Tag: Life

High hippie by degrees – nobody fully fit the stereotype

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By the end of ’68, the counterculture phenomenon was metastasizing from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and nearby Berkeley into pockets across most of the country and even Europe. As August of ’69 proved, it was sufficiently established in the East to draw together the unanticipated throng at Woodstock.

Much of the transplanted activity existed at the fringes of college campuses, as I experienced in Bloomington, Indiana, and later Binghamton, New York. For me, growing up in Ohio, I would have rather attended hip, beat Antioch in Yellow Springs, but the finances were way out of our consideration. So a state school was my destination, and at the time, Indiana as an out-of-state student was nearly as reasonable as in-state for me in Ohio. And a bit later, to my surprise, how yesterday Antioch began to appear once I was near the East Coast.

The searing experiences shape what I describe in Daffodil Uprising and then Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. And as I continue to repeat, hippies came in all varieties – and still do. There was no standard-issue, card-carrying member, but each was one to some degree or another. Nobody completely fit the hippie image.

As someone who became addicted at the onset of adolescence to classical, opera, and folk music, I was already passionate about an alternative to commercial entertainment, which was what rock at the time really was. I was one who lamented deeply when Bob Dylan went electric. Sold out, so it seemed. I had the long hair and blue jeans and bell bottoms. I was against the war, tried a few hallucinations, loved sex when I could get it, which wasn’t often.

And then I encountered yoga, which led me to give up meat, alcohol and drugs, and sex for the life I detail in Yoga Bootcamp – and yet, curiously, this was when I felt the most hippie in all of my awareness.

Keeping track of a big cast

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A multi-generational family tale like the one in my novel What’s Left can lead to a lot of characters, and keeping them all straight can be a problem.

My plot line takes a few twists that minimize their numbers, but when you get four generations over time, it’s bound to create a challenge, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes it helps to stick with somebody who knows everybody, when you’re circulating through the crowd.

When reading a big book, do you have tricks for keeping track of the individuals? Anything you’d like to share?

~*~

Just listen to the melody.

Yes, variables of place

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A major influence on my work has been an awareness of the variables of place. When I lived in the ashram, my yoga teacher returned from her first trip to India and described with wonder her sensation that each locale there felt different – to the extent that each village or region had its own god or gods to embody its distinct character or, as she put it, vibration.

Fifty years later, having lived and worked in eight states, I can say that’s true in America, too, even though we’ve muddied much of the indigenous awareness. I’m especially convinced that people in deeply prayerful states do somehow leave an imprint on a place.

That sensation has unexpectedly led me to Quaker meetinghouses and burial grounds or arisen in the midst of conversation in old houses of worship.

How have you felt special locales?

Construction report

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

behind plaster we rip from the kitchen crumbling accounts of protracted death Floyd Collins 15 days 1925 age 36 Sand Cave Crystal Cave Kentucky as published in Boston, accounting inescapably cold mud and implacable rock when my own parents were first walking, yet this story my mother related as if she were on the carnival rides of its macabre vigil but now we find nothing holding this roof to the walls so much callous indifference riding on the blind arrogance a foolish turn, perchance, or just dumb luck when it comes to catastrophe of course, I remember living on the roof of a cavern down in muddy Indiana

Distances from Seattle to … it really is a world apart

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my novel Nearly Canaan, Joshua and Jaya settle into a place unlike anything they would have imagined. It’s desert, for one thing, where nearly everything has to be irrigated, for another. Quite simply, it’s a lot like Yakima, in the middle of Washington state. The closest big city was Seattle, three or four hours away. And that, too, was far from much else.

Just consider these in miles, apart from flying time, even when you could fly direct.

  1. Anchorage: 1,448 miles. Alaska has a spiritual affinity in the Pacific Northwest, like it’s just up the road, more or less. Plus, it had good summer jobs on the crab boats, forget the riskiness.  
  2. Honolulu: 2,680. Naturally, driving isn’t an option. As a vacation destination, though, this was a highly popular option, especially considering the sunshine.
  3. San Francisco: 679. Like this was the next town south, and like a grown-up version of Seattle, a few decades back. It’s still a long way to drive.
  4. Las Vegas: 871. Seemed close, especially in winter. Say a weekend getaway. Again, factor in the sunshine, if you ever left your hotel/casino.
  5. Denver: 1,024. While many think of the Mile High City as Western, we thought of it as Out East. Our awareness largely skipped right over it. See next item.
  6. Chicago: 1,737. Alaska was closer, and more of a kindred nature.
  7. New York: 2,408. Largely didn’t matter in our eyes.
  8. Washington: 2,306. Ditto.
  9. Tokyo: 4,792. Psychologically, it felt as close as the East Coast of the U.S. and about as influential. We shared an ocean, after all.
  10. Atlanta: 2,182. And you still had to get to Florida, which didn’t matter since we had Hawaii when you added it all up. Blah! 

Wrong time, wrong place to miss out

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I had already made this point elsewhere in my novel What’s Left, so this sentence was trimmed out of the final version:

Theos Graham joins Theos Barney and Thea Pia in feeding the homeless at Carmichael’s back door or the soup kitchen at the Lutheran church or even letting them sleep in our bus, once we have one.

I do miss the mention of the Lutheran church or the bus, by the way, but they just didn’t fit what was left.

~*~

Yes, we all have found ourselves proclaiming, “I’m starving!” Not that many of us have suffered so much as starvation itself.

Have you ever gone truly hungry? Have you ever wound up accepting handouts from strangers? Have you ever fasted? What’s the longest you’ve gone without food?

~*~

In the family, Cassia would have had food like this.

Ten defining Quaker testimonies

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the Society of Friends, or Quakers, testimony and witness are synonyms. It’s what one does in one’s life, not what one says about the nature of faith or social stances. Here are some ways we practice this:

  1. Open, Spirit-led worship. Traditionally, sitting together in silence, but many Friends today do have pastors and hymns within a loosely structured worship program.
  2. Peace. It includes pacifism and non-violence, extending to speech.
  3. Honesty. No oaths, which can lead to a double-standard of truthfulness.
  4. Integrity. This means doing what we say.
  5. No creeds or dogma. We speak from our own hearts and experience. We do, however, recognize doctrine (meaning sound teaching) as useful.
  6. Queries. Use of questions and deep listening to guide actions and faith, rather than barking orders.
  7. Equality and social justice. (You don’t have to be a protester, though, to be a member.)
  8. No gambling. And no getting something for nothing, especially at another’s expense.
  9. No voting to arrive at decisions. (Voting in public elections, however, is strongly encouraged.)
  10. Simplicity. It’s more complicated than you’d think.

~*~

What would your faith tradition put on its list?

 

A few critical measures in compressed language

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One test of a poem (for me, at least) is based on the qualities of good vocal ministry arising in the traditional quiet worship of Quakers: incantatory language and prophetic whirlwind. Unlike “slow prose” as a kind of sermon.

In vocal ministry, how often the message comes from within our current conflict or personal struggle!

Yes, we wrestle with God.

Poems and prayers you feel in your hands more than bounce around ‘tween your ears.

Moving on?

Remarkably, it seems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

what’s happened I no longer want to travel or climb the high mountains or is it just all the moves across the continent and back, my years on the road, my commute daily so stretched I’d contract into my nest and grounds for reading or revision, the places I’ve been and people I’ve known so many I want to know my own better . people come from all over the globe to see the landscape I call home