Tag: Inspiration

PLACES OF RETURN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Years later, a friend relates an incident of telling his wife his intention of spending the day in a favorite place in the mountains, countered by her question of what makes him return there. Even though he’s a photographer, he replies by acknowledging that many of his writer friends have answered the question simply, saying it’s the surprises that draw them back.

Somehow, as one of his writer friends, I find the word “surprise” in this context jarring. For surprises, one would be better served by trips to new locations, rather than returning to an old favorite. Novelty, rather than familiarity. Upheaval or intoxication, rather than purity or sobriety. Even so, as I consider my own places of return, her question becomes increasingly kaleidoscopic.

First, there’s the very demand of naming a favorite place. In this context, he invokes wilderness, where return is a kind of pilgrimage. Here, return may be once or twice a year, if that frequent. I could counter that with an evening stroll, as I used to do along the canal bank at the back of the desert orchard, or sitting at the café downtown in the small New England city where I now dwell — activities that could take place daily. We could add to that an opera house or concert hall, museum gallery, or even places of dedicated labor: a studio, cabinetry shop, garden, kitchen, or laboratory. Even, though rarely for me, shopping destinations: a boutique or farmers’ market, perchance. A fair or festival.

So the question soon turns to a matter of one’s intention. What is one attempting to escape or encounter? What is one leaving behind and what does one face instead?

Continue reading “PLACES OF RETURN” →

MONTHLY, QUARTERLY, YEARLY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

punctual attendance at Meeting for Business is important

as worship
for to love is finding work also

there unmasked, when failing
a shining model of uprightness
and moderation

this purposing of expectation
coming to befriend each other
in daily labor and dreaming

vigilant close labor with any who slight
the holy standard

purposing
a forgiving spirit cherished by the whole
to resume anew

aggregating strength
for individual tribulations
where you’d otherwise succumb

*   *   *

the old pendulum, tick-tock
causing more than one who attends
to sit on the far side of the unadorned room

and that’s their business

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set, click here.

WHAT’S IN THE BAG

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Being mindful of what’s right in front of us can always be a challenge. Here are 10 new items from my end.

~*~

  1. Been collecting bags of fallen leaves from the neighbors, urban farmer that I am. These days, a couple dozen bags are sufficient, unlike the 200-plus I gathered in many of our first years together. They get stacked against one side of the barn to break the sharp blasts of cold wind that otherwise freeze the pipes to the mother-in-law apartment on the other side of the barn. It’s another of my winter-prep rounds. Come spring, the leaves get moved to the big compost bin.
  2. I carry a sense of being responsible for making everything better – me, alone. Except I have insufficient resources. Which takes us back to my deeply ingrained fear of poverty. No wonder I always want everything to work just right – and get so upset when it doesn’t! And that twists back to my fear of conflict.
  3. All of my writing (as I’m venturing) assumes an experience, if only an out-of-nowhere phrase (exploring the subconscious, then), demanding discovery as some unity of the cosmos. Even when I’m writing about what I don’t know.
  4. My appreciation of raw oysters on the half-shell goes back to my girlfriend in college, who insisted I eat (real) seafood while visiting in Florida. (And here we were, staying on a cattle ranch.) Up till then, it had been frozen fish sticks or canned salmon. Flash forward, to New England, where these days just before winter provide some of the fattest, juiciest oysters imaginable. These bivalves have stocked up for their version of hibernation. And, as one Mainer points out, you can count their age on their shells, just like rings in a tree.
  5. Gotta brace again for the end of Daylight Savings, the day our winter begins. Really begins.
  6. Of course location affects my writing and sensibility. The slums of a small city can be as urban as anything in a big metropolis, if you look and listen.
  7. Turn up an old Gohn Brothers catalogue – Amish clothes etc. Realize that’s no longer me, either.
  8. Ever so messy, the girl with the Lord & Taylor shopping bag.
  9. Somehow, even my Quaker practice and theory break free from some past.
  10. Taking the bus to Boston, I look out to see a field of big trucks just before the state line. Then remember, from a detour, it’s the truck spa. Seriously, that’s what it’s called. Keep wondering if there’s something on the side for the drivers.

~*~

In a solidly residential neighborhood these days, an echo of a more rural past.
In a solidly residential neighborhood these days, an echo of a more rural past.

DRIVING NAILS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

near the waterline, someone’s hammering
throughout the day, someone’s always
hammering

a staccato telegraph
of winter’s approach or gratitude
so little demands repair
or just some old goat’s survived

though when the hammering ceases
he may be eating a sandwich
or sawing a board to be hammered
yes, two taps secure its position

in the quiet, he’s
gone off to the supply house
for a another box of nails, another size
a door slams from another direction
where new hammering erupts

before the man puts his hammer down
on a leather tool belt
and then orders a beer

you’ll find boxes of hammering
in the tool shed, brown paper bags
of hammering in the mud room
old jars of hammering
on his truck bed

open any one
and his arm and shoulder
begin moving
the whole world as his anvil

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set of seacoast poems, click here.

TO AND FROM CUBA, DEARLY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

How many years ago did I write this? What’s come along since could fill a book!

One of the most exciting developments in New England Yearly Meeting is the Puente de Amigos – the Bridge of Love with Cuba Friends. Agamenticus Quarterly Meeting finally accepted the invitation to affiliate with Holguin Monthly Meeting, a pastoral congregation in the easternmost part of Cuba, a relationship that will force us to reexamine many of our own diversity of notions. The visiting Cubans have been gently reevangelizing New England, and when Wellesley’s teens were asked by their Cuban counterparts to “tell us about your conversion experiences,” a dialogue ensued that would have been difficult if not impossible to instigate otherwise: “our what?” Let us tell you!

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.

SIMPLY LISTEN WITH HANDS 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

People typically listen with their heads, attentive to logic and thought, or with their hearts, to feeling and insinuation. But there is also a frequently untapped ability to listen with one’s hands, as I recognized at a Susan Stark concert in Brunswick, Maine. There, two Quaker pastors from Kenya (themselves excellent, forceful singers) sat with arms flexed out before them, as if each held an invisible beach ball squeezed slowly. They were appraising the vibration of the room, the presence of Holy Spirit moving. This time, the current was plentiful and active. Try it, in public – at a governmental hearing, a poetry reading, a concert or play, a sporting event – and you, too, may observe how the sense of each occasion may differ. Watch a master carpenter or a first-rate baker, as well, to see how hands ponder a task, running ahead of mental comprehension. A musician often seems to hear music through the fingers, as if playing, even when no instrument is present. Perhaps a surgeon does the same with medicine.

These poems celebrate the movement of Spirit perceived through a Third Ear, between the hands. The tactile response. Here’s one:

 

~*~

TO USE TOOLS

Connect
four fingers and thumb
sometimes, double

into the fire, and out
a pot, a pan, or a skillet

with or without a lid
and its handle

extending to a blade
or straw, depending:

All the wonder of the work at hand
cooking, keeping house,
gardening, splitting wood –

to say nothing of the factory,
farm, boat, or mine –

hunting or warring –

Even basic parts we touch
with each other

Poem copyright 2017 by Jnana Hodson
For more, click here.

Poetry
Poetry

THOU SHALT NOT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At least they’re not commandments. Holy Moses! Ten more from my end of the universe.

~*~

  1. Sometimes I enjoy being in the front passenger seat the entire trip. Get to see more, for one thing. It’s an opportunity not to be in charge, not to be fully responsible – just let go and observe. What a relief!
  2. All the waterfowl, the tip of the wing nearly touching the surface they fly over: how do they do it?
  3. As Richard Brown Lethem says of his work, “For my entire life I’ve been trying to mine the subconscious.” No wonder I’m drawn to his paintings, inexplicable as so much remains to me.
  4. I feel myself to be from another planet, looking at a world I once wanted to inhabit.
  5. The grief men carry. Could it simply be the passage of time? Or something more fundamental to Eden?
  6. As the news story reported, a neck-slasher to his stepdad: “I’m going to kill you and your life is going to end.” (The redundancy is emphatic.)
  7. The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston’s Bay Back really is a magpie’s nest, an egocentric collection of bright and shiny objects. I do wish the curators were at liberty to give its masterpieces better display, contrary to Isabella’s directives. My, there’s so much clutter in the way!
  8. Rather than heading back to Maine, she’s spending the night here. Thus, it’s NO YORK.
  9. Pockets in a room that aren’t doing anything: that hold, in effect, dead energy. What’s the better usage?
  10. Who am I, at the core? What do I really want? (That, for someone she accuses of being self-centered.)

~*~

Right downtown, a great blue heron watching the tide.
Right downtown, a great blue heron watching the tide.

PENOBSCOT BAY PARTICULARS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

1

what if the tide never turns
but waits to be submerged
in the next high tide
one after another until
the whole city is inundated?

sailboats would go under
on their moorings, perhaps still
rocking mostly one side
from perpendicular

the wharf and its autos
would mean nothing
while the moon ignores her orbit

2

masts sway
like speedometers

or gauges
missing their dials

3

a whirlpool, however large or compact
swirls within myriad currents
that knit the harbor

some talk of changing public opinion
or the incumbent party
but don’t reckon the vortex
swimmers approach
laughing to each other

any remorse
over their drowning
will ring hollow

3

while ducktrap is a fish
a store touts its Ducktrap Decoy

whether for some waterfowl or the fish
lingers in question

awaiting a retort
from Daffy, Donald, or Daisy

as for the fish? only silent
disdain

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set of seacoast poems, click here.

RAISING THE STAKES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The kids raise a valid point when they notice how much we teach them about Quakers back then – but what about now?

Yes, what about NOW!

We need to get our act more together and acknowledge many of the remarkable ways we continue to witness today, usually in individual callings that deserve more support from the rest of us. So maybe the kids’ question can help us better focus on our greater purpose.

I’d like us to proclaim more of the courageous work of Friends internationally, too – I can think of examples in Cuba and Kenya in our own time.

Not all of the action involves peace and forgiveness issues, either.

Consider, too, two points from a visit to an Evangelical Friends Church on the other end of the Quaker spectrum from my own Meeting:

“Is Jesus Christ going to be exalted and praised?”

Her shocked look haunts me, considering the big Quaker gathering where I’m headed. I think, Yes, but in ways you wouldn’t recognize.

Also, humbly, as another realizes from one difficult exchange with a customer at her business previously that week: “I may be the only Jesus they’ll see.”

Now we’re talking business.

~*~

For similar thoughts, check out Religion Turned Upside Down.