Tag: Musings

Among my greatest accomplishments

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not to toot my own horn.

  1. Remarriage after years of wandering. Not that I’m anywhere near a mastery of intimacy yet.
  2. The novels and poems. They really are a record of my pathway to here, as well as my deepening skills in the craft of writing.
  3. A week on the Appalachian Trail. I was 12 and survived under a heavy backpack, unlike the lightweight gear available these days.
  4. Making it to retirement in a shrinking profession.
  5. Becoming a Friend, building on my ashram experience.
  6. Working with future Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom.
  7. Landing a job in the Pacific Northwest. I got to explore a dream landscape, including the trek to Camp Muir on Rainier and the mountain’s ice caves in the mouth of a glacier.
  8. Singing in an extraordinary choir. There were times in rehearsal where just listening to the others would blow me away. Public performances were always a revelation.
  9. Genealogy, connecting my line back to North Carolina, initially, and then all the way back to 1500s Cumbria, England.
  10. Blogging. It’s simply been personally satisfying. I never expected to be communicating with readers on six continents.

~*~

But who am I to say? What are you especially proud of in your own life?

Ten ‘First World’ problems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So many modern annoyances seem minor when you look at a more global perspective. I know, it’s become a cliché over the past few years, but it’s true.

For instance.

~*~

  1. My refrigerator is too full but there’s nothing I wanna eat.
  2. I lost the remote. How do you turn the thing on?
  3. My wallet’s too small.
  4. Why does my favorite take-out close so early?
  5. None of the ten outfits I tried on for the weekend quite do it. I’ll have to buy something new.
  6. There’s no dip for the chips.
  7. I can’t decide whether to take the trip to Paris with my sister or Hawaii with my mother. They’re both the same week.
  8. My Fitbit doesn’t have a heart rate monitor.
  9. The cleaner couldn’t make it last week. My bin’s almost full.
  10. My toilet paper roll is too big for the holder.

~*~

My, aren’t we spoiled. What would you add to the list?

 

Is everybody crazy?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know, like screwed up?

We’re reflecting on so many people we encounter, in person and their stories as well as in the news, and so often there’s a kind of lunacy involved. That, or plain tragic fate. I wouldn’t even call it bad luck.

Makes us question if anyone’s normal, whatever that is, or makes us see our own irrational failings and emotional struggles as nothing in comparison. (Yes, we still want to be better than those poor unfortunates.) As for paying the bills and that sort of thing – getting to medium income would be nice – though even that is beyond the range of possibility for many.

Lately, in revisiting the program booklets of so many musical performances I’ve attended over the years, I’ve been wondering whatever happened to so much of the rising talent I heard – the soloists or opera singers who never made it to the top, and that’s just one front.

Authors and journalists, too, as the written word has receded from the public spotlight. (No, Fox News anchors are not journalists, and that’s part of the problem.)

Makes me wonder if I’ve been looking at the whole world wrong. Maybe we should begin with an assumption of insanity somewhere in every psyche and work from there. Maybe that was the best part of the hippie outbreak, letting that side somehow out of the box. Dunno, but it was lively.

Of course, it also means looking into the dark side of life, if it’s possible to do so and not become engulfed in evil. That part’s scary.

And here we are, wishing everyone Merry Christmas.

Ding-a-ling!

Ten things about the Hodgson Mill

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

In my novel The Secret Side of Jaya, she encounters an old-fashioned, water-powered gristmill when she and Joshua relocate to the Ozarks.

Turns out that the best-known mill in the Ozarks is named after some of my kinsmen who settled near Sycamore, Missouri.

Here are some facts.

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  1. The Hodgsons were Quaker millers in Guilford County, North Carolina, before heading north in the 1820s. At one time two cousins, both named William, had mills there. The Missouri line descends from one. I descend from the other. (For the family line before that, see my Orphan George blog.)
  2. For a while after leaving the Piedmont region, that line of the family briefly spelled the surname the way I do. Then they reverted to the original, with the “g” in the middle.
  3. A grain mill has graced the site at the foot of a bluff on Bryant Creek, Missouri, since 1837. The current three-story mill was built in 1897 by Alva Hodgson, who mostly worked alone on its construction.
  4. After 1909, Alva imported top-of-the-line French buhrstones from the Pyrenees Mountains and installed a turbine to provide electrical power to light the mill and surrounding buildings. The electricity also ran a half-dozen sewing machines producing overalls in a neighboring general store.
  5. Alva Hodgson also purchased the site of the Dawt Mill near Tecumseh, Arkansas, in 1901 and rebuilt that mill in 1909. Today it continues to grind grain. It’s also a full-time resort with three restaurants, a concert venue, and float trips.
  6. The Hodgson Mill left Hodgson hands in 1927.
  7. Until its purchase by Hudson River Foods in Castleton, New York, last year, the Hodgson label was still a family-owned operation.
  8. At the time of the purchase, the company’s headquarters and production facilities were in Effingham, Illinois. The milling was still done in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri.
  9. In addition to its signature cornmeal and unbleached flour, products include whole wheat pastas, breakfast cereals, bread mixes, pancake mixes, wheat bran, and pure cornstarch.
  10. Principal competitors include Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, Nature’s Path Foods, and Spectrum Foods.

~*~

Do you ever see your name on a product?

Hodgson Water Mill near Sycamore, Missouri.

 

Sometimes, you need a bigger map

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

I’ve loved maps since childhood, so our new interest in Downeast Maine has whetted an appetite to investigate more of the region’s geography, which includes a lot of water. Not just the ragged coastline and bays, but also large lakes and many bogs, marshes, and swamps plus rivers and waterfalls.

One thing that’s rather boggled my mind is discovering of what’s cut off from U.S. maps on that edge of the continent.

For instance, I had no clue of Grand Manan Island, which is 21 miles long with bluffs rising 200 to 400 feet above the Atlantic just nine miles east of Maine. It even has three lighthouses. Getting there’s a whole other matter.

Still, I doubt that many Americans think of anything lying in the ocean east of the United States until you get to the British Isles or European mainland. So is there anything else we’re missing?

Well, there’s tiny Machias Seal Island further south, claimed by both the U.S. and Canada, which has a long lighthouse presence there.

What’s really surprised me is how far the province of Nova Scotia extends south.

From the easternmost point in the U.S., Nova Scotia is more than 82 miles to the southeast.

From Bar Harbor, Maine, it’s 113 miles to the east.

And further south, it runs down past Portland, Maine, where sits more than 200 miles to the east.

Put another way, nearly anyone sailing from Maine has to navigate around this extension of Canada.

If you follow the news, it also puts some of our fishing controversies in perspective.

From Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, for instance, the distance to the tip of Nova Scotia is roughly 230 miles, versus 111 to Portland, Maine, meaning that the southernmost point of Canada juts that much further into what I had considered U.S. fishing grounds.

With the bigger map, one including both the New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia shorelines, you can see how a funnel is formed, one where ocean currents push into Fundy Bay to create the world’s highest tides.

For me, this is a reminder of how often our comprehension of a problem is limited by conventional thinking when we look at the situation.

Just how else do you get outside the box, anyway?

What you’ll find in my studio

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
  1. My laptop and the battery rechargers for my smartphone and digital camera.
  2. Tons of paper. Manuscripts, notes to myself, bills, and correspondence, mostly.
  3. My journals. (200+ volumes.)
  4. My stereo. Yes, I still love vinyl.
  5. My most favorite books plus dictionaries, thesauruses, reference works.
  6. Separately, my collected Quaker and related religious volumes.
  7. Seashells and rocks from across the continent.
  8. Incense, a small Shiva Nataraja statue, and a postcard of Green Tara.
  9. Filing cabinets and mailing supplies.
  10. A cabinet drawer stuffed with maps.

~*~

What’s your favorite workspace? What doodads would we see there?

 

Ten categories I’ve collected

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments
  1. Fossils and rocks.
  2. Butterflies and beetles.
  3. Classical LPs.
  4. And then tapes and CDs.
  5. Paper clips. The colorful ones.
  6. Concert programs. Add to that theater, opera, ballet playbills.
  7. Books by the ton.
  8. Correspondence and rejection slips.
  9. Welcome brochures from visits to Quaker meetinghouses.
  10. Tearsheets and clippings … graphics.

~*~

What about you?