Tag: Jobs

HARD-HEADED RESOLVE IN THIS MATTER OF DIVERSITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

May I plead for some hard-headed Friends in our midst? We’ve been blessed with many compassionate, sensitive, open-hearted individuals. (Not that we wouldn’t welcome many, many more to join in our circle.) But in our emotions and good intentions, we can also be easily swept up in more than we can handle as a faith community.

There are many reasons to value the Friend who asks the hard or even embarrassing question in the midst of our business discussions, even if we find ourselves momentarily annoyed. The one who keeps asking, How will we pay for this? Who will do it? What are the long-term consequences? Where’s the documentation? Sometimes it’s someone who sees needed repairs and sets about getting them done. The legal issues and nagging details, too. Often, it seems like throwing a wet blanket over our enthusiasm, but I’d rather have that happen before we set out on a venture than have us break down in discouragement when unexpected difficulties arise once the project is in motion or we find we lack the time and commitment to follow through.

For all of our talk of diversity, we do tend to be largely a self-selected group – like attracted to like – and this can leave us with some large gaps in our skills and outlooks. Any auto mechanics or accountants, for instance? Or, as the French novelist Andre Gide once asked, Where are the shoemakers and cobblers in the Society of Friends these days? Which is another way of saying, the people who help us keep our feet on the ground when we’re caught up in the Spirit.

WITHDRAWAL AND INTEREST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I wrote at the time …

Remember when all the banks were centralizing? This was bad news for most cities, taking our money someplace else. You could see it in the way they put the screws to us. Overdrawn? Need to talk to a teller about your account? A safe deposit box? Here are our new fees, and they’re going up sharply. Pure economic theory pointing toward monoply. What happens as competition diminishes. Nobody’s explained why this had to happen. The legislators should have known better. They owned too many shares to be disinterested.

The insurance companies, too. When juries began handing out awards that few individuals could afford to pay, the insurance companies must have been gladdened, for it meant none of us could afford to be without their policies. Now, however, none of us can afford their policies, either. And they dare cry out for relief from a problem they encouraged for so long?

Where does that leave us? My auto insurance costs more than the car. Back in Maryland, a friend tried calling her company after it cancelled her auto policy when it refused her check and then, in cahoots with the state bureaucracy, she was being told to return her auto tags; the bastards at the insurance company were all snippy, even the operator; they wouldn’t even return the inquiries of her agent.

Just sign on the line. “But I refuse to swear or affirm. It’s against my religion. See Matthew.”

“Look, don’t make waves. Just sign it, OK?” So they want me to sign something that says I live up to my word, but for me to do that means I have to violate my principles.

My Bible has a story about Goliath …

INC. TO INCA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In a global economy, even a backwater town’s at risk.

To go from Inc. as in Incorporated to Big Inca is just a small leap in the miasma of international corporate espionage and conspiracy – especially when a frontline player has to run for his life.

Take it from Bill … in the mill.

Inca 1~*~

The novel is available here.

 

 

BEWARE OF BIG INCA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The New World – North American and South – comes clashing in the down-at-the-heels mill town of yrubBury when Bill sets out on his first job out of college.

He could easily be a Pony Express rider venturing out onto the frontier – or a lonely station master, saddling the next horse and holding it ready.

This time the frontier has one foot in the past, a time of water power and European immigration of labor. And rather than the Great Plains, his route runs through urban blight.

As Bill discovers, history’s never finished. Especially when Big Inca starts lurking.

Inca 1~*~

 The novel is available here.

LABORING TOGETHER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his book of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall divides our labors as jobs, chores, and work. Jobs, of course, are done for income; chores, the things that must be done to keep a household running, are gratis; but work, he says, is done out of passion, and if we’re really lucky, it even pays our bills. In other words, work energizes us.

Another poet, Gary Snyder, uses the term, The Real Work, which is also the title for a book of his own essays and interviews. There, he argues that real work is a matter of attention and focus, as well as finding our unique place in the universe of the moment.

From the Shakers’ “hands for work, hearts for God” practice, I would add that real work is not rushed, but rather proceeds at a sensible pace, without too much concern for “productivity”; real work includes times for reflection and play. Otherwise, you’d never conceive and create things like a circular saw or clothespin. And, increasingly, such work is rarely found in the workplace. (Job-place?)

From a conference representing three different strands of Quakerism, a statement from one of the Evangelical Friends has stayed with me. She differentiated between “church work” and “God’s work.” One, she explained, was agreeing to teach First-Day School because an adult body was needed; the other was a response to something deeper and fully engaging. In Hall’s view, one was a chore, while the other was work.

Nominations time will approach all too shortly. Yes, our pool of available bodies is shrinking and aging. Still, I’ll ask that you search your heart for the ways you might respond to God’s work in our midst. (As clerk, I was more and more amazed by the range of skills needed to keep this building and its activities running!) Look especially at the little ways this might play into your own larger Life Work – and for ways we might engage playfulness into our labors, transforming chores into the real work.

I’ve spoken of what I call the parable of the geese – the image of our clerks, rotating in the lead so that none get exhausted. My turn, your turn, his turn, her turn. And to think, the birds fly almost as fast as cars on the freeway. Maybe it’s another image of the perfect Meeting. In one of the first quarterly meetings I clerked, as I looked out from small table at the high bench in the Henniker meetinghouse, I thought, Look at all those former clerks! It was my turn, and I felt comforted to know I could trust their guidance.

So who’s leading the geese? And how do they decide in their lineup? I can’t decide if they’re barking or laughing as they fly, but they sure sound like they’re having fun – coming or going.

PRIVILEGE … OR RESPONSIBILITY?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Having all of the presidential hopefuls at hand, as we in New Hampshire do during our unique primary season, comes at a price. Not just the traffic congestion as candidates race from one site to another or the advertising that clutters on the airwaves or the willingness to venture as outsiders into hotbeds of supporters. No, the more vigilant and responsible of us spend hours of personal time and gallons of fuel driving to scheduled events to meet the hopefuls in the flesh and see how they respond to public concerns. It often means arriving early to get a seat while knowing all too well the star of the show will arrive late, and not just by minutes.

And then, sometimes, you get there only to find the parking lot’s empty – the event just got cancelled. We could name names here but won’t.

Let me say, though, you get a much different view of them up-close and in-person than what you’d otherwise obtain. Especially when they’re off-camera and pulled away from the script.

PLAYING ALONG WITH TEMPTATION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The race for New Hampshire’s First-in-the-Nation presidential primary, currently set for February 9, has barely entered its pregame activities and already our phone’s ringing. Not just the candidates, either, but the surveys, especially – rarely does a day go by without at least one.

OK, some of the surveys are no doubt fronts for candidates or campaigns, but the frequency of the bona fide pollsters is also troubling. Ideally, the statisticians are sampling a legitimate cross-section of likely voters or, in an era of unlisted cell phones, they’re turning to a very small fishbowl regardless of its ultimate match. I fear the later.

It’s also raising the temptation of playing with the game itself. Say, with four registered voters in our family, we decide to tell everyone this week we’re backing X, and thus inflating that hopeful’s ratings, only to totally ignore X a week later. You can imagine how the pundits would react to the fluctuating numbers.

~*~

My larger concern has to do with leaving room for the process to actually occur without all of the Big Media tampering. Let the candidates meet the public without having hundreds of reporters tagging along – especially the intrusive television cameras and sound bites. Yes, I want a few journalists to be there for the unscripted moment that can enliven or derail a campaign – I just want the general public to be there as active participants rather than merely as an entertainer’s backdrop. That is, the journalists should be invisible rather than part of the celebrity-style entourage.

~*~

Well, one thing we do know. All of this is about to speed up. And how!

REVIVING THE FAVORITE SON OPTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Looking at the lack of traction of any of the candidates in the Republican presidential field, maybe it’s time to suggest returning to a once common strategy, one known as the Favorite Son – or, on today’s scene, Favorite Daughter.

Here’s where the large states like New York or Ohio could wield their clout, throwing their primary election weight behind a candidate from their state who would then negotiate at the national convention. Well, we do have Pataki and Kasich as a fit. Add Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania, and Chris Christy, New Jersey.

Florida becomes more of a problem, split between Bush and Rubio. As for Texas, still Rick Perry?

Could be interesting, if they can muscle their delegations. But California keeps drawing a blank for me. Keep wondering who I’m missing.

Well, why wouldn’t conservatives want to return to the past? Seems a rational option at the moment.

SNOBBERY, ALL THE SAME

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

To see the old meetinghouse at China, Maine, as it’s been turned into a Friends Camp arts studio (a messy one, at that) is a pointed symbol of the tensions many of us encounter as we attempt to live out our faith – and not just on the cultural front. (For the record, I am, after all, a published poet and novelist, a professional journalist, an avid contradancer, gallery-goer, foreign film buff, occasional violinist and harmony singer, and a lover of opera and classical music – all of which can raise eyebrows in various spiritual circles, and most of which would have been forbidden in traditional Quaker discipline – all this even before we turn to the struggles of the workplace, families, neighbors, or politics. Call me a snob, if you will.) The fact remains that the Society of Friends today is filled with many artists pursuing every imaginable medium. Dover Meeting is not alone in its range of talent.

A while back, I spoke of practice as something that’s ongoing and never finished, in contrast, say, to a performance or even a rehearsal. Practice as something done more for its own exploration and pursuit of a discipline than for any finished product. Practice as being part of a bigger encounter: the practice of prayer, practice of poetry, practicing musical scales, play practice, football practice, even medical practice. Something done with care, and if freedom follows in critical situations, as we often hear in interviews after a Patriots’ game, then all the better. Weeding and composting, I suppose, are part of the practice of gardening, apart from any harvest.

When I think about qualities that mark Quaker artists, I would tentatively suggest: placing the ongoing work ahead of themselves; “cool” rather than “hot”; a sense of experience and discovery rather than make-believe or escape; honesty rather than pretense; wonder rather than irony; humility rather than egotism or arrogance; candor rather than flamboyance; a preference for simplicity over complexity; directness rather than confusion; economy rather than extravagance; calmness rather than shrillness; curiosity and listening rather than dogma or bombast.

We might also turn the old Quaker views toward a critique of today’s cult of celebrities (almost universally entertainment/professional sports figures) and their exorbitant incomes – a situation that I believe accompanies a lessening of power within our communities. To that we could add the ways the arts are often used as a secular religion to sanctify public occasions. As for the Oscars?

But maybe that’s just another part of our unfolding spiritual awareness.

REGARDING THE LATEST GREEK TRAGEDY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Vanity Fair magazine’s October 2010 article, Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis may still be the best perspective we have on the events finally crashing along the sunny Aegean and sending shock waves through the rest of the continent.

Events? Do we call them economic? Financial? Political? Social? Moral? Cataclysmic? Truly tragic, as in “taking on the gods and bearing the consequences”?

The Greeks aren’t alone in trying to make sense of money issues. Apart from monetary policy itself – a highly esoteric field – any discussion of money soon wades into emotionally laden assumptions regarding wealth, possessions, time, labor, even food or family or religion. These are the grist of my ongoing Talking Money series at Chicken Farmer I Still Love You. I hope you join in — the category can be found under the Contents tab.

One of the easily overlooked realities about money is that it is essentially an elaborate IOU – one that allows us to store excess productivity or labor over time and space. Eventually, though, any promises come due, and you better have something that will back the debt up. That’s as true for nations that print the bills or banks that move them about as it is for individuals. And that’s what we’re seeing in Greece.

As I write this, I have no way of anticipating what will play out. The lack of a single nation to enforce the necessary regulations that would back the euro had me skeptical of its success from the very beginning, though I’ve long admitted to being a neo-Luddite. Still, the history of state-issued currencies in the United States in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War illustrates the pitfalls of currency that is insufficiently backed up. Prudent Pennsylvania proved to be the big exception to the trend and maintained its value.

We watch the present drama, then, hoping the action remains confined to the stage in the amphitheater. There are no guarantees – no double your money back – for anyone as the plot thickens.

Any predictions? Or counsel? We’re all eyes and ears.