Tag: Counterculture

What’s wrong with being elite?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As an editor on newspapers where, in an attempt for excellence everyone was giving of themselves totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.), I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity – not the truth, but pleasantry” – from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football quarterback or automobile.

In many religions, however, the “world” of common subservience and society or what some today are more accurately seeing as “empire” is ultimately a mortal trap. In spiritual practice, then, only total effort is acceptable in seeking a holy transformation of this life. If only we can rise to even a portion of it.

As an ancient New England hymn reminded, “Broad is the way that leads to death / and many trod thereupon / but Wisdom shows a narrow way / with here and there a traveler.”

I see that lyric, by the way, as the root of Robert Frost’s road less traveled.

When I ask what’s wrong with being elite, I’m not talking about social status or wealth but something more elusive – something much more humble and loving.

It’s not all about food or forestry, either

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As long as we’re at the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, let me mention a few presentations today that go beyond the solid fare of food, forestry, livestock, fleece and fiber.

For instance, a home funeral demo is followed by discussions on green cemeteries and community death care teams for those interested in alternatives to costly funeral traditions. There’s also a blacksmithing demo and a hands-on assembly of a ¼ scale timber barn. Chicken first aid could be amusing, as could the basic of breeding your own pigs.

Of special interest to me are the two contradances, a traditional shape-note sing (hope I remembered to pack my Sacred Harp hymnal) alas at the same time as an Indigenous storytelling session, and three Maine legends appearing together: folksinger Noel Paul Stookey, comedian Tim Sample, and guitarist David Mallett.

I’ve sung in the choir behind Stookey twice and can say he’s an amazing person and musician.

Here’s a taste of what’s on tap

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Many of the presentations at the annual Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine, focus on healthy garden and kitchen practices.

Today’s workshops and discussions include seed saving for the home gardener, my love affair with garlic, stories of climbing fruit trees, weird and whacky wire weeders you can make, beekeeping, honey harvesting and winter preparation, cider apple tasting, growing curcubits, unusual edible plants in the landscape, three-season gardening, year-round vegetable production, building and maintaining healthy soil, green manures, heritage tomatoes, and running a “from scratch” kitchen. There’s also canning, cooking your way to health with mushrooms, health and healing with products from the hive, medicinal uses of tannins, a panel answering your questions about herbs, a solar cooking demonstration, a children’s apple pie contest, and judging of baked goods and dairy and cheese entries. Remember, that’s just one day out of the three and there are plenty of other things happening at the same time.

Among the specialties being offered by the 43 food vendors you’ll find maple fried dough, Zylabi fried dough, sausage and chicken gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, chai tea, traditional empanadas, Maine fish tacos, hummus and falafel pita sandwiches, spiced beef and lamb bowls, bialys, sourdough bruschetta, tofu fries, seaweed salad, sambusas, oysters on the half shell, eggplant and hummus sandwiches, pad Thai, Asian rice bowls, festival sweet dumplings, lamb shawarma, elote (street corn), switchel, fried shitake mushrooms, chicken tikka, aloo palak, chicken and lamb flatbreads, vegan egg rolls, and wild blueberry crisp. Maybe there’s only one way to find out what some of those are.

The lamb and oysters definitely have my attention.

For more conventional tastes, there are Italian sausages, burgers, smoothies, French fries, lemonade, cheesecake, thin crust pizza, soft pretzels, Belgian waffles, popsicles, and coffee and tea.

If that’s not enough, tomorrow includes growing rice in Maine(!) and yesterday had a future of psilocybin in Maine (21+ must have ID).

I think it’s a good example of ways America’s cuisine has expanded in the past 50 years. Back in my youth, mushrooms were an exotic item that came out of cans.

How about you?

We’re off to a most uncommon country fair

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

There’s no Ferris wheel, no cotton candy, no neon lighting, no celebrity performers – for years there wasn’t even coffee, until fair-trade organic became an option – but the three-day event still draws roughly 60,000 folks to a two-lane road toward its grounds in the rolling farmland of central Maine.

For the first dozen years I lived in New Hampshire, I heard about the most recent gathering and spotted its current T-shirts at contradances and farm markets afterward, but my work schedule didn’t fit attending.

And then, newly remarried, I took some precious vacation time that gave me a first-hand experience – including the now legendary traffic jam that rivaled any big city. Once there, we encountered a number of people we already knew, even though we lived three hours away.

Another dozen years passed before we returned, from the other direction, and this year’s an encore.

It’s the Common Ground Fair, a three-day weekend affair held a few weeks after Labor Day – more or less an equinox celebration held by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA,  the nation’s oldest and largest statewide organic organization in America.

It’s like a Whole Earth Catalog come to life. Of, if you’ve ever wondered where the hippies went, a good place to see places the movement has evolved and continues in practical ways.

Not all of it’s back-to-the-earth, either. Sustainable living, local economies, and spirituality augment the emphasis on organic agriculture and food use. There’s even a workshop on organizing a labor union.

Here’s hoping for some prime fall weather.

One of the many ways the dynamic of American society has changed in my own lifetime

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As Dover First Parish pastor David Slater wrote in 1983: “Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural. In the 1950s public values were largely Christian values (even Protestant Christian values). Today we are more religiously pluralistic, but even more importantly, more secular. We can no longer assume that the values of the church will be shared by the larger society.”

How prophetic, considering where American society is today.

And how ironic, considering that his congregation embodied the common culture the Quakers in my book were countering.

As a reminder from the dominant side

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The ruling Puritans in New England had reasons for opposing the Quakers, something I need to remember in the midst of my Quaking Dover arguments, They don’t get much sympathy in their objections, at least from my audiences.

As Dover First Parish historian Donald R. Bryant put it, “The Quakers did not conform with the orderly practices of the Puritan churches. They would not join in fellowship, and met among themselves, propagating their own beliefs. Many of them did not do this quietly, but in a manner that was disturbing to regular church members. They were apt to interrupt a meeting or a preacher, or to even interfere with the proceedings of a court. They insulted church order and disturbed the peace. Their conduct was described as ‘indecent and provoking.’”

Some of these points still sting as I look at today’s political and social polarization.

I hate having to admit an unexpected ugly side of the hippie outbreak

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The ’60s and early ’70s unleashed a revolution, one I tend to see from the progressive side of the experience.

But after writing about it in many of my novels, I’m having to acknowledge a dark underbelly.

There was a strand of ghouls who opposed any kind of common action, including politics. They were deeply angry but wanted to hide in a hole rather than celebrate oneness with each other and the greater universe and then work to advance that awareness.

That points, unfortunately, to the Trumpist ultra-right wing or Libertarians with no broader community sense other than what they can get out of it directly – or otherwise get out of supporting, period.

What I’m having to see as anarchy.

Yup, I’ve overlooked those who just wanted to escape any, well, Peace & Love revolution outside of their own turtle shell.

Maybe that’s the side the younger generations have perceived all too clearly in their negative view of hippie, despite the many other aspects they openly pursue.

 

 

The 1630s was a most remarkable decade in New England

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

A comment from a professional historian after one of my Quaking Dover presentations has me realizing how much more needs to be seen in fresh light.

New England history, he said, is told through Harvard. And then, to smaller degrees, Yale and Williams College. A more accurate verb might be “filtered” or “focused,” but the implication was clear. The tale is party-line. Even Greater Boston-based.

When I delved into the roots of tiny Dover to the north, from the perspective of its Quaker Meeting, I had no idea how unconventional my stance would be.

The traditional history, I will argue, is Puritan-based and largely pushes aside the earlier settlers and the cultural differences or influence they had.

The well-organized Puritan invasion began full-force in 1630 with Massachusetts Bay and then the Connecticut colonies. Their utopian vision was far more fragile in practice than we’re led to believe. In that first decade, Roger Williams, Ann Hutchinson, and Samuel Gorton were banished, leading to the establishment of Rhode Island and quickly afterward, in reaction, Harvard College. Their own charter was under threat of revocation from the king, and they placed cannon on Boston Harbor to fire on Royal Navy ships, if needed. Think about that. And its Pequot War enslaved Natives who were exchanged for Africans, spurring the lucrative slave-trade.

That’s a lot in a small space in a short time.

Settlement to the north was not immune.

In New Hampshire, two of the four colonial towns were established by religious dissidents fleeing Massachusetts. Dover’s Edward Hilton conveyed his charter (exactly how or for how much remains unclear) to the Lords Saye and Brook for their own management … or mismanagement. As my book details, the New Hampshire province and neighboring Maine quickly became a hotbed of dissidents and misfits – a story that is largely overlooked in the traditional accounts. Let me just say it was a ripe time.

What I’ve also been seeing is that the story of dissent has focused on Rhode Island and largely ignored the north, including Salem, Massachusetts.

Should one of my upcoming presentations redress that?

Now for a word from Friends Journal magazine

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A classy magazine published 11 times a year in Philadelphia and having a readership in all 50 states and 43 foreign countries has reviewed my book Quaking Dover. Yay!

As Friends Journal critic Marty Grundy asks, “What was it about Dover, N.H., on the Piscataqua River separating it from Maine, that enabled early Friends ministers to establish first a toehold and then to gather a third of the populace into the meeting, in spite of New England’s violent opposition to Quakers?”

Dover, I might venture, is way off the radar of the usual Quaker heritage addicts.

For answers, she notes, “This book offers an alternative history to the usual Puritan-centric stories,” a volume where “history is not just the result of the larger, impersonal scope of folkways, economic and political forces, or social class. It is lived by individuals who are part of families, individuals who make personal choices and influence those with whom they live. So Hodson also traces family connections showing that both a bold embrace of Quakerism and bitter persecution of the disturbers of the status quo tended to run in families.”

Yes, it is about people.

As Grundy also observes, “The book is an artifact of COVID in that it was created using what is available on the web, including secondary sources, much older published accounts, and summaries of meeting minutes … As anyone knows who has tried to do historical research recently, there is a gratifyingly wide variety of materials available electronically. Hodson has done a good job of mining; juxtaposing; and, as he says, ‘connecting the dots’ to produce a somewhat speculative but eminently well-argued and documented account,” one “also filled with verbal asides as the author comments on what he is discovering and sharing with the reader. He offers various versions of events and cheerfully acknowledges when he can’t find facts to fill in gaps.”

For the full review, see the magazine’s March issue.

My, and this was in a periodical going back only to 1827.

Three contradance highlights

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

All of them regard waltzing, rather than the facing lines that give New England contradances their name.

I should mention that there’s something special about waltzes, which usually come just before the break after the first hour or so and definitely at the conclusion of the evening. In fact, one girlfriend would always grill me about my waltz partners on those nights she decided instead to stay home.

The first memory here involves a dance at the town hall in Bowdoinham, Maine, always special in my experience, especially those when the band centered on three families of musicians.

At the break, as I was conversing with a lovely potential dance partner, I noticed that a young fiddler, maybe six years old, was still on stage and teaching an even younger fiddler some music. It was enough for me to say, “Hey, it’s a waltz, let’s dance,” and we did, soon joined by others. I looked up and saw the amazement in her eyes. You know – If we play, they will dance – as an epiphany.

~*~

Years later, elsewhere, I was telling that story to a fantastic young dancer as we waltzed.

Her eyes lit up.

“So you’re the one!”

~*~

And then, at a Bob McQuillan retrospective honoring the rerelease on CD of an earlier LP, the partner I had for the waltz was named Amelia.

Coincidentally, the same as my step-grandmother, fondly recalled.

And the waltz was titled “Amelia’s Waltz,” composed by Bob for the daughter of a beloved band member.

The same one, it turned out, circling with me and ever so light on her feet.

~*~

I’m getting teary as I relate all this, but there you have it.