Tag: Inspiration

NAMING THE CHANGES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
My fondness for mountain laurel goes back to my days of living in the ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. There, the undergrowth of the forest was filled with these blossoms in season.

Over the years, my own spiritual practices have undergone many changes. Even in a tradition like the one I’ve embraced, seemingly free from the annual routines of a liturgical calendar or outward emblems, there appear cyclical changes mirroring those of the seasons. Cycles, too, like those of progressing from childhood and parenthood into retirement or release. In Salem Quarterly Meeting in Ohio, the session each Fifth Month meant rhubarb in the applesauce. See it as sacrificial and special.

There are times of struggle, doubt, and distrust. Times of whirlwind passion and excitement. Times of discovery. Times of drought or deep winter, relying on what’s brought out of storage. Times of renewal and recharge.

This has manifested as periods where I’ve been able to dedicate significant time to meditation, solitude, travel in ministry, prayer, Bible study, research into history and theology, organizational service, teaching, correspondence, or writing, as well as to regular disciplines such as fasting or physical spiritual exercise (the hatha yoga sessions or even wilderness hiking). Emphatically, however, one would predominate while others would likely be absent or greatly diminished. In addition, they would be strongly impacted by the events of my daily life itself – whether I was single, married, divorced, or “in relationship,” my hours and nature of employment, my friendships and faith community, my driving patterns through the week.

The result of all of this would be a crazy-quilt tapestry or a ricochet trajectory if it weren’t for a spiraling within it. That is, over the years, various periods and interests begin to overlap one another, creating a kind of harmony or accumulated depth. My asparagus bed in New Hampshire has roots in my experience of asparagus along irrigation canal banks in Far West desert three decades earlier. A dog sitting through Quaker meeting here is a reminder of dogs sitting through predawn meditation sessions in the Pocono Mountains, or of the cats aligned on the scaffolding outside the windows, as if they, too, were deep in concentrated worship. I read a particular Psalm and see the passage taking twists I hadn’t perceived earlier.

In my own life, my childhood was filled with natural science, hiking, and camping, each with its mystical visions and moments. Adolescence led into politics, classical music, opera, and writing complicated by unrequited sexual yearning. Without romantic companionship, a Lone Ranger journey. Rejection of existing creed while ensconced in church office was followed by flight into atheism and hippie excess landing, inexplicably, in a yoga ashram with its Hatha exercises and sustained meditation. From there, into Quaker practice, though of the ABC – or “anything but Christ” variety. The ashram lessons were applied here, in circles of deepening prayer life. By steps, I moved toward Christocentric and Plain speech, and an especially faith fervent language. Among the Wilburite Friends as well as Mennonites, especially, I came to wrestle within Scripture while similtaneously undergoing repeated Dark Night journeys and questioning. Turning to therapy, I wondered if anyone could come along with me through all of this. By now I was no longer meditating to get high, or transcend, but rather to center down to the Seed. Here, with all of its committee work, I was engaged in a religion that combines mystical experience with social witness and activism. In a nutshell, then.

Each swirl also stirs up something from before. What failed in earlier marriage or relationships reappears. What has been left unfinished is not left entirely behind. What has been shredded remains to be woven. I heard this opera in its entirety a hundred times. Have I ever heard this note before?

I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast and back before heading on to the Pacific Northwest in what seemed an epiphany but instead shattered amid volcanic eruption and devastation. I left the wilderness for another kind of wilderness, back across the Midwest to the East Coast. The pendulum, as they say. Here, I now see life as both linear and circular – that is, spiraling. The spirit requires flesh, or is it that flesh requires spirit? Seasons include times that are full or overflowing, and times that are barren or dry. I now welcome the questioning that is not hostile is both essential and healthy.

My first spring in the orchard, I expected all of the trees to blossom simultaneously. They don’t. The apricots and cherry petals give way to plums, pears, and peaches. The apple blooms arrive last, when others are already gone.

Experiencing a new place through a full year or repeated years provides a much different understanding than a tourist gets – even one who spends several months there. Relocating requires a year-and-a-half to gain familiarity with the new surroundings – to get beyond the obvious, to establish friendships, to be oriented with the elements one finds essential or special. A favorite restaurant, a woodland pathway or place to swim, a boutique or gallery.

There are seasons for a person of faith, from winter to spring elation and then into fullness, dryness, struggle, or disillusionment. To harvest, perchance. Marriage? Family? Children? Extended into joy, compassion, humility, appreciation – one begins observing and naming.

The turning point in my own journey came when I accepted a new name.

MARIAH WATKINS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

One of my wife’s childhood heroes, George Washington Carver, is proof that some of the best mothers never have children of their own. After his own mother’s death as a consequence of being stolen from one slave-owning family and carried off to a plantation, before being bought back – how vile, the entire institution – young George was cared for, first, by the sickly wife of the slaveowner, and third, by an art teacher who directed him on to her own father, a college professor of botany. But most important was Mariah Watkins and her husband, Andrew.

We know very little about this black couple, except for her influence on the boy who emerged from spending a night in their barn. In another circumstance, George might have been shot. Instead, she called out for him to wash up and come inside for breakfast. What’s your name, she asked. Carver’s boy George, came the reply. No, she corrected, from now on you’re George Carver. (The Washington came later.) He lived with them while attending the Lincoln School for Negro Children. She gently instilled a deep religious awareness in him, presenting him with her beautiful, large family Bible, which he used daily for the remainder of his life, and also nurtured a sense of responsibility for the advancement of his own people. Essentially what we know about her comes in the correspondence they continued over the years. (Among the few other bits we know is that she was a midwife who cared for about 500 babies, including the painter Thomas Hart Benton.)

You can also trace the two connections between George and another great agricultural reformer, Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution is credited with saving the lives of a billion people.

Indirectly, then, by feeding a single child that first morning, Mariah put into motion events that would feed a billion humans – a miracle overshadowing the multitude Jesus’ disciples fed with those few loaves and fishes on the banks of Galilee.

HOW HUMBLING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Even though I’ve never asked previous clerks how they experienced sitting at the head of an institution founded in the 1660s, I found it humbling. The mere thought of superintending the construction of our present meetinghouse (1768) is overwhelming, as is the faithfulness that led the congregation through the Revolutionary and Civil wars. To think of the succession of mighty Quakers who came here in traveling ministry reflects the history of the movement itself, beginning with Elizabeth Hooton, who first nurtured George Fox in the emerging faith. Dover Friends sat down to worship originally in homes and barns, then in our first two meetinghouses, and finally in the room we know so well.

Visit historic Plimoth Plantation, and you get a taste of what Dover must have been like – already four years old at the time those enactors portray. It’s probably not that different from what the first Friends encountered just 3½ decades later when they stirred up what would become our Meeting. Just think of the differences in dialects and vocabulary. (Plimouth, to represent a population of slightly more than a hundred people, employs seventeen dialects, moderating them enough to make them understandable to modern visitors; Dover was likely no less divergent.) From all the evidence of smoke-filled houses, bitter winters, mosquito-infested summers, this must have been a rough-and-tumble community where Friends required generations to evolve into the sedate image we often treasure.

There aren’t many places in the United States having organizations with such long histories. We know only a portion of ours. Even so, we’ve been entrusted with this legacy, and to fulfill it and pass it on. How humbling, indeed.

LION’S TOOTH SALAD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Maybe it was simply a day of firsts.

As I was lunching al fresco for the first time this year, having savored our first asparagus of the season (which I’d sautéed with minced garlic leaf in olive oil and then fried two eggs atop the mixture), I realized I was still hungry. So glancing up, I noticed a sprout of dandelion, got up, plucked a leaf, brought it to the table, wiped it in some of the remaining egg yolk, and … it was good. It was very good. Somehow, the yolk overcame whatever bitterness I expected at the end of the bite.

So I harvested the remainder of that cluster (which also doubled as weeding, let’s be candid), went indoors to rinse it and fry another egg to serve with it, covered the resulting salad with salt and coarse-ground fresh pepper … and it was still good. Very good.

So for dinner, another round, this time with a fresh mustard vinaigrette my wife had just made … and it was still good. Very good.

Maybe I’m hooked. Yes, we’ve read some fine food writers who’ve extolled their pleasure in fresh dandelion every spring, before the leaves turn too bitter and too tough. Until now, though, our dandelions were treasured only by our pet rabbits.

Not anymore. Another first.

Now, to see how it works blanched. Or maybe as a spinach substitute, say in a Florentine-style dish.

Not that I have any intention of turning the Red Barn into a food blog. Oh, no. I know my limitations.

ALL HAIL THE DETERMINED GARDENER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Although I do my share of the weeding and much of the spading, I’m not the gardener. My wife is the one who studies the varieties of plants, selects and orders, fusses and sows, evaluates soil and sunlight, while I’m more likely to mow, do the composting, construct the raised beds, and transport ferns, Quaker ladies, and ox-eye daisies from the wild. In recent years, our elder daughter has taken delight in getting seedlings started and transplanted, especially, as well as making jams from the fruit we harvest. (The younger one could care less.)

While my dad, mainly, raised vegetables and tomatoes behind the garage when I was growing up, and my mother fussed over flowers that generally failed, and despite my later experiences living on a hippie farm and then the ashram as well as my first wife’s efforts in Ohio, Indiana, and the fertile desert country of Washington state, my perspectives on gardening center on Rachel and her world. Everything before was simply preparation. Little did I suspect, when we set out to buy a house as part of our marriage, how much she was calculating garden opportunities; many of the urban New England properties, surprisingly, have little usable space for raising plants. Only after bidding successfully on the house we now inhabit did we learn that it included not just a small but manageable strip beside the driveway but a half-lot on the other side of the house, as well – the side we’ve come to call the swamp.

But that’s the beginning of another story.

PASSAGE INTO THE QUIET

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

From my earliest days of practicing meditation, I’ve been aware of an invisible wall of resistance or restlessness before passing into the comforting depth on the other side. For whatever reasons, it reminds me of those early experiences of a sonic boom, when planes overhead would “break through the sound barrier” – not that we sense a loud crack of arrival, but there is a distinct change all the same. Maybe it’s an awareness that the air in the room feels different – heavier, like water, is one description. Maybe it’s not that far removed from the ancient Jewish priests who “passed through the veil” to offer sacrifice in the most holy space in the Temple.

My actual experience of meditative worship has also changed, from the initial goal of getting naturally high or stoned – of transcending out of the world – to the present centering down into the essence of life, but the wall remains. Some weeks it’s more pronounced than others; other weeks it’s quite faint. Even so, coming to that point Bill Taber referred to as “soft eyes” worship, where Friends begin removing their eyeglasses, is delicious. Even the clock stops ticking.

Frequency of practice can make a difference. Sitting in meditation twice a day, for instance, generally allows a deeper session than an every-other-week or once-a-month schedule does. Suitable physical exercise, charitable activity, or spiritual reading may also guide the experience. We speak of preparing for worship, but rarely of the unspoken flow within the hour itself. What I do know is how much easier it is to pass through that barrier when I’m sitting with others. That is, as early Friends sensed, even when two or three gathered in the Name.

BECOMING A CHARACTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Everyone where she was from said simply, “Oh, that Anna! She’s a character!” But they’d never say why.

I met her long after she’d moved east, and sensed in her a deep spiritual presence.

Still, when it came to opening her memorial service, I couldn’t refrain from mentioning her identity as a character. What emerged in the next hour was quite a lesson.

Afterward, as I drove home from New Jersey, I embraced this mandate: we have the first 40 years of our lives to get our act together – and the next 40 to become a character. If we can. If we’re worthy.

Down to Copley Square and the finish line

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There’s something wonderfully small-town about Boston, despite all of its world-class amenities. For those of us who love professional sports, classical music, museums of all stripes, theater and ballet, lectures and the like, there’s far more to do than time will ever permit.

But the scale, especially with all of its smaller cities and towns clustered in close at hand, can be wonderfully human. Or think of Fenway, one of Major League Baseball’s smallest parks, and its oldest.

Nowhere have I seen this balance more acutely than in the Boston Marathon.

The first inkling I had was one April Monday when I was driving along 128, the semicircular freeway around the city. With all of its high-tech business headquarters, it’s often called Silicon Valley East. Approaching one overpass, I noticed the side of the highway was thick with (illegally) parked cars, almost as if there’d been an accident. But then I saw the overpass itself was crowded with people. Only when I turned on the radio for the every-10-minute traffic report did I discover this was where the race route crossed on the way toward Copley Square. The station, by the way, was almost exclusively marathon coverage.

Nor was it alone.

The city’s television stations also provided continuous coverage, from 9 a.m. or so at the start in Hopkinton through the awards at 5 p.m. on Copley Square in the Back Bay. Live cameras broadcast from trucks in front of the lead runners and wheelchair contestants, as well as reporters and cameras all along the 26-mile route. The technical planning and execution of such coverage must be incredible.

While the event has more than 20,000 registered participants and 500,000 spectators each year, you’re still likely to know someone or more who have run in it. In fact, if they’ve qualified, you can follow their progress and times online. That’s another incredible aspect, to my eyes. And then there are all of those who jump in afterward, no need to register — you just get to say you’ve run the marathon.

To share in that joy and community spirit combined with the determined efforts of each of the runners is inspiring, even before we add the outdoors release from New England’s long winter. This is what the evil scheming behind yesterday’s bombing targeted. If the perpetrators thought they were somehow reenacting the Shot Heard ‘Round the World that the Patriots’ Day event commemorates, they have it backwards. We celebrate the resolve and victory of the people over tyranny and fear.

While officials are remaining tight-lipped about what’s happened, we’re getting our news from those we know, even when we live more than an hour away from the action. We’re relieved to hear our daughter’s safe and that a friend crossed the finish line hours earlier, but we’re also troubled by the words coming second-hand from the emergency rooms. We’ll learn more in conversations in the weeks ahead. In the small-town character of Boston, these things hit home, one way or another.

With determination, then, here’s looking ahead to the 118th annual marathon running April 21, 2014, God willing.

SEASONS OF THE SPIRIT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

To perceive a spiritual journey as Seasons of the Spirit acknowledges how much of it is out of our own hands, like the weather. We yield to the Spirit and are guided by it, to the extent we are faithful. “Which Spirit is thee speaking of?” I hear echoing, a memory of elder Mary Hawkins of rural Ohio before she counseled me of other spirits, such as anger and jealousy and so on. For the record, then, this is what I now call the Spirit of Christ – specifically, the Light and Life addressed in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. You may define your encounters as you may. My interest here is with an experienced connection with the Divine and a heightened awareness of its manifestations among us.

While everyone talks about the weather, few openly discuss religion. Too often, those who do raise the subject seem unwilling to listen, at least openly, and their arguments are cast along the lines of dogma or creed. Again, my focus is not on what we have been taught about faith, but what we can say about its workings in our own lives. When we can get past the formulaic responses, a discussion of religious experience allows us to search some of the deepest desires and fears of human existence. It can also unleash extraordinary social reform, as we might see looking through history, or be constrained to do the precise opposite.

 *   *   *

To speak of Spirit in this manner requires us to search for the ways it becomes embodied in our lives and our world. That is, how it takes flesh. What is abstract reveals itself in concrete decisions and actions, as well as thoughts and emotions.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE POTLATCH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Among the coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest was a custom known as the potlatch. Essentially, it was a way for the wealthiest members to enhance their status by redistributing the wealth downward. Starting with blankets and maybe a festive meal.

But then things got out of control. The way things do at a party when you forget about tomorrow, again.

Still, you first need to know everyone in the village and the fact it’s your home. Yes, the way families and neighbors just might function together.

Even so, remember. Maybe it was all Coyote’s fault, after all.