Tag: Inspiration

VENTURING INTO NEW GROUND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I related at the time:

Our Meeting has been undergoing some fascinating growth, both spiritually and in numbers. At the moment, the meetinghouse (1768) is about ten feet in the air, jacked up for another two or three weeks while a new foundation is excavated and poured, to make room for religious education classes and to permit us to use both sides of upstairs for worship. (It’s been getting crowded.)

The resistance I originally encountered to Biblically-based messages has vanished, and these days it’s not uncommon to find two or three members reading quietly from their Bibles at some point during the Meeting, while references to Christ or to Scripture are now heard in a third to half of the vocal messages. That’s encouraging. And now a committee has been appointed to arrange for regular Bible study; though I would prefer we simply work our way through a book at a time (starting with Jonah, then the Gospel of John, one of Paul’s epistles, and the opening chapters of Genesis), there’s some interest in using Mary Morrison’s Pendle Hill pamphlet as the base, while others are leaning toward Sondra Cronk’s Tract Assn. peace booklet. Will be interesting to see what emerges.

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.

ROLLING IN CLOVER, AS IT WERE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Just a taste of what’s popping up. In case you were looking for a prompt.

~*~

  1. Time to start checking on the ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, courtesy of the NOAA buoys reported on the website. I no longer bother to venture into real surf until the readings hit 60 Fahrenheit. Below that it’s blue-toe water.
  2. There’s an irony in performing sun-salutation postures but none, say, for the new moon or full moon. Om, my. Inhale and exhale, with incense.
  3. On our apron by the back door, a small snake, whip motion, ever so slowly.
  4. Here I’d been intending to write leaner, tighter, shorter, clearer – a lacework of Light. Wind up with dense blocks of prose-poems instead.
  5. It’s hard to imagine my native Buckeye State was created, in essence, by eleven Connecticut veterans of the American Revolution who met at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston on March 1, 1786, to form the Ohio Company. The tavern was a gathering place for wealthy merchants sympathetic to the patriot cause. At least it wasn’t Manhattan. Who knows what we would have wound up with.
  6. Sometimes you feel a new beginning – not just renewal but turning a corner.
  7. My own pathway unfolds as its own guide.
  8. Sometimes I read this place as CLOVER NH. Better, of course, than the unintentionally comic EFFINGHAM.
  9. I’ve resolved to spend more time in the mountains to our north this summer. In recent years, even getting to the beaches nearby has been elusive.
  10. So that’s it! Blah-blah-blah.

~*~

Preserving a touch of history in downtown Boston, while the rest of the building's been razed. Something similar just happened to the oldest residence in Maine.
Preserving a touch of history in downtown Boston, while the rest of the building’s been razed. Something similar just happened to the oldest residence in Maine.

 

 

LOOKING FOR WIDER CONNECTIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My wife, meanwhile, has her own perspective. “Many people think this valley can prosper in isolation, but let me tell you, the local museum indicates otherwise. It’s filled with Pennsylvania long rifles, Ohio flint, a New Hampshire stagecoach, antique cars from Michigan, pianos made in Indiana, Connecticut pistols, even Illinois farm implements. Everybody came from somewhere.” In her case, South Carolina.

Taking her up on the invitation to tour the exhibits, my wife paid special attention to local Indian basketry and beadwork. “Over time, their artistry was pathetically stripped down to resemble coloring books,” she told me afterward. “The gift shop sells greeting cards from Iowa and crafts from what the sales clerk said was ‘Berea, Virginia.’

“Virginia? I replied.”

“The college there.”

“Oh, you mean Kentucky!”

“‘Kentucky, then,’ she said, as if it’s all the same.”

I understand the scowl. “I notice, around here ‘Easterners’ seem to come from such ‘seaboard’ states as landlocked Nebraska, Kansas, and Illinois.”

“That’ll be news to them,” she grins. “Bet they never thought of themselves as Easterners, either!”

Infinite misunderstandings continue, tit for tat.

“Even so,” I say, “this is big sky and cowboy spreads. Even these treeless foothills ignite something in my airy nature. I hope this elation never ends.”

An elation, at least, when I’m out of the office.

I look forward to tonight’s gig with Kokopelli.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

LOOKING FOR VITAL MUTUALITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We, who consider ourselves free spirits, despite any penchant for obligations, still yearn for a steady circle where attendance at worship is less of an option within many alternatives. Let the worship itself have an urgency and regularity, may it be a priority in the weekly schedule, free it to be focused on the One and empowering.

To be one!

Don’t ask me if prayer works. Anymore than singing, birds answer on a May morning.

Our struggle is magnified by our degree of selfless service.

We turn, instead, to free-spirits, where we give fairly selflessly of ourselves.

Only problem is, unlike the Old Order or monastic setting, we’re not surrounded by and bathed in the selfless gifting of everyone else.

They just aren’t reliable, no matter how fine their intentions. Ergo, burnout! (You and I always wind up holding the bag when they default or go off to boogie.)

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.

GEMINI, BY JIMMINY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Why wait for the dust to settle? Here are 10 bullets from my end.

~*~

  1. This matter of scale – and balance – in a life that has an appearance of randomness. All these items collected throughout the house and barn. Somehow, order reasserts itself, if you look.
  2. Remembering the volcano 37 years ago. Just look at the skulls I collected in that country.
  3. Four years later, the move to Baltimore for the one I thought embodied that moment full of promise to take my life upward into a fairy-tale existence of class and repose, a much different direction from where I’ve landed. Alas, she’d already bolted. And mine has become much more organic.
  4. Common Meter, 8.6.8.6, as in “Amazing Grace,” is simply the syllable count. A great way to swap words and music.
  5. Am not having profound or imaginative dreams. But at least the flow’s beginning again, like looking at a secret movie or computer screen.
  6. When taking portraits outdoors, how often the eyeglasses turn into sunglasses in the bright light – and how often people in party mode turn wooden.
  7. Looking at a book of glass houses reminds me how deeply that Bauhaus aesthetic is embedded in my sensibility. Not that I’d aspire to live in one now. Who washes all those windows, anyway? And what about fingerprints or noses? These days I’ve chosen a different style, one based in Yankee houses that just keep growing, as needed. As for curtains, she and I will argue.
  8. To ease back into Hatha – Ha-ha!
  9. “The things that are not seen are eternal” – II Corinthians 4:18.
  10. Still feeling so tentative rather than forceful.

~*~

Why's he honored on the street?
Why’s he honored on the street?

I chanced upon this scultpture at 15 Beach Place while wandering from Chinatown to Faneuil Hall. It’s about a block from the old Boston Music Hall, where Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto got its world premiere. Maybe this site is where he stayed while visiting? Anyone got a clue?

The sculpture resides just left of the doorway.
The sculpture resides just left of the doorway.

TOWN AND COUNTRY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Our landlord explains his own decision to relocate in the valley: “Cities embody man’s attempt to be supreme over all. You tire of the power games, the competition rather than harmony. The back country I love emphasizes what’s greater than man. There I’ll endure avalanches, sliding roadways in mountain passes, storms, grizzlies, even cougars. The city relies on institutional religion, second-hand versions of Great Spirit codified to support the System. No, that’s not for me. My back country upholds individual revelation. Wilderness raises fresh opposition against everything that binds artificially. The back country leads me closer to basic understanding. You need to accept whatever Absolute there is, whatever portion of the Mystery you can chew off at the moment. It makes me recognize how much more there always is. The city’s linear, controlled. But back country is circular, like wave motions. It’s feminine, robust and soft all at once. Its give-and-take reminds me of Emma.”

And, as I also knew, the land can be as hard and unforgiving as rock.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

SMALL FRY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Gould’s Trumpetworm
looking to all the world like sand

spoonworms

speckled flatworm, milky ribbon worm
the many segmented worms
(rolled up into a body when threatened)

shells of northern white chiton
diluvian punturella
spiral margarite
wide lacuna
the tiny periwinkles
flat skinea
three-lined basketsnail
solitary bubble
fuzzy onchidoris
graceful aeolis
shag-rug nudibrand
northern dwarf-tellin

if you’re close
or have a yen
for maritime bonsai
of a zoological twist

dig in

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

JUST LOOK AT THE VARIATIONS OF LIGHT ITSELF

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Where I live, seasons differ in their degree of light, not just temperature. Winter has long nights and short days – you can enter the workplace before sunrise, work a normal shift, and still leave after sunset. Summer, of course, reverses the pattern, so that you can go to bed before sunset and get up after sunrise and still have a full night’s sleep.

Here, we also have the ocean, warming and chilling on its own cycle, and, if you’re close enough, reflect light back into the air.

Sailing on the ocean, you try to stay with the compass direction, while the wind twists the boat in one direction and the current, in another. You fear being blown over or far from your destination. “Don’t worry,” you’re told. “If the boat is blown too far to the side, the sails will empty” – and the boat will right itself.

Remember, my awareness of ocean comes principally from my last quarter-century of experience. It’s far from the Midwestern farming cycles imprinted in my soul; even though we lived in a medium-sized city, where our house was a half-block away from a working dairy, and after college I did live on a neglected farm and then the ashram, itself a former farm. Somehow, the changing tides add to my sense of seasons and constant change.

The seasons, in their many forms, become a pulse of life itself, including all of the invisible influences and realities.

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.

MAYBE IT ALL ADDS UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The mind dances here and there, rarely in a linear fashion. So what’s on my mind these days? How about counting on these fingers?

~*~

  1. The return of warm weather allows more leisurely use of the top of the barn again, before high summer makes the space too oppressive. Eight years ago we made major renovations that made the loft more fully accessible and usable, gaining 500 square feet of storage and retreat space – my three-season retreat, as it were. The elbow room has been quite liberating. I love to sit at the hall door, reading and sipping a drink while overlooking my domain. How good, tranquil, it feels. How much I love listening to rain fall on its roof, too.
  2. The rush of spring now brings on fresh lettuce and spinach in our garden. Turning the compost, I’m delighted to see so many red wigglers already active – my little buddies in restoring the earth where we live.
  3. I’ve thought about The Daily Vulture as a title. Seeing them now reminds me of my bird watching on my daily commute, back when I was driving daily. Gee, would the name befit a newspaper?
  4. Thinking, too, of all the near misses on those drives. A few seconds this way or that and I would have been road kill. A feast for the vultures. Far more times than I’d care to recount.
  5. Nice poets are a dime a dozen and largely ignored. Makes me wonder about assuming a hidden identity as a Quaker Agitator, waiting to be claimed. As for amateur theologians? Time to emulate Swami?
  6. There are far more writers than I could ever read. Even in any of my fields of interest. And far more advice.
  7. After living here, in a richly pedestrian-friendly small city in New England, or on historic Bolton Hill in Baltimore, or even the inner city of Binghamton, how sterile I find so many other neighborhoods where I’ve lived or wandered.
  8. How essential and uplifting that sense that says I’M HERE!
  9. As he said of himself, “I go to extremes.” Still, there wasn’t a sweeter human. And he still had his beard in the end. As for our demons and passions?
  10. Hebrew “to know” is yada. Another rich word.

~*~

Guess which one caught my attention.
Guess which one caught my attention.

 

There, on the ground floor of Boston's historic Faneuil Hall, a vendor to warm my heart.
There, on the ground floor of Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, a vendor to warm my heart.

 

WORKING THE LATE SHIFT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Approaching thirty years of Aquarius, I consider what happens when the office finally hushes. Despite the line bells and the whine of an engraving machine in adjoining rooms, I’m the only one at a keyboard while the police dispatcher mumbles about deranged prowlers, unwanted guests, a prostitute overdosing with the hypo still in her arm (though she later claims she never uses the stuff, as they all say). Sometimes, pretending I no longer care, I sit and read as blue smoke swirls toward fluorescent tubes.

I wish Kokopelli were here, even with one of his stinky cigars. Or the pipe, the one he plays for music or the one he fills with leaf, either one.

Instead, I ponder ways this place differs from Long Pond and its Mafia hit men out of New York and Philadelphia visit to drop a corpse in icy brambles. A nearby restaurant serves poached venison year-around. Another hit happens near a stone mason’s hunting cabin above Devil’s Hole, on mountainside still fire-scarred where his father had built it like a dock. I’ve been both places. Two hits in one place out of many.

When I step outside for my dinner break, I observe a doll holding a cigarette at nose level, as if waiting for some night bird to perch. While she stares through smoke as if she desires me, I wondered how many have fallen for her tricks. I scan her hand and fingers and spot the glittering emblem. I buy a cheap cigar — for later, whether Kokopelli shows up or skips.

At heart, though, I sing for a restoration of America. A healing of fields, of fish, of human integrity, of Eden’s ideal. I want to live free in the Holy Spirit. “May we turn it,” I pray silently. Be it so!  Genuine repentance. Turning. Always turning toward what’s holy.

At breakfast, I begin: “Praise the hunger that brings us together.”

Kokopelli takes a second helping.

I meditate as befits a stone sitting in water.

I gain bearings in addition to the mountain. Some are also barriers. Nuclear reactors, to the southeast. To the north, Army maneuvers. To our west, the Indian reservation. All posted: DO NOT ENTER.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.