Tag: Life

As for fireworks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s start with a pitch I once considered using.

“Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and I’m a retired hippie. One of millions and, unlike many, I’m not embarrassed to admit it was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its potential. What is often overlooked is that the central element was the hippie chick. My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrates her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to a rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town. May I introduce you to the full story?”

Well, that attempt has now been woven into what stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Still, as I also proclaimed:

“In many of my novels, the hippie movement opened their minds. Or at least their horizons. Or even a few hearts. What’s most opened yours?”

That led to these points:

  • Crucial to the outcome were personal transformations that few today will speak of.
  • We’re still caught between two worlds (or) unfinished business. I wanted to present my work as letters from a retired hippie or letters to youth and a call to action.
  • I wanted to tell them I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we messed up.
  • And yet, it wasn’t all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.
  • Looking around, there are the old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.
  • It was a youth movement. What you need to know about its legacy is this.
  • Economics:. globalization and digitalization versus small-is-beautiful. As for the tax base? And the kleptomaniac One Percent? How about selling yourself into slavery?
  • Relationships: the restructuring of marriage and family (dare we consider ashrams and similar shared householding).
  • Environment and the earth: Global warming is a reality, despite years and millions of dollars expended in its denial.
  • Justice and equality. Dare I say more?
  • Alternative lifestyle. Think of clothing, the arts (Edge City), food, even basic skills such as use of a broom or hammer.
  • Drugs, alcohol, etc. Legalization is one thing, appropriate usage another. Jail is not the deciding point. Oppressive life situations, however, are.
  • Yup, the whole system of shaping our children.
  • I’m not going there today, other than to say deep readjustments are in order. I hope they get to the bottom rather than enrich the most elite of society.
  • Discipline and self-discipline. For me, that leads to the next.
  • Spirituality and religion. Personal experience of something divine and then holy community.

Now, back to those contributor’s notes possibilities:

  • As an unabashed political liberal, Jnana despairs for public sanity.
  • He knows nothing good can come from a politics of hate.
  • Jnana is a Lincoln Republican who votes Democrat by default.
  • I was UPROOTED, repeatedly. In location, relationship, my career, even faith.
  • The undertow or rip current, pulling me away. I expected to live in large cities, my life filled with opera and symphony performances. Instead, it’s been mostly small cities in rural conditions.
  • My life journey has had little resemblance to what I anticipated from college on. Repeatedly, it seemed I was uprooted – in location, career, relationship, and even spirit – just as I began to address a situation fully. Outwardly, the result has been fragmentary, unified only in the mind and heart that embrace its many facets.
  • In recent years, much of my experience of wandering and sojourn has constellated in an investigation of the metaphors of Light and Seed as they were expressed in the early Quaker movement. I now perceive a semblance between the Dharma bums of Asian religious practices and the vagabond ministry of itinerant Quaker ministers, and find comfort in their legacy, with its parallels to my own movements.
  • After throwing myself into business crusades and tumultuous relationships, I consider myself a survivor. I love classical music and opera, mountaintops and the North Atlantic, Quaker Meeting and New England contradancing.
  • For me, poetry is a state of mind. Its essential element is silence, linking it to sacred (An impossibility, of course, considering the nature of words. And yet!)

Or, to reconnect with Ezra Pound, literature is slow news, something allowing some breathing space and reflection, rather than the minute-by-minute confusion before us.

Which takes me back to Scripture, diving into antiquity for parallels to today.

Now, let’s sit back tonight for some gloriously fleeting pyrotechnics. Something that might inspire and awe almost everyone.

Happy Canada Day – and a nod to the Loyalists who fled from the American Revolution  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was growing up, we occasionally heard that not everyone in the American colonies supported the Revolutionary War, but we never, ever, got a clue of how many opponents there were or how strongly they resisted. Sometimes it went past as “a third.”

Living where I do, facing the border of New Brunswick, Canada, has been an eye-opening experience on that front.

In fact, a premiere historian of their support of the Crown was Lorenzo Sabine, a prominent figure in early Eastport and a business partner, briefly, of two of the sons of the man who first presided in our house. We’ll look at him in a Tendrils next week.

Today, in observation of Canada Day, we’ll focus on the United Empire Loyalists who were expelled from the new United States to the south. Or, where I live, it’s also east.

  1. An estimated 42,000 white settlers plus 3,500 free blacks and 2,000 enslaved blacks migrated to the remaining British North America holdings during and especially at the close of the Revolutionary War. They came from all 13 rebelling colonies, but principally from New York and New England. Many other expelled monarchists relocated to Florida, Britain, and the Caribbean.
  2. They came from every social class but often after enduring the confiscation of their property and wealth. Some did manage to dismantle their houses and erect them anew in Canada, as I learned in a neighborhood of Castine, Maine.
  3. Sir Guy Carleton – the 1st Lord Dorchester and governor of Quebec and governor general of the Canadas – created the identifying label to distinguish the English-speaking settlers from the descendants of New France inhabitants of the Province of Quebec, otherwise known as Canadians or Canadiens, possibly akin to Acadia.
  4. Growth resulting from the arrival led to the creation of new colonies. In 1784, New Brunswick was partitioned from Nova Scotia to reflect significant new settlement around the Bay of Fundy. In 1791, the Province of Quebec divided into Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), and Upper Canada (present-day Ontario).
  5. To encourage Loyalist resettlement, especially along the frontier of Upper Canada, the Crown awarded the new arrivals land grants of 200 acres a person. This added English speakers to the population and was followed by additional waves of immigration that established a predominantly Anglo-Canadian culture both west and east of the modern Quebec border.
  6. Loyalists in Upper Canada petitioned the government to be allowed to use the British legal system, which they were accustomed to in the American colonies, rather than the French system. Great Britain had maintained the French legal system and allowed freedom of religion after taking over the former French colony with the defeat of France in what we call the French and Indian War but is more widely known as the Seven Years’ War. Thus, most Loyalists in the west could live under British laws and institutions while the predominantly ethnic French population of Lower Canada, who were still French-speaking, could maintain their familiar French civil law and Roman Catholic religion. (I’m assuming that the residents of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick already functioned under the British system.)
  7. Thousands of Iroquois and other pro-British Indigenous peoples, expelled from New York and other states, resettled in Canada. One group established the Six Nations of the Grand River, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada.
  8. In laying out St. Andrews, eight miles from my home in Maine, Loyalists named the north-south streets after the 13 children of King George III. The major east-west streets include one named for Queen Charlotte and another as the Prince of Wales. The county is also named for Her Highness.
  9. Largely influenced by its Loyalist presence, Canada resisted U.S. overtures during the War of 1812 and successfully repulsed American invasion. From the Loyalist perspective, the War of 1812. Other parties viewed it as a mixed bag.
  10. Many Canadians take pride in their Loyalist ancestry. As In 1898, Henry Coyne wrote in 1898, “The Loyalists, to a considerable extent, were the very cream of the population of the Thirteen Colonies. They represented in very large measure the learning, the piety, the gentle birth, the wealth and good citizenship of the British race in America, as well its devotion to law and order, British institutions, and the unity of the Empire. This was the leaven they brought to Canada, which has leavened the entire Dominion of this day.”

George Washington, we may note, did not view them so favorably. As he remarked in a 1776 letter, “One or two have done what a great number ought to have done long ago, committed suicide. By all accounts, there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are. Taught to believe that the power of Great Britain was superior to all opposition, and, if not, that foreign aid was at hand, they were even higher and more insulting in their opposition than the regulars.”

Now, for tonight’s fireworks from an island on the other side of the international border.

Dealing a new deck, just for fun

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While awaiting the delivery of the windows for the front upstairs – once we had definitely decided on their size and placement – Adam turned to one of our optional side projects, redoing the back deck.

The ramp leading to it was becoming a safety hazard, and the existing deck was tiny and sinking.

The replacement and steps are a huge advance.

The windows arrived, and that put a hold on the bigger plan, for a lower deck on two sides below. It would be one way to keep Eastport’s red ants at bay when we’re dining outdoors, as well as less lawn to mow. Pluses on both counts, right?

Would Adam get back to it before the ground froze? We were facing a time crunch, and the interior was the priority, followed by the cedar shake siding.

~*~

Coincidentally, we found a mason who was able to get to repairing the top of our chimney – it really was in precarious shape – and touching up the exterior of our foundation. We wound up with a layer of supporting cover compound, too.

Our plumber had also installed three outdoor spigots and removed the one we previously had. It was leaking badly anyway and was on the side of the house where it was least useful.

Progress was taking place, just not always of the most noticeable sort.

Anyone else taking notes in an art gallery or museum?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’m not sure when the practice started in my own life, but somewhere it did.

Typically, in a first visit to an art museum, I’ll move along quickly to get a sense of the fuller collection. In the returns, however, I’ve become more inclined to sit down in front of a particular piece or even a full wall or room and then more fully immerse myself in particular pieces, usually while the rest of our party roves on. Yes, I’m with notebook in hand.

Those scribblings have led to poems, especially those in which Norman Rockwell and Gertrude Stein appear commenting, somewhat like poet Lew Welch’s Buddhist Red Monk who kept popping up at the bottom of the page. I’m not quite sure how they showed up, either, but there they are, as you’ll find in recent entries at my Thistle Finch editions blog.

Let me repeat that I’m generally averse to poems about poetry or celebrating poets or that somehow place artists of any stripe above the rest of humanity, ditto that for movie stars or professional athletes or billionaires or politicians. We do need our heroes, but I’m convinced that it’s healthy to keep their human frailties and shortcomings in perspective.

In that regard, I do believe we artists need to keep our vision beyond our studio door. Anything less strikes me as incest, even for an interdisciplinary addict like me. It’s why I refuse to respond to political pollsters. Go ask somebody on the street, OK?

Still, I made the central character in my Freakin’ Free Spirits novels a photographer. Even having him make a living by working at a newspaper was skirting my taboos.

~*~

The term “ekphrasis” defines poems that describe visual artworks though it can be applied more broadly. Sometimes the results are admirable, as exemplified in music by Gunther Schuller’s “Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee” or Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

~*~

Lately, I’ve become quite fond of the Alex Katz galleries at Colby College, not just because he almost collected a painting by my first wife. Rather, I sense something in the plainness of his depicted figures and where I’d like my own work to head. It’s stripping something down to essentials.

We’ll see.

~*~

For Rockwell and Stein, take a look at at Thistle Finch editions. For Freakin’ Free Spirits, look for the four novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They novels are also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

Where else can we jointly examine our deepest values and ideals?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Allow me to restate my argument that religion is important, along with a confession that in too many ways, at too many times, its proponents have betrayed its radical promise and its progressive direction, whatever their professed faith.

At its best, religion gives us individually and collectively a place to examine our hopes, dreams, and possibilities of a healthier, more justful, and more harmonious world. In short, moral and ethical guidelines. It can also provide the necessary foundation of community for pursuing and nurturing that goal.

Some of the sharpest critics of its practice at worst are prophets found in the Bible.

To see some examples of how that worked within the Quaker movement, visit my blog, As Light Is Sown.

Mackerel by the bucket

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yes, I’ve long known the explicative, “Holy mackerel!” but have never gone beyond that until moving to Eastport, where it’s commonly fished from the Breakwater pier. Previous postings here at the Barn reflect that.

That said.

  1. It’s a small fish (around here, less than a foot long), oily like salmon, and to my eyes quite pretty.
  2. For those casting with a rod and reel, it’s caught with four to six hooks on a line, on a good day all of them emerging from the water fully loaded.
  3. Much of the haul here is either thrown back, as sport, or kept as bait for lobsters, or eaten smoked, pickled, or cooked fresh. Otherwise, mackerel don’t keep long. They’re bony, FYI, so they need to be fileted expertly.
  4. Oily? They’re rich in healthy omega-3 fatty oils, a plus when it comes to cholesterol control. And, thanks to that oil, their beautiful scales do stick to the human touch. Oh, and the fish are low in dreaded mercury.
  5. They exist in many species around the globe and are high on the menu of larger fishes.
  6. They breed near the surface of the water, with a female releasing between 300,000 and a million-and-a-half eggs that float free in the open sea.
  7. Ours travel in dense schools, roiling the water above.
  8. They’re fun and easy to catch, from what I’ve seen, and a great target for young and new anglers. There is no size limit, harvest limit is 20 a day per person, no license required except in interior waters, however that’s defined.
  9. They’re related to tuna and bonito. (Now we’re talking.)
  10. There’s an art in the cast and in the jigging of the line while reeling it in.

Looking for the pearls

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), I often sensed the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing.

Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget I’m to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both the “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.” What exactly are those in my own experience?

We did revise the design while underway

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it was a good thing that we didn’t have too much detail in the CAD design we ordered from a local lumberyard. Initially, that was a miscommunication between our contractor and us, plus a looming deadline for a building permit.

The upshot was that as we watched the space open, our vision transformed. We saw new possibilities.

The first big one opted for cathedral ceilings in the four bedrooms. No big problem, said Adam.

Also, we wanted to leave the charred exterior rafters visible in the two back bedrooms. They were evidence of the 1886 downtown fire that started on the waterfront just below our house. They also reflect the original roofline, which we had now raised. And they were dramatic.

Alas, once we realized how labor-intensive (i.e., costly) keeping that touch visible would be, we opted to forgo it.

In another change, the windows in the bathroom and laundry room went from transom-style to narrow vertical.

The ceiling in the upstairs hallway was originally going to be flat, but we liked the feel of having it follow the roofline. Classy.

In the two front bedrooms, the width of the two side roofline panels was halved when we saw how much the original, aligned to the old dormers, really confined the rooms. The purpose of the panels was to keep a sense of the original profile of the house as seen from the street.  What we wound up with does the job.

Note the way the loft over the neighboring closet makes the ceiling look even airier. The slope of the original Cape roof doesn’t run bluntly into that wall.

After that, the windows in the front two bedrooms went from spaced apart to being placed together, centered between the two pairs of windows below.

And there were some big tweaks in closet arrangements between bedrooms. The two smaller bedrooms got larger closets while the two bigger bedrooms got open loft above those.

As I’ve said, none of the bedrooms wound up looking like rectangular boxes with holes for windows punched in.

We did encounter so many unanticipated details. Things like molding, the placement of light switches, even the door latches – you usually open them with your right hand, it turns out. I’d never thought about it. How about you?

~*~

Did we see things an architect wouldn’t? I like to think so.