Tag: Musings

FASTER! FASTER?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I hope nobody’s getting whiplash from the wide variety of my recent Red Barn postings. Much of it I’d scheduled ahead, anticipating the usual rhythm of the seasons. And then the book-length publications jumped in, along with a few other surprises.

As we bounce from one category to another, I’m feeling like somebody’s turned up the speed on a merry-go-round. Way up. As you might sense, life’s been getting chaotic around here. More than usual, that is.

But as I’ve been hearing from others, that’s not unique. Seems May, especially, has everybody on the run while much of the winter cycle wraps up and summer events start to kick in.

And we thought it was a long winter? Maybe (and I hope this isn’t too heretic) it wasn’t long enough?

Oh, and now I’m thinking of all those house painting projects still ahead. The ones I can’t put off any longer.

RETURNING TO THE MONET WINDOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The window I long viewed from my seat on the facing bench in the meetinghouse may also be regarded as an icon or mandala – a piece of art to facilitate the practice of spiritual focus and release. As an image used to settle a person into meditation, the window is hardly static. I’d settle in and close my eyes, as usual. At some point, though, I’d open them, softly, gaze around the room and then the window. Where is my heart today, truly? Where are my emotions? Let my thoughts still, for now. One looks out, to look within.

I recall another Friend, Randy Kezar, who once proposed photographing the view from another window in the room. His concept was to shoot the same scene from the same spot, at the same hour every Sunday for a full year. The record would show the small wooded slope blooming and in fullness, autumn color, snowfall and melting. Sunny days and rain. Glimpses of the city cemetery beyond.

On most Sundays after that, I would ask myself which artist best related to the scene framed before me. It turned out to be quite a collection.

And then there was that one April morning when I realized the visual quality of the air itself had changed. We’d crossed out of winter and into the light that accompanies summer. In the coffee hour afterward, a former TV producer told me of the ways his cameraman had to have the film adjusted to accommodate for this change every spring and again every autumn.

Just as telling was that one morning in May when I was struck by the hues of green and blue in the window and saw what resembled a Monet painting. While this was not a reference many of the earlier Friends in the room would have acknowledged or accepted, it definitely was one I could … along with most of the others present that day. The view in that color continued for three weeks but has never returned quite the same.

If I watch my own window hoping for a return of the Monet experience, I can too easily miss what’s present.

ESSENTIAL HELPERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Asked what I consider the most essential tool for the yard and garden, I’d answer “my wheelbarrow.” A six-cubic foot wheelbarrow. Even more than my heavy-duty loppers.

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It’s not just because we have gardens on either side of the house, either. I use it to move newly delivered firewood as well as shrubbery cuttings. Compost. Harvests. As well as trash. Building and filling the raised beds for square-foot gardening. Spreading seaweed and mulch. The list goes on. And on.

It even serves as a platform for working. Or, in the past, for giving the kids rides.

GOOD TOOLS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Seeing a yuppie neighbor tackle another home project was always amusing. You could tell by the shiny new brand-name tools in the driveway. Always the he-man approved brands, at that. All for a 15-minute or half-hour job.

What a contrast to the beat-up weapons used by the professionals I knew! Or even the more skilled neighbors.

Pay attention and you can find a lot of good stuff at yard sales, including aluminum ladders and fold-down sawhorses.

But sometimes, it just pays to pay more for quality. My favorite garden spade demonstrates this perfectly. Purchased at a local greenhouse-and-nursery, the metal from the tines extends up and around the shaft, rather than being jammed into its end. There’s no separation while forking, unlike the cheaper models, the ones we still have but rarely use. No, those are just too frustrating. I’m sticking with my better designed favorite.

Here's my favorite. The forks are cast as a single piece with the sleeve that fits over the handle.
Here’s my favorite. The forks are cast as a single piece with the sleeve that fits over the handle.
In the less expensive model, the forks are jammed straight into the handle. Over time, however, they pull out while you're using them, leaving you frustrated and saying things you shouldn't.
In the less expensive model, the forks are jammed straight into the handle. Over time, however, they pull out while you’re using them, leaving you frustrated and saying things you shouldn’t.

 

 

HIERARCHY OF WEEDS

~ Jnana Hodson

There’s an abundance of stealth maples, of course. Should we want the yard to revert to maple forest, we’d leave them untouched. Otherwise, they’ll overrun – and overshadow – everything we intend to garden. This is New England. Our yard has too little open, full sunlight as it is. Just ask my wife.

Each spring, we get thousands of these maple sprouts as they race to establish themselves around our yard and garden. Often, they pop up in the middle of plants you want, where they like to hide until it's too late, so eradicating the maples early is essential.
Each spring, we get thousands of these maple sprouts as they race to establish themselves around our yard and garden. Often, they pop up in the middle of plants you want, where they like to hide until it’s too late, so eradicating the maples early is essential.

Unless one is a truly dedicated weeder, a triage sets in: aim at the most damaging species and go after it, rather than everything at once. Thus, the maple seedlings, before they establish deep roots that are impossible to pull up. Or concentrate on specific beds each year: the asparagus and ferns, for instance.

There’s a list of common invasive species. We have them all.

Others that are welcome, within limit: honeysuckle, on the cyclone fence; mint, at the back, for mojitos and iced tea. Maybe even poison ivy, tolerated to ward off pedestrians or to establish boundary.

Dandelions (tooth of the lion) are no longer a weed now but daily greens for our rabbits and our own table, at least at the beginning of the season. After that requires vigilance.

The wild rose hips are becoming another matter altogether.

WHEN LEADERSHIP GOES WRONG

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Leadership is a fascinating subject, not just the source of many intriguing biographies but also corporate case studies and political histories and military campaigns and religious movements and … well, feel free to add to the list. We’ve all been in places where we’ve worked with admirable leaders, as well as places where we’ve suffered – perhaps even leaving in despair.

Outstanding leadership is, of course, a rare and wonderful occurrence. Mediocre is, by definition, the norm. And then there’s the kind that worms itself into position and sets about doing destruction.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting (again) on the last one. Not just inept, but destructive. I can work around one, but the other one makes for an impossible situation. Think Moby Dick.

It doesn’t always start off as badly as I’ve portrayed. Sometimes the individual begins gangbusters, doing everything right, before something goes seriously wrong. The person may simply burn out or lose interest. Conditions may change, so that the fit no longer works to the organization’s advantage. (Corporate organizational consultants have elaborate charts of the qualities needed for a startup versus a maturing company, or one shifting from private ownership to a public stock offering or the reverse.) Sometimes the person is fine for when everything’s going smoothly but has no ability to adjust for necessary – and often painful – restructuring, especially when layoffs and shutdowns are involved. Or there may be a buried demon that is let loose somewhere along the way, perhaps triggered by a divorce or death or temptations such as greed or power-hunger or sheer arrogance or flawed leadership techniques such as bullying and abuse or deep-seated insecurity or an untamed ego or, well, again the list goes on. Feel free to add or amplify. This, too, is a source for many great works of literature, operas, plays, and movies. The dark side comes forth.

My big question is whether an organization reacts in time to save itself, and what steps can be taken before it’s too late.

One of the first signs of trouble is the departure of key personnel, often lower-level individuals on the front line – or at least a failure to hear their complaints without retaliation. Sometimes it’s flight at some of the highest levels. After all, their jobs are at stake.

Usually, however, the awareness comes later.

The New York City Opera, for instance, appointed a new CEO whose brief tenure was disastrous. His flamboyant, extravagant vision for the company sent it straight for the cliffs, and the trustees’ decision to terminate his reign ultimately came too late to prevent the train wreck. This was a company, we should note, founded by visionary leadership that continued through several administrations. RIP.

I’m thinking, too, of situations where one of the top leaders engages in clandestine conflict – often backstage, one-on-one building alliances – that’s ego-based to the detriment of the organization. Commonly, the player lacks an appreciation for the culture and values of the organization and seek to turn it toward his or her own goals, including self-power enhancement, regardless of the trustees’ projections. Removing such a toxic manager, however necessary, produces ill feelings and misunderstanding all around, especially when the others are prevented by legal constraints from speaking openly of their underlying reasons.

Sometimes I think it’s a miracle organizations get anything done, top to bottom or, more accurately, bottom to top. There’s far more to leadership than barking orders, for sure, or undue frugality. I’d put mutual understanding high on my list of leadership qualities.

How about others?

~*~

I looked at something similar – good bosses and bad – back on June 28, 2013. To take a look, just click here.

ELK, AS AN EMBLEM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Typically, when you first enter a forest, you see very few animals. Maybe a squirrel or two in the shadows, and then flitting birds. It’s mosquitoes or other insects, mostly. You might as well be looking for fish. Even in a desert, where the range is wide open, this happens. Pay attention, though, and they appear, albeit largely second-hand – a snap or cracking branch, the cry of a blue jay or crow, the high-pitched exuberance of peepers in spring, the work of beavers, a feather on the trail, a tuft of fur caught in a snag, the small tunnel opening of a den, a pile of bone, a curl of snakeskin. Tracks and scats, especially. To say nothing of roadkill, along the highway.

Thus it was in my initial forays into the high country west of Yakima, where I was puzzled by deer-like pellets and tracks everywhere in the undergrowth. In time, I learned how widespread elk had become again, after being decimated a century earlier – and how crucial hunting and fishing organizations were to the conservation efforts. Although I neither hunt nor fish, I came to respect those who do so with a sense of humility and admiration. At the office, especially, Jim Gosney and Wayne Klingle told of intimate encounters in the field, while others, speaking of the occasions when they’d eaten the meat, could have been describing a sacramental meal. Heard their derision and disgust, too, regarding others who come only for slaughter. Heard, too, that the best places to observe elk were at the back of the Rez, south of town – an area off-limits to all but tribal members and their guests.

That understanding was only a small step from timeless Amerindian lore, the insights and practices arising where survival or death hung in the balance. Even before my move west, I had begun running across these stories, however haphazardly; by now, the Native American myths directly touched me in ways I found more compelling than the Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies that fill so much of our literature. More pressing, in fact, than the Hindu and Buddhist stories I’d devoured before heading west. “If a Man Goes Wild” and “True Practice” both draw on this trove, even if some poetic license is applied; besides, the stories themselves no doubt become varied as they pass from one locality and time to another. Here, though, the animals are no longer inferior creatures but can speak and interact in an equality with humans.

From this perspective, whether we’re considering elk, moose, or bear, the reappearance of large wildlife expresses not only a healthy forest or range, but a healthy society as well. I cannot think of elk without also thinking of what’s been lost and is being lost from the North American continent. Recently, returning to my native Ohio in winter, I looked across the shorn corn and soybean fields and realized how impossible it is to imagine the endless forest my ancestors entered, when elk and wolves and Indians were still present – nor the ecological catastrophes that followed in their first years after.

For me, elk are an emblem of what I learned living in the foothills of central Washington state. Here, then, are moments when the intimacy resumes, one way or another. Elk matter, indeed.

The elk farm in Lee offers me reminders of the wilds of the Cascade Range in Washington state, especially.
The elk farm in Lee offers me reminders of the wilds of the Cascade Range in Washington state, especially.

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HOMAGE TO THE BEST … AND BACK TO THE SCREENING ROOM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

We sometimes express a yearning for the return of the Renaissance Man – the individual who could be conversant on all fronts of intellectual inquiry – but the reality today is that it’s impossible even to stay abreast of the developments in one’s own field, much less other more widely shared interests.

Just ask folks who read if they’ve read your latest hot discovery, and you’ll likely get blank looks. It’s just a fact of life, even for works that are in the basic canon.

It extends to the other arts, too, and we won’t even raise the frontiers of science.

That reality hit home the other night when we sat down (finally!) to view Citizen Kane. I knew from my cinema studies (uh, 44 years ago) that the work was then considered one of the four greatest movies ever made, but somehow it had slipped through my viewing. Yes, I’d seen Birth of a Nation and the Battleship Potemkin and likely the fourth work on that tally, though I can’t remember what it was.

And now? I’m in the camp that considers Kane the most important movie ever made. Period. And, as my viewing companion said afterward, “I was ready to respect the movie, but I didn’t expect that I’d enjoy it as much as I did.” Which was immensely.

If you want to know how Orson Welles and his team changed the face of movie-making so utterly profoundly, go to the Wikipedia entry for the movie and then watch Peter Bogdanovich and Roger Ebert’s running commentaries, which are included on the Netflix DVD. Apart from the advent of color, there’s really nothing they didn’t revolutionize. (If you see something they missed, speak up.)

I’m glad we saw Kane after we’d watched The Grand Budapest Hotel. For all of Wes Anderson ‘s wonderful quirkiness, we could now appreciate the ways he and his team paid homage to Welles and the incredible cinematographer Gregg Toland at the head of that list.

We’re now going to have to watch both movies again.

BLURRING INTO SMOKE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The title, drawn from a line in Galway Kinnell’s “Tillamook Journal,” brings to my mind the corkscrew motion of seasons, memories, and time itself across the sequence of landscapes where I’ve dwelled.

My poems arising in this vein rarely stray far from northern woods. Or from the woodpile or fire, even in summer, no matter how unacknowledged their presence.

Nor do the poems in this range stray far from crickets, whose fiddling is akin to rubbing sticks together to create a fire. Where I live, their night rasping intensifies in early autumn, as though defying the growing chill and approaching, decisive frost. In a sense, there’s an inverse relationship between the mating songs of birds, so rampant around dawn in mid- to late spring, and the cricket activity. In the end, their music goes where the smoke goes. For now. Before starting over.

CULTURE SHOCK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

It had been ages since I’d gone to the cinema multiplex – you know, the kind in the vast parking lot beside the mall. Usually, when we go out for a movie, it’s an art house in Concord or a volunteer-run series at the Music Hall in downtown Portsmouth.

But Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was showing, and we figured we’d better make it there fast. No telling how quickly anything that quirky, formalistic, and savvy would be playing. (As we juggled our schedules, we realized it would have to be Monday night, overriding another activity on my itinerary – as we discovered, if you’re going to hit the big-box of showrooms, that’s the night to do it. We practically had the rectangular cavern to ourselves.)

I’ll leave it to others to lavish praise on the witty plotting that continually turned in unpredictable yet seemingly inevitable developments; the impressive casting and stylized acting; the precise cinematography; or the marvelous interweaving of actual sites in Germany (the hotel interior was actually the atrium of a defunct department store), miniature models of varied scales, and special effects to create a sense of fantastic and delightful artificiality. Anderson, as his fans know, is a moviemaking genius with a voice and vision all his own. (For one engaging detailed look at the roots of the story, click here.)

For me, though, the outing also invoked a series of culture shocks. Now that I’m “retired,” income’s tight, I’ll admit. I’m spending much less than I did before, and gasoline’s toward the top of my out-of-pocket budget. So the current ticket price (go ahead and laugh, you debonair rounders, when I tell you it was $11 apiece for three) made me gasp silently. (I know a good Greek restaurant where we could have dined out for that.) (I’m I really turning into this?)

From my end, it’s hard to take the very interior and decor of consumer society reflected in these big-chain outlets. It all feels plastic, cake-frosted, impermanent, unnatural. No one would want to linger in the vast lobby (what’s the point, anyway?), and no matter how plush, the showing rooms are – well, showing room sounds like something you’d find in a funeral home, which may be a good parallel, except that in much of the country, the mortuaries are usually in some amazing Victorian mansions. Nothing cookie-cutter about them, unlike these concealed warrens. None of this matches what I consider a theater or concert hall or even a house of worship, the kinds of places I prefer to assemble with others.

The third shock came in viewing the trailers and commercials. I’m still offended to be bombarded with big-screen ads after paying what I consider to be inflated ticket prices, after all, but to be hit twice with a promotion for a new computer game was especially egregious, especially with its pseudo-documentary interviews with its “creators,” a handful of pretentious nerds claiming social value for violent nihilism. I’m sorry, their world vision leads nowhere but destruction.

Actually, it was the amplified violence repeated in the trailers as well that most aggravates me. What in the American psyche so fosters terrorism of this scale? What justifies the reveling in gore for so many (and at such a price, even before we get to the price on our psyche)? Here’s the road that deserves a sermon of hellfire and brimstone, indeed. Wake up, folks, will you?

No wonder I prefer intimate, small-scale, gentle, playful, European or indie productions! They, in contrast, have soul and reality.

Anderson, I must confess, goes well beyond the small-scale criterion, but he earns the right to do so. And he’s generous to those who contribute to the effort, from the visual artists to the payroll accountants. One of the things that kept going through my mind as we were watching, actually, was an awareness of the lavish investment he was expending in the process and the question of whether he’d ever make it back. Well, maybe it wasn’t any greater than those of the futuristic trailers we’d watched beforehand, but still … Hollywood and Las Vegas have more in common than I’d like.

Maybe their biggest gamble is in making works that demand to be seen on the big screens rather than on our laptops or TVs via Netflix.

If you were a moviemaker or investor, what would you do? Or, as a film buff, what are you doing now?