WHERE ARE THE TERRORISTS HIDING OUT IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Homeland Security’s grant of $240,000 to my placid city of 30,000 to purchase an armored truck for the police department has me concluding:

Anyone who thinks this is fighting international terrorism has a lot of explaining to do. This place is the epitome of calm vanilla, even with all the college students and nightlife.

Until I hear otherwise, the conclusion continues: if those officials see this town as a hotbed of terror, it’s time to abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Even if it means starting over.

TURNING THE TABLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Something I ask among Friends, from time to time: What would you be if you weren’t Quaker? It’s an insightful exercise, unearthing answers that point to individual tastes in worship, spiritual practice, and friendships.

My answers have changed over the years – from Judaism to Zen or Unitarian to Mennonite (of the faster variety) or maybe even Eastern Orthodox (for the Greek dancing and music as well as the mysticism and discipline). I know strongly, too, what I would never be – and we’ll leave those unnamed. Look deeper, and you may see what is most precious to you at this point in your spiritual journey; perhaps it’s the richness of the story or tradition, the social witness in the face of injustice, the emotional response to music or even dance, the warm embrace within a disciplined community, the comfort of a timeless dimension, even a particular aesthetic. The fact is that we can be fed, in stretches, by practice with other faith bodies, especially through those periods where we find ourselves conflicted within the our own stream. We can learn, too, from their experiences and sometimes come away with something that enriches our own way.

The exercise can also help us greet visitors who come through our door, acknowledging that they, too, bring something to the service, even if it’s only for one morning. I see, too, how the question demonstrates the great variety of responses within our own circle, as we return to worship and work together.

MISSING IN ACTION, AGAIN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m waiting to hear from the right-wing of the political isle on the latest local issue of government waste. Yes, I know this one adds nothing to the city’s property tax bill, but it still comes out of our pockets.

I’m referring to last Wednesday night’s City Council vote on a $240,000 Homeland Security grant to purchase an armored truck for the police department.

That’s for a relatively quiet city of 30,000 residents.

It’s not the kind of place we have riots, much less terrorists.

Well, there’s some talk of using it in domestic-violence disputes, but honestly, I don’t see how a truck of any size is going to fit in a bedroom to calm things.

As for drug raids?

What do those have to do with fighting terrorism, anyway?

No matter how you slice it, this is government waste – from a federal agency that obviously has way too much money on its hands. Money approved by a Tea Party Congress.

DESPITE MY USUAL OBJECTIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve previously posted on my distaste for art that cloyingly celebrates artists as geniuses. Too often, I simply find these to be self-pandering and incestuous, even before we get into the reality that many great artists are seriously defective humans, at least in their interpersonal relationships.

But I’ve found myself swept up in two music-related video encounters that prove the exception to the rule.

The first is Amazon’s 10-episode sweep of Mozart in the Jungle, which despite my initial misgivings of the heavy sex-and-drugs emphasis, moved on into an often surreal criticism of the classical music industry as well as a fantasy of its artistic and life-enhancing possibilities. Equally impressive, its increasingly engaging characters are refreshingly cast warts and all – knocking ’em off their pedestals despite their sycophant handlers. I’m anticipating a second season.

Likewise is Dustin Hoffman’s top-flight directorial debut, the 2012 movie Quartet, set in a retirement home for musicians on a lavish British country estate that is in financial peril. Here, the real drama pivots on issues of aging and relationships sustained or damaged over the decades more than the concert hall or opera house itself. Success, as we see, often comes at a high personal cost.

What I love about both entries is the way the stories can be extended to universal experience rather than setting the musicians apart as an Olympian class. Indeed, the charismatic young conductor of Mozart, Rodrigo, moves repeated to take music to the streets and working-class neighborhoods – his people and roots – with magical turns in the idiosyncratically constructed story.

Here’s to people, then, as they are, no matter their field. And to the down-to-earth insights and discoveries we share along the way.

LEONARD SPRINGS: WHAT’S HIDDEN UNDERFOOT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One set of my poems of return, discovery, and loss is centered on the Leonard Springs which were hidden a half-dozen miles from the university I attended in my first sustained leap from my native Ohio.

On my return, we lived at the edge of town rather than on campus, and the springs were in a ravine just over the edge of our view from the kitchen. Few knew of their existence. Now, as I find online, they’re a public park and treasure.

~*~

Much of southern Indiana sits atop a thick limestone bed, some of it quarried for the construction of large-scale buildings worldwide. Over the ages, the bedrock has been riddled as slightly acidic water chiseled passageways and cave systems below the ground surface. Learn to read the landscape with this awareness and you come to recognize the widespread karst features, including sinkholes where cavern roofs have collapsed – some could easily hide a large truck or even a barn. There are also the sinking streams that vanish back into the earth as well as open mouths concealed in fields and forests that would swallow an unwary trespasser. So this hardness is laced with underground mystery and motion.

I already possessed some familiarity with this terrain from childhood camping and hiking trips, and had even crawled through some small caves in nearby state parks. Commercial caverns had also instilled an awareness of the otherworldly character of underground chambers and passageways. But this time, as I now lived off-campus on Leonard Springs Road, far to the other side of town, I was newly married and free to explore. After residing and laboring in the foothills of Upstate New York, the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the flats of what had once been the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, I had come back to Bloomington as a research associate. This sojourn would be all too short – a little more than a year and a half, though not by design – but long enough to acquaint me with the hardscrabble backcountry and its peculiar character.

Our garden sat in one sinkhole, and our waste water probably flowed into another (there’s no accounting for our landlord’s septic system). While I’m not a caver (as many spelunkers prefer to be called), I did become intrigued by the meandering channels beneath the meadows and woodlands beyond our house. From what Roger Pfingston writes more recently of his neighborhood on Stouts Creek, a similar locale a few miles to the north, I can suspect that much of the Leonard Springs terrain has since been ripped up and developed into housing.

What I leave, then, are field notes of the layering I experienced then, and a testimony. The poems in Green Repose present these. For your own copy, click here.

Green Repose 1

DON’T EXPECT SYMPATHY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

With a cap placed on the city’s major source of tax revenue, Dover’s public services have been stressed. The library, for instance, is closed most evenings as well as early Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. The public schools are in trouble, as you hear from parents, students, and teachers. Street repairs are often on a long list, along with other infrastructure upkeep and improvement. City hall had a leaky roof that went years to replace – there were buckets in the auditorium to catch the rainfall. You get the idea.

So City Council’s decision to accept a $240,000 Homeland Security grant to purchase the police department an armored truck – the description sounds like a flying saucer on wheels – does nothing to suggest common sense in high places. In fact, it’s salt in the wounds.

Does the police chief really expect public sympathy next time he’s trying to avoid staffing cuts and layoffs? Think again. And rely far more on those officers on the street than that armored truck, ever.

STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck my little city will be getting from Homeland Security – presumably to fight domestic violence and riots rather than international terrorism – is described as a personnel carrier that can transport at least 10 police officers (who knows about regular folks) and comes equipped with gun ports on each side and a rotating center hatch.

Get that, Darth Vader? I assume it has blinking lights all over as well. And maybe steam or fog pouring from under.

Yes, the Department of Homeland Security has been playing Santa Claus with its Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program.

This decision does nothing, of course, to make me feel any more secure. Quite the opposite, actually. I hate to think what might happen if this vehicle gets out on the streets. Or bullets start flying. Or worse, it falls into the wrong hands.

It’s enough to suggest that too many bureaucrats in some high places have been watching too many weird action movies. Or are they really just 14-year-old male adolescents?

PUSSY WILLOWS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Nothing has demonstrated to me how varied growing conditions can be, even in a small plot, more than the six pussy willows we planted our first year here. Some of it is the amount of light each receives, and some, how much water. The soil itself varies widely as well.

One of the sprigs died within a year. One, planted where we thought we had a natural spring at the head of the Swamp, has proliferated – so much, in fact, we must harvest drastically early each spring to keep it from becoming a full-blown tree shading the garden.

After a decade, two others, in the berm along the sidewalk, were finally established enough to begin lopping off budding branches.

The last one, close to the house, is no bigger than when it was first planted.

My wife is always elated by the soft gray budding. I remember both my third-grade teacher, who brought them into the classroom, and the Japanese artists and poets who laud the seasonal marker.

We have so many we give them away, at work, at school, at Quaker meeting.

One March, yes, I still remember so many crows in flight while I cut pussy willow against an incredibly blue sky. Those artists and poets are right.