SUMMER CRAFT
FURROW
Like the American bison that dominated the prairie, the continuous ocean of tall grasses, which for so long spread from a corner of Ohio into Montana and Colorado, has been decimated. Homesteaders – seized by a fever to possess farmland of their own – sowed apprehension in their furrows. Inhabitants and land itself now lay open to chronic infection. After each harvest, the Breadbasket of the World, the Interior States of the American Soul, is left vacant, a stubble desert awaiting rebirth. Descendants of those who made this band agriculturally productive bear both its blessing, in economic output, and curse, as if no one can entirely escape the desperation that prompted settlement in the first place. In the recesses of the psyche, inheritors of these spaces must likewise sense themselves to be buffalo-people, and then fear they, too, may be heir to this fate. Pushed to the fringes, the intrinsic beauty and spiritual potential of the heartland are easily overlooked, both by the remnant population and the world’s policy-makers. Today’s farmers are mechanics, first and foremost. Cry, then, for harmony and healing – a proper reentry into Canaan, a taste of balm in manna. Look, ultimately, to the surviving bison and tall grasses with their underlying lavender shadings. Respect the faint drumming, growing louder.
A PROSPEROUS TURN
Demand for wool in the first three decades of the 19th century shaped the boom years of agriculture in New Hampshire, at least until the invention of the cotton gin allowed for a cheaper clothing alternative – a condition that was accompanied by a changing American workplace and economy.
The brief but prosperous boom financed many of the Granite State’s landmark large farmhouses and barns as well as the nearly ubiquitous stone fences that are still visible, some in the most unexpected remote forests.
Pay attention while driving along country roads, and you’ll often notice stretches where each house seems to be an evolution among the others. I suspect that what happened was they were all built by one craftsman carpenter and his crew – perhaps itinerants who would stay for a season of erecting a house before returning home – who were invited back in another year to build another, each one to customized specifications. The chimneys, for instance, reveal a progression away from the massive central fireplace of the Colonial era to the use of multiple chimneys after the Revolutionary War – something that has me thinking of how much firewood these houses must have consumed through a winter.
It’s possible, of course, that the carpenters and masons and others came to live in the neighborhood as well. But one thing I feel certain: the resident commercial farmers, faced with the demands of their flocks and fields, did not have the time or perhaps even skills to build houses like these.
Here are some of the fine examples found in a village along a ridge in the town of Deerfield, a neighborhood known as South Deerfield. There are more, I should mention, than I could capture in this outing. Meanwhile, I’d like to know more about the site of the popular Mack Tavern, with its fiddler’s throne to protect the player from the wild dancers.
NATURALLY, SHE HAS REASON TO WEEP
You may remember my writing of the wildlife we have in our yard, even though we live in a city. Maybe I was even bragging, a tad.
Meanwhile, our garden was looking better than ever. Some of it was likely a consequence of all the seaweed we’re using for mulch, plus the compost. Some of it a matter that we got just about everything transplanted on time, and some a reflection that my being free from the office has allowed a little more help with the weeding and harvesting.
On top of everything, the weather has been uncommonly cooperative. There were no late frosts in May, though there were nights we had to bring plants under cover as they “hardened off” before transplanting. We largely avoided a wet June, which kept the garden slugs under control and meant the strawberries didn’t get waterlogged. (They’ve been very tasty. The berries, that is.) July has brought rainfall as needed and also stayed out of the tropical range of oppression.
And then, about a week ago, disaster struck. A groundhog (apparently dwelling under a shed three houses down the street).
We had some near misses in the past, but nothing like this. One year, in fact, a band of possums evicted the groundhogs from their burrow. My wife’s always like opossums.
Overnight, half of our Brussels sprouts and a half-dozen heads of lettuce were obliterated. The rest were wiped out a day or two later, despite our efforts to fight back. Without the possums coming to our rescue, my wife’s taking this personally. For that matter, so am I. What about all that teaching about peaceful coexistence, anyway? What if the other side just doesn’t care?
Living in the city, we can’t resort to the usual line of defense, either, the one many vegetarians no doubt practice. No, a .22 is not an option here. You can run down the list of other weapons and strike them off one by one. Children and pets, after all, live in the neighborhood.
So here we are, mopping up and hoping the cantaloupe slices in the Hav A Heart trap do the job. And wiping our tears.
WITH OR WITHOUT A PULPIT
If I speak of pastoral Friends, it’s often because I often see there some attempts to respond to problems we, too, face. There are ways their side has adapted from broader society, just as we have, in our own manner. We typically share periods of open worship, though theirs are admittedly much shorter and often filled with prayer requests. We share some common difficulties, starting with the “herding cats” problem or the attempt to transport a hundred frogs in a wheelbarrow; at least we don’t have to go through the trials of hiring or firing a pastor. But there are times, admittedly, when I wish we had someone who could devote more full attention to the demands of our Meeting.
Visiting among pastoral Friends can be challenging, as well as rewarding. There are often differences in language and understanding – same-gender marriage being one. Sometimes we can see ways we fail to reach out into the wider community; I recall one minister telling of making a pastoral call here in New England, where he entered the kitchen of one of his parishioners to find the man seated under a bare light bulb, wearing an undershirt, smoking, and drinking a can of beer. “I go because it’s the neighborhood church,” the pastor was told, as if we should be so inviting. Sometimes it’s the insights from our Puente connection, and the life of Cuban Friends as a community of faith. These encounters certainly help me look at Dover Meeting from fresh perspectives.
Some of the most interesting dialogue among Friends has been happening in the journal, Quaker Religious Thought, which is found in our Meeting library. It’s not just that we share a common root, but also that we face a common future that fascinates me. Often, our experience has more in common than we might care to admit. Sometimes there’s even strength in numbers.
OH, YES
As I said at the time … Eighth Month 24, 1997
Dear M of the Warm Heart and Extraordinary Signature …
Thanks for giving those five poems a first home. I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with your ‘zine, being already intrigued by your sense of graphic design. (A lobster in the crest? Great touch, especially considering how many French-speaking kids in Maritime Canada used to go to school with lobster in their lunchboxes while their richer English classmates had roast beef. How times change.)
You have no way of knowing how much your letter meant to me. (So I guess I’ll have to try explaining, right?)
Here I was dragging home from another hellish Saturday at the newspaper office — the 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. drill — well into a mounting depression that has been building for the last several weeks. (In part from watching an ex-girlfriend slip into alcoholism and eating disorders, and also in part from going to contradances where we’ve been way short of women partners, as well as in part from the pleasures of adult orthodontics, and even in part from car trouble, blah-blah. You get the picture.) So there, amid the junk mail and a bill or two: your letter. Poetry acceptances are always nice, especially when an editor selects more than one. An entire batch, of course, is a winning scratch ticket. But a letter? Not just a form acceptance? I’m touched.
You pack a lot into a single page. Things that trigger emotional reactions within me, too. For starters, you write so well — with seeming ease, grace, intimacy, color and a varied vocabulary, joy, and encouragement. You leave me arguing with myself: Is she really 18? (Na, can’t be … way too insightful to be a kid.) (Yes, she is: Listen to the dreams. Listen to the inner connections. You don’t get that from university study.) (Nah, it could be a very studied imitation — somebody who would like to be 18, like your friend who decided 17 was the perfect age and then spent the next half century remaining 17.) (Yes, see how she leaps with playful touches — the “love and liquor” or “little blade of grass in the garden of literature.”)
So, M, which is it? How is it you apparently have so much going — plus the resourcefulness and skill to launch your own magazine? Tell me, do … I’m intrigued. (And why, by the way, were you home on a Friday night instead of out on the town. Especially a big town, like Chi’town?) Ah, life! Ah, mystery!
“Professional” writer? My dear, all writing is work — and sometimes, when we’re really blessed, it becomes intense prayer, no matter how that particular piece turns out. Writing is a process, with two muses, as Wendell Barry insists: one says you can do it, you really have to give it a try, before the other reminds us, it’s harder than you thought! For most journalists, it’s a trade, as in plumbing or meat-cutting. Since no poet today pays the rent or mortgage from royalties alone, my definition of a “professional poet” is anyone who gets pieces published while being employed to teach “creative writing.” That makes the rest of us “amateur poets” — amateur, as in one who loves. Of course, as an editor now, you are “professional” to whatever degree you want to accept — especially since you’re in position to endorse some of those creative-writing teachers through publication. (Feel the power yet?)
Literary masterpieces? Don’t worry about that, not for a long time, if ever. The important thing for you now — as well as those other “mostly manic, angst-ridden teenagers,” who, you acknowledge, “produce some fine work too” — is to ride the energy, recording as much of it as you can while everything is extraordinary, intense, and fresh. This — your “shit load of poems (from) the last several years” — is the Mother Lode you’ll be drawing on for the rest of your writing career. Lucky you! Thirty years from now, you’ll shriek: “A diamond in the muck! A turn of genius where I had seen nothing remarkable!” Trust me. And in the meantime, throw nothing away. I wish I had begun keeping a journal six years earlier I did. One detail can spring an entire movie from oblivion.
A theory: By the time most writers develop the craft to accomplish what they intend technically, they’ve lost the opening that compelled them in the first place. The result is dry, technical work.
Put another way: A critic on PBS remarked that no other visual artist has produced as much bad art as Picasso did, yet we need the nine bad pieces if we are to appreciate the genius of the tenth one. Ted Berrigan, in one of his taped teaching sessions, says much of the same in warning writers to be wary of the limitations success can put on their outpouring.
About my poems in your hands: Yes, these five are delicate, subtle, even dreamlike. Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the conflicts within any relationship often form as much of the fabric of connecting as the basic erotic/romantic attraction does. Of course, either partner can really know only his or her half of the interaction, at best, so there are always these gaps and misunderstandings and expectations and — well, the kind of lacy texture I think you perceive. I’m trying to let the images themselves convey this energy, without limiting it by any editorial comment. Does this make sense to you? (By the way, a hambo — one of the images — is a wonderful pivoting dance for a couple: somewhat like a waltz or a polka, except that the woman really does seem to fly about five feet rather than five inches above the floor.)
So how ‘bout sending a big batch (copies, of course) of your writing my way? Not that I’m bored, mind you, but as I’ve said, intrigued. The whole point of writing is to share it. Enclosed check, too, is for past issues, future issues, a subscription if you have one.
Wish you were here to read to me. It’s a lovely, dry, cool New England Sunday afternoon. A great day to head to the beach or the mountains. Or even off to Boston, for whatever. Thanks for making up for being so mean to everyone that day by being nice to me. Your penance worked!
Cheerios and grins …
GARDEN LIGHTS
the Tiki torches, hints of pathways in five directions
from the Smoking Garden
* * *
twilight
with charcoal, glowing and ready
poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson
CORNFLOWER EYE
The sky of America’s interior West is a dry eternity – an intense blue I see reflected in the cornflower bloom, or certain other blossoms, such as flax.
Curiously, the flower itself has no direct relationship to the cornstalk or ear. Its naming presents a mystery, to the modern ear, at least.
Now that I dwell under the commonly milky skies of New Hampshire, I find the blooming cornflower celebrates that vibrant blueness in my memory, and locales suddenly overlap in my mind, making me grateful to once again acknowledge that fullness and contrast. By extension, the cornflower blue sky extends to open spaces reaching westward from the Great Plains, with another set of experiences within me.
Gaze, then, into such deep color, undiluted, and its inexplicable essence.
NOTHING NOSTALGIC ABOUT IT
One thing I strive to avoid in my Hippie Trails series of novels in a sense of nostalgia. Admittedly, the music, especially, can bring back groovy feelings. (The close reader will notice how little of it I touch on directly, but rather I try to look at other facets of the experience.) And, yes, it is easy to get wistful with some of the memories – Woodstock, for example, while conveniently overlooking all of the physical discomfort, or for some of the lost social life and friendships – but there are good reasons we can’t and don’t go back. Our youth, obviously, has turned to aging, and our freedom turned to responsibilities, many of them ones we’ve chosen.
We need to emphasize that much was not happy. There was desperation, in fact.
The period and the movement were far from perfect, but we also had glimpses – epiphanies, for some – and their influence is far from completed.
If we wholesale deny the dreams and prophetic directions we experienced in that youthful outburst, we cut ourselves off from our higher nature – and both we and our largely society are impoverished as a consequence.
As I look at the array of problems facing America and the world today, I sense that the more serious currents under the surface of the hippie outbreak may finally provide some much needed direction, if we can be honest with ourselves and our history.
That’s definitely not nostalgia, no matter the anthems and hymns in the music of the era.
~*~
To learn more about my novels, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
CHOOSING FRIENDS
Theological issues play very little into why a family chooses one church over another. So the surveys tell us. Instead of its beliefs, a church is chosen for its youth program, its overall vitality, music, the kinds of expectations it will or won’t place on members, and so on.
Puts Friends in a pretty strange position, doesn’t it? What committee do you want to serve on?
On the other hand, our existence as a “do-it-yourself” congregation requires us, personally and as a group, to draw out individuals and families and engage in their daily lives. One of our strengths is that Quaker meeting allows room for spiritual growth over the years, within a wide range of activity, while maintaining an intimate connection. Our small size, in an era of mega-churches, presents us with advantages, especially in knowing one another authentically. Besides, worship is quite distinct from entertainment.
Now, how do we roll out this welcome mat? Maybe I would remind folks that our place of worship is a house, first and foremost. Come on in and get comfortable. And then be fed. Be sure, of course, to lend a hand with the dishes.
Jnana's Red Barn 