Tag: Life

Down to Copley Square and the finish line

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There’s something wonderfully small-town about Boston, despite all of its world-class amenities. For those of us who love professional sports, classical music, museums of all stripes, theater and ballet, lectures and the like, there’s far more to do than time will ever permit.

But the scale, especially with all of its smaller cities and towns clustered in close at hand, can be wonderfully human. Or think of Fenway, one of Major League Baseball’s smallest parks, and its oldest.

Nowhere have I seen this balance more acutely than in the Boston Marathon.

The first inkling I had was one April Monday when I was driving along 128, the semicircular freeway around the city. With all of its high-tech business headquarters, it’s often called Silicon Valley East. Approaching one overpass, I noticed the side of the highway was thick with (illegally) parked cars, almost as if there’d been an accident. But then I saw the overpass itself was crowded with people. Only when I turned on the radio for the every-10-minute traffic report did I discover this was where the race route crossed on the way toward Copley Square. The station, by the way, was almost exclusively marathon coverage.

Nor was it alone.

The city’s television stations also provided continuous coverage, from 9 a.m. or so at the start in Hopkinton through the awards at 5 p.m. on Copley Square in the Back Bay. Live cameras broadcast from trucks in front of the lead runners and wheelchair contestants, as well as reporters and cameras all along the 26-mile route. The technical planning and execution of such coverage must be incredible.

While the event has more than 20,000 registered participants and 500,000 spectators each year, you’re still likely to know someone or more who have run in it. In fact, if they’ve qualified, you can follow their progress and times online. That’s another incredible aspect, to my eyes. And then there are all of those who jump in afterward, no need to register — you just get to say you’ve run the marathon.

To share in that joy and community spirit combined with the determined efforts of each of the runners is inspiring, even before we add the outdoors release from New England’s long winter. This is what the evil scheming behind yesterday’s bombing targeted. If the perpetrators thought they were somehow reenacting the Shot Heard ‘Round the World that the Patriots’ Day event commemorates, they have it backwards. We celebrate the resolve and victory of the people over tyranny and fear.

While officials are remaining tight-lipped about what’s happened, we’re getting our news from those we know, even when we live more than an hour away from the action. We’re relieved to hear our daughter’s safe and that a friend crossed the finish line hours earlier, but we’re also troubled by the words coming second-hand from the emergency rooms. We’ll learn more in conversations in the weeks ahead. In the small-town character of Boston, these things hit home, one way or another.

With determination, then, here’s looking ahead to the 118th annual marathon running April 21, 2014, God willing.

SEASONS OF THE SPIRIT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

To perceive a spiritual journey as Seasons of the Spirit acknowledges how much of it is out of our own hands, like the weather. We yield to the Spirit and are guided by it, to the extent we are faithful. “Which Spirit is thee speaking of?” I hear echoing, a memory of elder Mary Hawkins of rural Ohio before she counseled me of other spirits, such as anger and jealousy and so on. For the record, then, this is what I now call the Spirit of Christ – specifically, the Light and Life addressed in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. You may define your encounters as you may. My interest here is with an experienced connection with the Divine and a heightened awareness of its manifestations among us.

While everyone talks about the weather, few openly discuss religion. Too often, those who do raise the subject seem unwilling to listen, at least openly, and their arguments are cast along the lines of dogma or creed. Again, my focus is not on what we have been taught about faith, but what we can say about its workings in our own lives. When we can get past the formulaic responses, a discussion of religious experience allows us to search some of the deepest desires and fears of human existence. It can also unleash extraordinary social reform, as we might see looking through history, or be constrained to do the precise opposite.

 *   *   *

To speak of Spirit in this manner requires us to search for the ways it becomes embodied in our lives and our world. That is, how it takes flesh. What is abstract reveals itself in concrete decisions and actions, as well as thoughts and emotions.

A LIVELY CAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

One of our favorite TV comedies has been Little Mosque on the Prairie, a Canadian series about a small, struggling Muslim community the fictional prairie town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. I’ll let those of you in other faith traditions weigh in on the parallels, but I suspect you’ll find each of the show’s characters already existing in your own congregation.

You’ll also see many of the same dividing lines and tensions. Traditionalists versus modernists, for instance, or those bred to the faith versus converts. There are even the basic questions of identity and self-identity or motivation and discipline.

As I look at my own Quaker circles, I sometimes see a line between those drawn to the hour of worship itself and those drawn to the peace-and-justice witness, such as gender and racial equality, global non-violence and fair trade, prison reform, environmental concerns, and the like. Sometimes the difference shows up most sharply in the announcements that come at the end of our period of silence – those who want to leave quietly, savoring the calm, and those who instead urge us to attend all kinds of lectures, discussions, demonstrations, fundraisers, and other gatherings in the coming weeks.

Sometimes the lines even cross.

THOSE LIVE BROADCASTS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A confession: I’m one of those rare aficionados of radio, rather than television. It’s not radio in general, however: rather, it’s for classical music, essentially, along with jazz and folk music and, these days, Boston professional sports coverage.

At its best, there’s an intimacy – the host speaks directly to you, in your home or car or, during the summer, as I sit outdoors in the shade. There’s a sharing of good taste, too: here’s a new recording, a composer you ought to know, a fresh performer.

Unfortunately, ever since the Federal Communications Commission changed the ownership rules to allow a few companies to monopolize all the commercial stations, the overall variety and vitality of the airwaves has plummeted. Apart from athletics events, there’s little live coverage, especially at the local or regional level. As for the call-in programs, I’m left yearning for civility and balance. Please!

What survives as radio done well happens on the noncommercial stations. I’m fortunate to be within range of one that makes a special effort to present live concerts, including the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops as they happen on Saturday nights from fall into spring and their Tanglewood performances Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through the summer – plus groups that come to play at the station itself or live recordings from concerts throughout New England. The extra touches, too, are important: interviews with the performers, delving into the archives for historic recordings, or news of upcoming events. I love the quirkiness of their late-night host, as well as his comments on the changing weather.

Likewise, the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts have undergone a remarkable transformation. As one who began listening when the legendary Milton Cross was host, I find the Margaret Juntwait and Ira Siff announcing booth team an exciting – and often unpredictable – leap forward, along with all the live backstage links during the intermissions. As you could say, it’s Good Radio.

Now, if I could only get the truly eccentric Harvard station to come in on the air – we’re just out of range.

THERE’S A REASON IT’S CALLED WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Perfection: the goal. The end of craft. The essence, completely uncovered. Yet writing is never perfect. Can never be. Not even in its own era, its own place, its own vernacular. So we’re working within a field of potentialities, choosing one aspect over another. Liquids at play. The words themselves will change over time. Energy fields. Northern lights. Sunsets. The mind and flesh, mixing.

Consider a square grid sheet neatly intersected, and then place yourself at the center, where the four quadrants intersect. Take the horizontal line and name it for one continuum, say “highly emotional” at one end and “completely rational” at the other. Now take the vertical line and apply another continuum, say “public” at one end and “private” at the other. As if we could actually measure any such qualities and then scale them on the grid. (We could even consider this as a color field, with white/black as one dimension and red/green or blue/orange as the other.) We could even consider this as a kind of Chinese checkerboard, but stepping outward. The point is, you have to move: to stay at the center produces a muddy gray: nothing unique emerges. The fulcrum remains static and lifeless. As one proceeds away from the center, a kind of balloon or blob may appear on the grid: you’re working somewhere between selflessly emotional and rational, for instance. Or maybe it’s highly focused. In an art – and possibly other areas of life – I see the goal being to move out to an arc from the ends of the horizontal and vertical axis lines – somewhere along an optimal and growing frontier of two qualities. Beyond that, however, destruction awaits. An orchestral conductor, for instance, can emphasize a work’s inner rhythms or its singing lines – or, more likely, arrive at some combination – while counterpoising them with architectural structure or emotional outpouring. The choices determine whether the result is an orthodox repetition of familiar security or an insightful and exciting (and even disturbing) revelation.

So there’s the question of when to stop, on a given piece. When we’ve depleted ourselves. Or when we’ve moved on. Or when it’s more or less accomplished what we set out to do – the less ambitious works having more prospects for success than do those that attempt to soar closest to the sun. Or when the piece moves off into the marketplace, one way or another. Or when we die or grow infirm. Or when we realize we’ve completely missed the mark.

My focus here is primarily on poetry and fiction, although the concepts can be readily expanded outward through all of the arts and probably into a number of other fields as well.

MUG, MORE THAN A CUP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Seems I’ve always been a coffee lover, as far back as those “coffee milks” our Gran used to serve my sister and me on Sunday afternoons. Maybe that’s why I still prefer mine café au lait – half milk heated with a liberal dose of sugar or sweetener.

For decades now, my days have begun with a round of hot coffee, often abed – yes, how blessed I was after remarrying, when my wife would appear with the perfect mug when I needed to awaken. And how much I lament how that ceased, in part because the office rejuggled my schedule, meaning she never knew quite when I would be rousing.

For someone in a faith tradition that eschews rituals, I have to admit where they really appear – and be willing to acknowledge anything that’s an addiction, as well. (Remind me to take a coffee fast in the next year, OK?) Yes, maybe the editors of one poetry journal had it right when they admitted they were devotees of the Goddess Caffeina. (Oh, she has temples everywhere.)

More recently I’ve begun to question whether it’s really the coffee itself I like. That is, I can drink it black. And, yes, I also demand dark coffee – the darker, the better. I even like Starbucks, though that has nothing to do with my years in the Nevergreen State. (Remember, I lived in the desert side of Washington state.) No, I realize when the mug’s turned cold, my beverage tastes a lot like the cartons of chocolate milk we used to purchase in the elementary school vending machine – the ones that cost us a nickel. So maybe it’s that chocolate underpinning that grabs me.

Is it possible that even at six-foot-two, the chocolate stunted my growth? We can’t blame the coffee, now, can we?

THE SHRINKING PAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

l look down on the newspaper page and think how narrow it’s become – about half of the width of the pages I designed at the beginning of my career. The broadsheets of today are about the width of tabloids back when.

It’s all cost-saving measures, of course. Like the shrinking candy bar. Yes, I remember when the joke circulated, “It’s hard to find a nickel candy bar for a quarter these days.” Ditto, for the cola.

So we keep hearing the economists warning about inflation. Not a word, you notice, about the corresponding deflation of the product itself.

ON THE PICKET LINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time, carrying a picket sign, after all those years as a professional journalist, crossed a barrier. We don’t take sides, in public, so what does one do in a labor impasse? I realized this is what my younger stepdaughter, the political activist, called a “viz,” for visibility event, and that we could add more posters to our sticks, to create a “totem pole.” I also recalled a Friend, speaking of driving along and seeing a vigil and then stopping and opening his car trunk for the sign he always carries, just so he’d always be ready to join in anywhere. There was something liberating in this, even if it was an “informational picket” rather than a straight-out strike line.

Now, having retired from the profession, I sense another opening. A return to an earlier calling. My entering journalism, as a public witness and service, is restored to its original prompting of advocacy and reform, before it was confined by corporate media – the very bottom-line organizations right-wing critics overlook when they accuse “liberal media” of, well, reporting both sides. Maybe I’ll become a Quaker agitator, after all. (As the retiree activist, I might say: Thank you, Megan. And Iris. Especially.)

EPHEMERALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Much of the delight in life comes as surprises, especially when you’re paying attention. Moreover, they’re often of a very short time, a fleeting breath. Even when you’re anticipating an event, a certain unpredictability remains. You might be watching the sinking sun along with a bank of clouds, for instance, but a slight shift in conditions can spell the difference between a spectacular sunset and a dull glow in a woolly pile. And that glorious sunset, when it arises, changes second by second before dimming within five minutes.

The same can be said of family life or even a party or artistic endeavor. Much of the time, though, we’re too engaged in other matters to revel in the brief thrills. We need a bit of openness — what some call margins — in our daily activities to allow for such curiosity and wonder.

After the long, slow months of winter where I live, signs of quickening are appearing. In the early morning, the male cardinals, who have been singing defiantly from mid-January, now erupt with an insistent joyfulness, inciting other birds to join in, with hints of what’s just ahead. I haven’t been out in the woods after dusk, but any day now, the peepers will begin their sparkling chorus in their vernal ponds — the pools that will shrink to nothing by midsummer.

In our own yard, the first of the spring ephemerals (how I love that word, as well as the phrase “vernal pond” — they’re such fun on the tongue!) are now blooming, however timidly, even though most of the yard’s still covered in six inches of snow or more. (And rapidly melting.) I could present a checklist of what I expect will follow, but there are no promises — winter takes its toll, after all.

For me, this has been the first winter in a long, long time in which I can admit to suffering cabin fever. I’d have to go back to my “sabbatical” of writing more than a quarter century ago, or the ashram a decade-and-a-half before that, to find a stretch in which I didn’t have the demands of an office away from home weighing upon me. That is, requiring me to leave the house daily for hours on end. Admittedly, this winter hasn’t been completely job-free: November and December were still quite busy on that front. But the New Year turned toward retirement and new focus. What I’m experiencing is not boredom — far from it. I’ve had a full plate of writing and reading, for one thing, and I’ve enjoyed more evening and weekend social activities than I’d been able to attend in, well, it seems like forever. Rather, this strain of cabin fever feels like a time of recharging, getting ready to burst forth with the warming weather, in any number of surprising ways, if I’m lucky. So you see, this affliction is actually a kind of luxury. For now.

SUMP PUMP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

I’ve learned to listen whenever we get heavy rain. Check to see that the jerry-rigged sump pump is still upright and its line’s not clogged.

Yes, indeed: too much rain, and the sump pump kicks in. Or else the cellar floods, along with the furnace.

It’s all a matter of perspective.