SIGNS OF STATUS

August 12, 2015August 11, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I learned to backpack as a Boy Scout. Our troop was big on primitive camping using homemade trail tents.

When you successfully passed the requirements for the Second Class rank (twice – ours was a strict troop), you got to construct your own pack frame. When we went camping, you had everything tied tight to it – inside your sleeping bag, which was rolled into the trail tent.

When you were awarded the First Class rank, you were privileged to weave and stain a rectangular basket that was then bolted to the frame. Your sleeping bag would be rolled up in the tent and tied to the top of the basket, while the rest of your goods went into the basket itself – a much more convenient arrangement.

You couldn’t buy a backpack like that anywhere except, maybe, a very expensive outfitter’s.

What I learned along the way was equally priceless.

The pack on the cover of my poetry volume is a more traditional design, but it still stirs the memories.

~*~

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CANYONS OF DESIRE

August 3, 2015May 28, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Follow the rivers, then. Some lead into the mountains and form the “passes” to the high breaks in the crest line. Others lead out the other way.

You can also follow the currents of your passions.

~*~

Having come to the desert, we now know the fuller value of water. Something simple, essential. No one can live without it. The list of necessities is a short one; the possibilities of embellishment, endless.

There are rivers on every map you rely on. Sometimes when I walk out into the expanse, I encounter one. Sometimes, one deep enough to block my way. And then I turn to the page for a bridge.

Or, better yet, call out for my buddy, Kokopelli.

~*~

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NORTHWEST OASIS

July 27, 2015May 28, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Three hundred sunny days a year in a fertile land may seem like Paradise.

But it’s surrounded by desert. And every irrigated ribbon of orchards was a relief.

~*~

In rain on Mount Cleman, sage and conifers become cloud wisps treading updrafts. Black talus glistens. The mountain’s so quiet that what seemed important hardly matters any more. Boulders float past the relics of the lookout, elevation 4,884. Step away. Over the edge, where black scree cascades, the carbon rods and oxidizing metal loops and plates of electrical batteries from some previous decade are now scattered among elk and deer scats. On downed trees and furry branches, too. A battered coyote skull stares up between shellrock. The mountains gasp repeatedly in their wrinkled embrace of limbs stretching out from the forest. Cupping vistas of orchards and rivers, the desert yawns.

~*~

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OUT OF THE FLATLANDS AND ONTO THE SEA

July 22, 2015May 28, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Another blast from my past:

I spoke in Meeting about being a flatlander from a landlocked place and my ongoing fascination with the tides and moods of the ocean, leading into my first experience on a sailboat which was also my first experience out on the Atlantic and my first time of seeing a whale, which popped up in front of us.

I then mentioned another trip when my boss asked me to take the till and my surprise at feeling the wind pull the sailboat in one direction while the current tried to turn it in the opposite and how I was trying to steer to a compass point in-between – me, who would rather avoid conflict. On top of it all, it was a day when we could not see our destination, the Isle of Shoals, but had to trust our maps and calculations. Then, too, Peter’s girlfriend laughed, realizing my fear of having the boat be blown over. “Don’t worry,” she said. “If the boat tips that far, the sails will deflate and we’ll right again.” She paused before adding, “Besides, if there’s really a big gust, there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s how I lost my boat.”

As I spoke, I admitted the associations of wind to spirit (inspiration) and, as I’d now add, intellect, and of water to emotions and the unseen, while we are here in our own little vessels steering in the hope of an unseen destination.

Afterward, one Friend told me of the importance of finding that point of critical tension in our lives, where things can be accomplished. I now see this in contrast to the Tao, path of least resistance or way of falling water.

A second round of memories involves an ability to choose the right sail or combination of sails to fit the wind, as well as the lulls. The emerging harmony, too, between the winds and the waves, the lift and fall along the way.

RUNNING THROUGH CHEATGRASS

July 20, 2015July 20, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The grass grew tall in tawny tufts. One bunch here, another over there. Sometimes in the company of sagebrush.

~*~

Here a man will learn to pace himself more steadily. To watch for the rattlesnake, especially at river’s edge. To recalibrate his vision to the American Far West, where natural beauty assumes such spectacular proportions few notice the thinness at hand. The spider will teach all this. Clarity, like the desert itself, strips away to essentials. Sweeps away clutter. In what appears sparse, the man will gaze for episodes of miniature grace. Even elegance.

~*~

For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.

DESERT DANCES

July 13, 2015May 28, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Appealing to the heavens for rainfall was only one of the reasons for dancing. Your feet could pray as well as your hands in this landscape.

~*~

Somehow, the novice begins dancing, if only in his head. Something simple, at first, until familiarity gains ground. Feet, legs, torso, arms, and hands eventually follow. A reel leads into a jig. Thought and emotions balance. Head and heart dialogue. With confidence comes freedom. More and more, the aspirant concentrates on partners or the group or motion itself, rather than his own next step or position. The music becomes more textured, until the hornpipe stands as the liveliest structure. So it’s been in this landscape. This is not just any desert, for there’s nothing generic about any detail encountered closely. With both people and places you come to know dearly, you find nuances and subtle contradictions will blur any sharp image. It’s easier to describe someone or something you meet briefly than what you know intimately. To say desert is dry and sunny misses the point, especially if you arrive in winter. At first, like so many others, we didn’t even consider this valley as desert, for it has no camel caravans or mounds of shifting sands with Great Pyramids on the horizon. One word or phrase can be misleading. Even the Evil Stepmother from folklore and fairy tales must have possessed some redeeming qualities. Could we be more specific than “evil”? Simply selfish? Or was she mean, jealous, domineering, afraid of whatever, from the wrong party? Suppose she was really a victim of some deep abuse? The portrait changes. Has anyone detailed how she dances? In the end, it’s either entertainment or worship, depending on the individual’s orientation.

~*~

For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.

LILACS

May 17, 2015April 10, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

So when did this appreciation begin? When I lived in the orchard house, we had a big lilac bush at the corner of the yard – the one where the bees swarmed from the hive that one day.

But I think the real change happened that spring after my first marriage collapsed and I was finally in love again. I crowded the house with those cut blossoms and their fragrance. It’s enough to make me picture a blue silk kimono.

That was years ago, and many miles. Yet the lilacs are more precious than ever.

As I said at the time, when I lived in that last apartment, I vowed if I ever bought my own place, I’d get cuttings from a friend whose lilacs likely descended from the first ones brought to North America. Of course, I didn’t, and the owner has since moved into a retirement center.

Even so, these days, we have our own, screening the Smoking Garden from the street. One lilac had, in fact, grown as tall as the house – but hollow. It’s been work, restoring them to flowering condition.

Still, there’s nothing more luxurious than lilac cuttings arrayed in the bedroom, with their heavenly aroma.

So quickly, they pass.

INTO THE GREAT PLAINS

April 26, 2015February 24, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

To grow a leafy tree requires more than thirty inches of rainfall or its equivalent each year. If you drive west across the United States, you can cross an imaginary line that passes through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and beyond it deciduous, or leafy, trees are quite rare. Soon, so are conifers, the evergreens. Irrigation becomes a fact of life if you want to raise food or flowers or even a lawn.

The Great Plains eventually pass into desert – and you might be surprised to discover that most of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington state is actually desert. The rainy belt is little more than a thin band along the Pacific-facing side of the Cascade and Olympic mountains.

Quite simply, it’s a different world from the one most Americans know.

~*~

As for the Great Plains, let me recommend Kathleen Norris’ Dakota. It’s a unique and marvelous book.

LEONARD SPRINGS: WHAT’S HIDDEN UNDERFOOT

March 16, 2015February 24, 2015 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One set of my poems of return, discovery, and loss is centered on the Leonard Springs which were hidden a half-dozen miles from the university I attended in my first sustained leap from my native Ohio.

On my return, we lived at the edge of town rather than on campus, and the springs were in a ravine just over the edge of our view from the kitchen. Few knew of their existence. Now, as I find online, they’re a public park and treasure.

~*~

Much of southern Indiana sits atop a thick limestone bed, some of it quarried for the construction of large-scale buildings worldwide. Over the ages, the bedrock has been riddled as slightly acidic water chiseled passageways and cave systems below the ground surface. Learn to read the landscape with this awareness and you come to recognize the widespread karst features, including sinkholes where cavern roofs have collapsed – some could easily hide a large truck or even a barn. There are also the sinking streams that vanish back into the earth as well as open mouths concealed in fields and forests that would swallow an unwary trespasser. So this hardness is laced with underground mystery and motion.

I already possessed some familiarity with this terrain from childhood camping and hiking trips, and had even crawled through some small caves in nearby state parks. Commercial caverns had also instilled an awareness of the otherworldly character of underground chambers and passageways. But this time, as I now lived off-campus on Leonard Springs Road, far to the other side of town, I was newly married and free to explore. After residing and laboring in the foothills of Upstate New York, the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the flats of what had once been the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, I had come back to Bloomington as a research associate. This sojourn would be all too short – a little more than a year and a half, though not by design – but long enough to acquaint me with the hardscrabble backcountry and its peculiar character.

Our garden sat in one sinkhole, and our waste water probably flowed into another (there’s no accounting for our landlord’s septic system). While I’m not a caver (as many spelunkers prefer to be called), I did become intrigued by the meandering channels beneath the meadows and woodlands beyond our house. From what Roger Pfingston writes more recently of his neighborhood on Stouts Creek, a similar locale a few miles to the north, I can suspect that much of the Leonard Springs terrain has since been ripped up and developed into housing.

What I leave, then, are field notes of the layering I experienced then, and a testimony. The poems in Green Repose present these. For your own copy, click here.

FAREWELL TO THE SWITCHBOARD

March 13, 2015June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the office, we had the farewell to the switchboard operator who’d been replaced by the new phone system – someone who had been there when I arrived two decades earlier.

Oh, the weird calls we’d get, the ones she usually screened yet some still managed to slip past her.

The woman from California, “Can you tell me what state New Hampshire’s in?” and I wanted to reply, “How the hell did you get this number?”

All of the ones wanting to know my opinion, as if it mattered.

Or the drunks or the individuals convinced of this conspiracy or that. Especially late at night.

As the publisher told one, “What do you think this is, a call-in radio show?”

Listen. We’ve got work to do, rather than yap. Piles and piles of work.

~*~

Oh, my, the telephones! They become a chorus of their own in my novel, Hometown News.