Avoiding the G-word while examining faith

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that turning any discussion of religion away from the doctrinaire formulas and instead to direct feelings and experiences can be quite refreshing, even inspiring.

Essentially, that boils down to shifting from “head” speculation and instead to personal encounters, “heart,” if you will. It moves the focus from the abstract to something more concrete.

In my book, Light Seed Truth, I try to take that a step further by avoiding the G-word altogether except in direct quotation. Part of that stems from a Jewish tradition that considers the name of the Holy One to be too sacred to be uttered, leading instead to substitutes that include the all-cap LORD in English translations, meaning The Name. And part stems from just how different our individual perceptions of the word can be, often defaulting into an old bearded male of some sort, despite other options. Even Adonai and Elohim carry different connotations, not that I go into them. Just be aware.

Besides, the G-word can too easily create a wall between those who “believe” and those who don’t.

Add to that the surveys that find atheists, overall, are more familiar with the Bible than are members of varying denominations, and I do want to include them in the discussion.

In my ebook, I do hope to encourage an appreciation for wonder itself in our lives.

Not a bad place to start, is it?

You can find the volume in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.

Could this be how it ends?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The time to go has come. It should have arrived several years earlier, rather than continuing in so much wheelchair loitering, trapped in a dream-state. Now the phone call, “I don’t expect him to live another week,” leads into packing and flight.

Unable to awaken, fully, from the bewildering disconnections. This is not the heart attack or car crash I had predicted. Nor the old age of graceful evaporation into a vanishing point of history. No one will say now, “He lost his mind,” but the new names change nothing. This terminal illness, in stages, until the patient no longer remembers how to eat or breathe. Perhaps, mercifully, an angel will break through the sterile chambers of medical enterprise, and another nature will take its course.

This flesh, shrinking to bone, rather than feather.

Fir tipping is a big job around here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The signs “fir tippers wanted” this time of year can be puzzling, so here’s the scoop for those of you who don’t live in Maine.

  1. Christmas wreath makers need stands of evergreens to shape into their festive rings. In Maine, the traditional material is the tips of balsam fir branches. Don’t confuse the inch-long needles for spruce or hemlock.
  2. “Tippers” are the folks who have the skills to collect tips that usually range between 12 to 20 inches.
  3. Quality needles are found only in the mid-section of the tree. Tops and bottoms are deemed unsuitable.
  4. The season is short. The greens cannot be collected before the “tips” are set when a tree goes dormant for winter, usually around November 1, and that’s if the stand has had three nights of 20-degree or lower nights. (Beware of global warning.) Any earlier and the tips lose their needles prematurely. But the wreath-makers do need to get the product to market before Christmas Day, too. It gets busy.
  5. Millions of wreaths are crafted in the state each Christmas season. The trees are abundant and the fir branches are easily worked. Balsam is pleasant to smell, too.
  6. The work is a welcome boost in income for many rural families and comes after the crops are in.
  7. Tips can be harvested by a firm grasp between forefinger and thumb followed by a quick downward motion. Loppers or pruners do the trick for more out-of-the-way tips.
  8. Skilled tippers leave enough on a tree for it to recover in about three years.
  9. The tips are commonly gathered on a “stick” made of a small conifer stripped of most of its branches. When the stick has 40 to 75 pounds of tips, it’s carried off. Bundling the tips into smaller bunches is another method of transport.
  10. Tippers do need to get permission before harvesting from a site. Sometimes that means paying a fee for a permit.

– Source: University of Maine Cooperative Extension Service

In our longest nights

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

How long the day now? Our shortest is a mere 8¾ hours of visible sun if the clouds permit, barely a third of the 24-hour cycle.

Where I live, we’ve now reached the earliest sunsets. They’ll be inching later by the solstice.

Enjoy the long nights, then. Perhaps by a fire but especially in sleep. Or even out, bundled up, viewing Northern Lights and meteor showers.

Gilkey Harbor memory

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The member ships of the Maine Windjammer Association are independently owned and operated, and apart from setting firm departure and return dates, each of them ventures at the will of its skipper and the elements each day.

Watching the others in the course of a cruise is almost a game, and sometimes two or three wind up spending the night in the same cove, as happened here on Islesboro. We had the Heritage, above on one side, and the Angelique on the other, and the atmosphere was festive.

For more schooner sailing experiences, take a look at my Under Sail photo album at Thistle Finch editions.

One checkpoint where we lucked out

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A miraculous thing for us was that the roofing shingles, which had prompted our big renovation project, had held on for the four years between the insurance company’s alarm after our purchase and the actual replacement. Not so for many other shingles around us, even those that had been replaced during those years.

My initial impression, looking at the real estate market when we started considering this move, had been that we could fit into something cheap and make do. But things were shifting.

Most homes we saw for sale had problems, either for my coconspirators or me. Many of the remodelings were utterly puzzling. Others really needed to be redone.

I wasn’t the one who zeroed in on Eastport, but now I cannot imagine anywhere else I’d want to be at this stage in my life. Maybe it’s like Swami when she came to the Poconos and felt the vibes.

The ideal of moving to an island in Maine is almost a cliché. Even a Downeast shore, or a bit to our west, like the Wyeth clan. But we did need to downsize.

At one point, my dream had been to live on a mountain lake. The ocean never even entered into the picture.

Yet here we are, surrounded by interesting people, too.

Where is today’s local communication and shared identity?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Unlike many localities, Eastport has a fine newspaper, one that appears twice each month. It covers much of Washington County in Maine and Charlotte County in neighboring New Brunswick, Canada.

You get a good sense of the place from its pages. I can’t say that for many of the newspapers I’ve seen across the country, even when they were big moneymakers.

Living in out-of-the-spotlight localities, I’ve been sensitive to the nuances of each landscape and the people who inhabit there, not that I’ve often found them reflected in mass media outlets.

It’s not just newspapers or, for the most part, TV, though Northern Exposure did create the sense of one, especially with Chris Stevens as the disc jockey on KBHR radio.

I do sense that the lessening of local identity reflects the loss of local economic power centers, largely through corporate buyouts. The pharmacist no longer owns the drug store, nor does the local bank have its own president. The newspaper is part of a chain, as are most hospitals these days. The list goes on.

As I’ve explained, for many years, despite the arcane business structure in which advertising rather than sales of copies provided the bulk of the income, hometown newspapers were cash cows for their owners – who, in turn, paid their reporters and editors minimal wages.

The resulting management practices – reflecting those of surrounding corporate retailers and manufacturers – have put news coverage at risk, endangering both the communities and democracy itself. How will they, like the reporters and editors, survive?

Oh, yes, the big box stores – especially Walmart – rarely bought advertising space in the local paper, even while they squeezed the smaller retailers out of business. I remember one year when an economic downturn put five of our ten largest advertisers out of business.

~*~

Social media posts by amateurs may fill some of the gap, but there’s no substitute for fact-checking and other accuracy. Reporting and writing take time and devotion, not a given when you have a real job and family vying for attention.

And if you’re out there solo, who’s going to back you up when the topic at hand gets nasty? As it does, when corruption seeps in.

Anybody else feeling crushed?