. For a better feel of it, visit my As Light Is Sown blog.

In that stream, William Penn, an unapologetic Christian minister, boldly wrote in the late 1600s:

“The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls everywhere are of one religion and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though the diverse liveries they wore here make them strangers.”

As for religion, he noted:

“There is a zeal without knowledge, that is superstition. There is a zeal against knowledge, that is interest or faction; there is a zeal with knowledge, that is religion; and if you will view the countries of cruelty, you will find them superstitious rather than religious. Religion is gentle, it makes men better, more friendly, loving and patient than before.”

What do these windows say about the people who filled the pews?

Put another way, spirituality and religion are two sides of the coin. One without the other would be counterfeit.

 

Ten great loves in my life

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

What, you were expecting sexy lovers? That’s a whole different story, maybe best left for my fiction.

  1. Symphonic music. Well, quickly extending to chamber music and opera and then even jazz.
  2. Quaker practice and culture.
  3. The great outdoors. Wilderness, especially.
  4. The Cascades range as I explored it, most of all.
  5. Seafood, fresh asparagus, real tomatoes.
  6. The sea. Surf. Lighthouses.
  7. Holy wonder. The natural high, if you will.
  8. Autumn foliage.
  9. The soul mate who turned out to be false. She still haunts me, all the same. I think it was all the shared aspirations that really got me.
  10. The color blue.

~*~

What do you really love? Make that who, if you desire.