Tag: Life

Have you ever got stuck playing with rubber stamps?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My hand these days may not be as reliable for sketching or painting as it once was, but my eyes are still alert. In our downsizing on our remote island in Maine, as I chanced upon our collected rubber stamps and inks, I started playing. Add to that some related artistry.

Do take a look for the results at my free digital bookstore, Thistle Finch editions.

The albums are Inked. Stamped, Pressed, Visual Twists, and Shore Things (collages arising from beachcombing findings).

You might even what to download and print some of the images. I humbly think they’re great.

 

Mention ‘The County’ in Maine, and everyone knows what you mean

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Pine Tree State has 16 counties, but only one is recognized as The County, a place also known as “the crown of Maine” or even the most northeastern point of the USA.

It’s Aroostook County, set right along the border with Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada, with a population of 67,000 people and who knows how many moose.

It’s also the largest county by landmass east of the Mississippi, though

St. Louis County, Minnesota, is larger though much of it is waters of Lake Superior. With more than 6,800 square miles, Aroostook is larger than the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.

Now, for ten more considerations.

  1. It’s famed for potatoes, which are being harvested about now. In the 1940s Maine topped the nation in potato production but by 1994 had fallen to the eighth-place in production and the seventh in the number of acres devoted to potato cultivation in the United States. In 2024, Maine grew 54,000 acres of potatoes (behind Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Colorado, and Michigan) and nearly 90 percent of that was in Aroostook County. Potatoes are still far and away the state’s largest (legal) crop.
  2. When the county was created in 1839, border conflicts with Canada threatened to erupt into the “Aroostook War,” explaining the town names of Fort Kent and Fort Fairfield.
  3. It’s hard to spell, but not nearly as much as the Wolastokwey (or Maliseet) language that originated it. It means “beautiful river” and refers to the St. John River. The Maliseet, still present in the county, are affiliated with the Wabanaki Alliance that includes the Mi’kmaq, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy tribes.
  4. The county was a stop on the Underground Railroad carrying fugitive slaves to freedom in Canada. The secret network carried freedom seekers from ports around Bangor to wilderness waterways, where Natives canoed them to havens like the Quaker community in Fort Fairfield, one of the last safe places before reaching Canada.
  5. During the Cold War, Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, vital because of its location close to Europe, had a major impact on the county’s economy. Its closure in 1994 is still deeply felt.
  6. The county is becoming a major producer of wind power.
  7. Many people in the northern part of the county speak both English and Acadian French (which is different from Quebecois).
  8. As the agricultural activity changes, Amish are moving in and establishing communities. Somehow, the county does feel a lot like Pennsylvania to me, so it seems fitting to see horse-drawn carriages (they don’t call them buggies) on the roads, dark blue and green laundry on the lines outside plain farmhouses, and lively one-room schoolhouses as you drive through.
  9. Much of the county is forest, including a significant moose population. Drivers, beware.
  10. A stretch along U.S. 1 presents the measured-to-scale solar system. Created with high school and college students plus adult volunteers, it really is mind-boggling. The results can be viewed in the October 2023 archives of this blog, should you wish to explore more.

 

Bodies of water attract us, naturally

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Walking along rivers, lakes, and ocean shores seems to have healing powers for the soul. Just consider.

  1. “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” — Loren Eiseley
  2. “Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.” — Charles Kuralt
  3. “To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.” — Barry Lopez
  4. “The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.” — Zhuangzi
  5. “Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.” — Herman Hesse
  6. “I’m an old-fashioned guy… I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.” — Johnny Depp
  7. “When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
  8. “There’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.” — Sarah Kay
  9. “Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.” — Zora Neale Hurston
  10. “Despite the ferocity of the current, a river is always moving but it’s always in the same place. And much like a river, while we should surge forward with great ferocity, our principles should never move.” — Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

Let’s catch up on recent releases

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My weekly offerings at my free digital bookstore, Thistle Finch editions, include some remarkable new entries gleaned from our ongoing journals review.

There’s the Chronicle, Antiques Dealer, profiling a woman who saw deeply into the landscape she adopted. I do miss her.

Another Chronicle, Shakers and Me, has me now reflecting on a late friend who had held extensive conversations with Eldress Bertha, one of the last Shakers; I urged him to set the exchanges down on paper, to no avail. Yet a few he mentioned still echo. What I present here could be a prelude.

Still another Chronicle, On the Rock Wall, underpins the petroglyphs and petrographs I would later see firsthand in the Pacific Northwest.

I am fond of Scenes From a Life, prose sketches of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

And then there’s Sue’s Bread Recipe. Yes, learning to bake loaves was one of my lessons in the yoga ashram, one that led to hundreds or maybe thousands later. Here’s what Little Sue introduced to me.

If that weren’t enough, there are the poetry broadsides Within a Bigger Order, Kansas and Kyoto, and Bronx to Brooklyn (about someone I’d still love to talk to once more).

Put them together and I think you’d have a great magazine. Well, I am open to letters to the editor.

 

Here’s looking at glass

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know, we usually take it for granted.

Here are some thoughts. Or should I say reflections?

  1. Usually you look through it, unless it’s dirty. You know, a pane of glass.
  2. I don’t know about you, but I find washing windows to be a pain.
  3. It can also be something you drink from. Or a quantity. (“I’ll take a glass of milk, please.”)
  4. Or something to boost your vision. (“Now where are my glasses?”)
  5. It can have very sharp edges, sometimes used in tools or instruments.
  6. Traditionally, it’s made from silicon dioxide (SO2), a common constituent of sand and coming from quartz flakes. Because of the high temperatures required to work with pure silica, most glass is made with additives that lower the required heating levels and allow for different varieties of glass, soda-lime being the most common. Borosilicate gives Pyrex, and lead glass being the most brilliant and having a lower melting point.
  7. Contrary to a widespread thought, it is not a solid liquid but rather an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid, allowing it transparency. In addition, it’s chemically inert, which is why it’s so wonderful for bottles and jars.
  8. Fiberglass is stronger than many metals by weight, non-magnetic, non-conductive, can be molded into complex shapes, and is generally chemically inert. Its applications include aircraft, boats, automobiles, bathtubs and enclosures, hot tubs, swimming pools, septic tanks, water tanks, roofing, pipes, cladding, surfboards, and orthopedic casts. It could easily be a Tendrils of its own.
  9. Spun glass is probably best known as insulation, while its use as fiber-optics cable is touted as superior to traditional copper wiring.
  10. The oldest known glass objects are beads, perhaps originating as an accidental byproduct of metalworking or lead glazes for pottery.

Technological advances in glassmaking could furnish a Tendril on its own, but let’s not overlook the fact that one of the most recent gives us the tough glass that’s on the screen of the laptop or smart phone where you’re likely reading this.

 

Along with a sunny apple ranch

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya contain many details from my Yakima Valley years, the experience also prompted a proliferation of poetry.

Works available as free PDF downloads at my Thistle Finch editions site include the poetry broadsides Whistling Jack (a common name for a high-country marmot) and Just Like That (regarding elk) as well as the poetry chapbooks Grilled Salmon, Sagebrush Diamond Hitch, Turquoise & Silver, and Universal Range.

The orchards, mountains, forests, rivers, and Pacific currents all astonished my Midwestern sensibilities.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.

There was an old farmer who lived in Maine

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Actually, there are a lot of them. A recent Census of Agriculture found that of Maine’s 13,053 farmers, half are over the age of 57½. Not only that, but there are more farmers over 75 than under 35. Do we see a shortage coming soon?

Now, for ten more tidbits.

  1. Four-fifths of the farms are family owned-and-operated. Corporations account for less than a tenth, 677 farms, while another 474 are partnerships.
  2. A bit over two-fifths of the respondents said farming is their primary occupation. The majority of the farmers rely on other jobs or other income.
  3. Women farmers comprise 43 percent of the workforce, 5,638.
  4. As the Census observed, “Male producers had higher rates of involvement in land use and/or crop, livestock, and marketing decisions than female producers. Female producers were most involved in day-to-day, record keeping and financial management decisions.”
  5. USDA-certified organic farms = 412.
  6. Black farmers: 132 operating 2,238 acres.
  7. New and beginning producers = 4,681.
  8. Renewable energy-producing systems in use = 907 farms.
  9. The state leads the nation in wild blueberry production and ranks second for maple syrup, but potatoes lead the way as the largest crop. Other leading agricultural products potatoes, milk and other dairy products, chicken eggs, and floriculture.
  10. Of special interest to Washington County, where I live, was the Maine harvest of 24,735 acres of blueberries on 703 farms in 2022, an increase from 20,473 acres five years earlier.

 

If only I had owned a digital camera back then

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In revising my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, I created several lookbooks slash storyboards from images found online to sharpen details in some of the passages. It’s a great writer’s hack, by the way. You pick up bits you overlook at the scene.

I do wish I had my own photographs from the decade of journals we’re sampling, but often I had no camera, much less training in how to use anything except the simplest point-and-shoot.. I did, however, work with some of the best photojournalists and knew some outstanding fine arts photographers as well. It would have been wonderful to work with them on these posts, but time has intervened. Well, I still have memories, faded as many are. And with a camera, I wouldn’t have worked so devotedly on writing, no doubt. There’s only so much time in a day, even without a paying job to attend to.

For a sense of my visual encounters in the Pacific Northwest, take a look at these free PDF albums at my Thistle Finch editions site: Apple Crates, Glorious Mount Adams, Know Your Salmon, Reflecting the Coast, Unexpected Northwest, and Yakama Beadwork.

Not that I haven’t attempted to re-create that world in immortal words.

Pick one or pick these booklets for your armchair travel.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.

On hits and misses as a writer

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here are ten more confessions on being a published author.

  1. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
  2. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” ― Stephen King
  3. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” – Jules Renard
  4. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” – Ken Follett
  5. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” – Harper Lee
  6. “One of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less … My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there … One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
  7. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.” – Isaac Asimov
  8. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” – Jennifer Salaiz
  9. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath
  10. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” – James Lee Burke