Tag: Life

WHERE ARE THE CANDIDATES’ OFFICES?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In remarking about the failure of the presidential candidates to get out and do the ground-level face-to-face meet-and-greets that are the foundation of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, I’ve failed to notice a conspicuous change in this particular campaign. I live in a county seat, one of ten in New Hampshire, and usually by this point in the campaign, we’d have prominent campaign headquarters downtown.

Not this time.

No, it finally dawned on me. Nada!

(Well, since drafting this, we got a phone call saying Hillary just opened an office here, just not downtown. Still, something’s akimbo.)

In fact the Republicans, who ought to be the most active in staking out territory, had only eight offices across New Hampshire by mid-September – all in Manchester, the largest city, an hour away from where I live. Much more from the further reaches of the state.

Contrast that to the Democrats: eight offices for Hillary Clinton alone, at the time, four for Bernie Sanders, and two for Martin O’Malley. Fourteen in all. And Joe Biden’s still waiting in the wings.

The local office is where a candidate’s organization offers literature and answers questions to passers-by, does its phone-banking, encourages supporters to meet, plans canvassing and visibility events. It’s where each candidate gains visibility – and credibility – every time a driver or pedestrian comes past.

Maybe the Republicans think advertising will fill the gap. It won’t. Each region of my adopted state is different. I’ll leave it at that.

I’ve also mentioned the lack of living room meetings and am surprised to see the only ones listed on the Republican side are all in Scott Brown’s Rye home – that is, the former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Hardly bread-and-butter invitations to the faithful, right?

TOMBSTONE: THE PREMISE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One late October afternoon, after most of the foliage had fallen, Randy Kezar and I simultaneously looked up from our pathway and beheld a large red maple fully aflame in sunlight as we strolled through the burial ground behind our Quaker meetinghouse. It was the embodiment of the single detail that says everything, the flash of perfection; this individual tree expressed the season as much as all of the previous color change and shifting light we had savored in the previous weeks. “I suppose if we were Japanese, we’d sit down and write a haiku on the spot, in celebration,” he said. Later, I took up the challenge and came up with a few lines I hope come close:

Somehow each New England autumn
comes down to boughs in a graveyard

– a common of stone and bone –

But my provocation and observations kept ranging wider, invoking a calendar not just of the place across  a year but also the epochs that fill what went from a boneyard and burial ground to a Victorian cemetery to the present, as well.

The winged death's head is a common gravestone motif in New England. This example is in Watertown, Massachusetts.
The winged death’s head is a common gravestone motif in New England. This example is in Watertown, Massachusetts.

The poems that resulted have one foot in Portsmouth and Dover, New Hampshire, and another in Portsmouth and Newport, Rhode Island, where I quote from the 1664 will of Alice Shotten Cowland and some of the activities of her son-in-law, Robert Hodgson – sometimes spelled Hodson, as well as Hutchin. (I detail what is known of their lives in my genealogy blog, The Orphan George Chronicles.) She was part of the early dissent against Puritan authority, first with Samuel Gorton and then as one of the first Quakers in the New World. I love Robert’s memorial minute, which calls him “an ancient traveler in the Truth.” He arrived in America on the historic voyage of  the tiny Woodhouse, causing turmoil in Manhattan and Long Island before heading on to Boston. As far as I can determine, he was no relation to my line, no matter how much many have tried to find the link.

~*~

Winged Death 1To see more, click here.

LOOKING AT THE GOP WHITE HOUSE HOPEFULS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Looking at the pack, I wonder how many voters can even say something about each of the names on the full slate. Even in simply determining each candidate’s state, as a starter, or the major offices he or she’s held.

That’s even before the question of finding some significant way one stands out from the rest.

I’m even asking if they’d make a decent Cabinet, put together.

Here’s hoping things start to get lively. Let us see who they are. Really are.

IN THIS JOURNEY TOGETHER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 14 Comments

I’m always startled to hear people say they can pursue spirituality without any teacher or community. Nothing in my experience, as a yogi or a Christian, supports that. If you point to George Fox’s time of sitting “in hollow trees and lonesome places,” and his recognition that among the priests (and preachers) he consulted, “there was none among them that could speak to my condition,” and his eventual proclamation of discovering “the pure knowledge of God and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing,” the fact remains that he was stimulated by that early dialogue and, once he’d experienced Divine Revelation, did not keep it to himself but was instead drawn out to others who were having similar transformations.

I would point, too, to the spiritual support he received initially from Elizabeth Hooten – whom I consider the first Quaker and who, incidentally, came across the Atlantic in her advanced age to Dover to minister among Friends here — and later from Margaret Fell.

One reason we need community to accompany our spiritual deepening and expansion comes in the ways it can counter tendencies toward self-deception, human weakness, laziness, or distraction. In the practice of our faith, we instruct, encourage, acknowledge, embrace, correct, inspire, comfort, guide – even rebuke – one another. These are matters the New Testament calls discipleship.

Lloyd Lee Wilson has reminded us there are no Quakers apart from the meeting, which is another way of saying each Friend needs to be part of this interactive dynamic. I remember my shock in picking up a book on leaders of the Confederacy and finding three Quakers indexed; “Impossible,” I muttered, until seeing in the text that all three had been raised in Quaker households but resided far from any meeting – and its corrective discipline – when the war erupted.

Try dressing Plain and adhering to Plain speech without a circle of Plain Friends at hand, and you’ll discover just how hard it is to continue even an outward practice. Maintaining a witness is no less difficult. Moreover, I find it’s hard to keep from being overwhelmed by the negative influences around us. Maybe part of the restorative answer is right in front of us all along – Society of Friends, plural.

Or in some other, similar circle.

NOT BY A LONG SHOT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A surgeon is more of an artist than an administrator.

There’s nothing to make me think he can lead a management team, much less a host of competing political and economic interests. Artists, after all, tend to act as soloists or move in small circles. An operating room remains a small stage or studio, all focused on one event, unlike the chaotic forces erupted in the Oval Office.

Before aspiring to the White House, could he show us how he’d function as a big city mayor? Or a small-state governor? Or even as a senator or congressman?

Let’s put this in context. An operating room is much, much smaller than the Pentagon. And the Pentagon’s only part of the Executive Branch.

Ben Carson’s not ready for prime time here. Not by a long shot. No matter how much we might like him.

By the way, his is the first — and the only — GOP bumper sticker we’ve seen on a New Hampshire car to date. This is turning into a first-in-the-nation presidential primary quite unlike any we’ve encountered before.

ANOTHER UNANTICIPATED TWIST ON THE PRIMARY FRONT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Only months ago, most of us assumed that the 2016 U.S. presidential contest was going to be a cut-and-dry Bush versus Clinton. My, how things have changed!

Most of the news focus since then has been on the crowd of right-wing and further-right Republicans jockeying for position as king of the hill, something that so far hasn’t turned into a new front-runner each week, unlike four years ago – but let’s not rule out the possibility if, or when, the Donald stumbles. So far they’ve all appeared to be untouched by the party’s turmoil in the House of Representatives, but a government shutdown could blow away their posturing rhetoric when it comes to real-life federal spending. Some intense and bloody drama may be about to explode on their political stage.

The Democratic side, meanwhile, has been relatively quiet, with Bernie Sanders steadily building enthusiasm as he stays mostly outside of the news spotlight. Many others, who fear he’s too far left to win national election, are now getting jittery over Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails controversy before committing to her campaign. How damaging are the charges, anyway? For them, the possibility of a Joe Biden run is tantalizing, especially as he is cast as a centrist candidate – and likable insurance for the party in light of the allegations or other troubles brewing for Hillary. As Stephen Colbert says, Everybody likes Joe.

The one other candidate who keeps generating excitement is freshman Senator Elizabeth Warren, but she has flat out nixed running this round. But don’t rule her out of the calculations. Just look at Damon Linker’s argument on today’s online edition of The Week: Anybody but Hillary: The case for Biden-Warren 2016. He makes a fascinating case.

At the moment it’s possible to view this as a political marriage made in heaven, especially if you consider recent meetings between the two. Any thoughts?