Tag: Life

HOT TUB ORACLE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I never intended to live there as long as I did, in the rented townhouse in what I sometimes called Yuppieville on the Mountain. But it must have suited me during that decade of waiting and searching, my anticipating true love and a long-desired relocation into permanence. Besides, it was convenient to the office. Admittedly, I enjoyed using the whirlpool in the clubhouse, soaking in the hot water while watching snowflakes drift down on the other side of the display windows; besides, at that time, the complex was still surrounded by woodlands. Lest it sound too idyllic, let me also acknowledge the dumpster parked beside my unit was frequently overflowing.

The poems in the resulting collection arise in that experience of transient proximity, which has become so much a part of the American landscape. The poems themselves are a kind of side street from other works I was drafting and revising during this time. Still, they make me examine what was right in front of me, all the same.

The series closes my collection, Rust and the Wound. To read the free ebook, click here.

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.

AS A VERB, PERHAPS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

now I lay me down to weep

 why, we always see the squirrel as playful
rather than tragic

or desperately terrified

a kite in the sky

*   *   *

if getting anywhere were only that easy
or direct

*   *   *

Survival is the first law.
But which Self?

To be hungry
and clever
are a dangerous combination.

Especially when cornered.

*   *   *

layered in trees           wires   roofs and decks
the predominant wild mammal of the city
mocks dogs, mauls cats
stands more visible than rats

bolts a zig-zag route at ground level
where pigeons walk in circles

*   *   *

some creatures are more monogamous

and some fear their young

some, helpless and afraid
have no way of knowing

*   *   *

To find yourself on the other end
of a hungry
and clever
creature

even if it’s only trying to get in

is the basis of law two.

*   *   *

zoology and physics, a most interesting combination

Poem copyright 2015 by Jnana Hodson
To read the full set of squirrelly poems, click here.

 

LOST YEARS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

these damned mill towns exhaust
another mystery in the night
of Indian and Barbados descent
as much a sphinx as medical

for a change, salmon, at the hydroelectric dam

(along with the fish ladders they’re installing
two blocks from my home) the only evidence of life
is where beaver has gnashed a foot up the trees

~*~

the decade and a half
between the collapse of first
marriage and origins

that second                spiritual redirection
and career retrenchment
not harried                but

resignation
collisions
oh, all these devils

~*~

like the other stuff I was going to do tonight
my intellectual existence, it seemed
if she knows any alternatives

To continue, click here.
Copyright 2015

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.

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.