Tag: Relationships

CHOOSING FRIENDS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Theological issues play very little into why a family chooses one church over another. So the surveys tell us. Instead of its beliefs, a church is chosen for its youth program, its overall vitality, music, the kinds of expectations it will or won’t place on members, and so on.

Puts Friends in a pretty strange position, doesn’t it? What committee do you want to serve on?

On the other hand, our existence as a “do-it-yourself” congregation requires us, personally and as a group, to draw out individuals and families and engage in their daily lives. One of our strengths is that Quaker meeting allows room for spiritual growth over the years, within a wide range of activity, while maintaining an intimate connection. Our small size, in an era of mega-churches, presents us with advantages, especially in knowing one another authentically. Besides, worship is quite distinct from entertainment.

Now, how do we roll out this welcome mat? Maybe I would remind folks that our place of worship is a house, first and foremost. Come on in and get comfortable. And then be fed. Be sure, of course, to lend a hand with the dishes.

THIS OLD HOUSE DISILLUSIONMENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

One of the downsides of owning an old house is an awareness of just how expensive any repair is. (And it’s always more than you’ve planned.) Add to that just how many repairs are needed. (Remember, most of them are for things you don’t even see.) And that’s before we get to any upgrades.

The awareness has also afflicted many of my dream-house observations, especially when I’m nearing the ocean. Where I would have admired a stone retaining wall under construction or a long pier from a private boathouse or deck to the mooring, what I now see is dollar signs. Often, more than I would have made in a year. It’s crushing.

It can make you wonder what people do for that kind of income. Or what kind of wealth they were born into. Or how long it will last.

One thing I know is that fishermen used to live in some of these coastal communities. But not anymore. Not by a long shot. Some of them live closer to me.

 

A TURN IN THE GARDEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As the hot, humid weather kicks in, we shift gears. Our weeding turns lazy, and our plants will just have to fight it out for survival. If we’re diligent, we’ll water, though the utility bill frightens.

Maybe it’s all part of the relationship.

~*~
Of Devis and Other Spirits

A garden without a woman is lamentable

unfolding from Eve
and the Singer of the Song of Songs

 all this color and excitement

my Woman wears no cosmetics
she’s organic
but oh so much better for me
than health food

my Lady leads me in unanticipated ways
she’s so unlike the ones before her
she works with wise fingers without hesitating
to get dirt under her nails

still, as the younger one said,
“you’re a mean mommy:
you’re as mean as the thorns in a buckle bush”

In constructing her garden

sod, roots woven tight, close together
the way I thought we would

overlooking the fact we both flower
quite conspicuously

our stems woody or thorny
even through winter

 poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson

CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.

For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.

Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.

When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.

Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.

Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.

You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.

Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.

The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.

What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.

As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.

What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.

On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.

YEARBOOK CONFESSIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

There was the night when my daughters – at the time, one in college, the other beginning high school – had been chattering about something that prompted me to get out the yearbooks. Show them what things had been like back then, when Bob Dylan was just going electrified, Vietnam was ramping up, and hippies, well, were still more than a year away in the future. (My wife insists this came up on my birthday.)

Their reactions weren’t quite what I expected. Yes, there was the giggling, especially over the girls’ flip-style hair and A-line dresses. And their dismissal of some beauties I’d lusted after, as well as their agreement on others. Initially, they couldn’t find me in the pictures, and then, when they did, they started laughing: “You’re everywhere! Is there a group where you weren’t an officer? Hey, he even has some poetry here!” As well as my wife’s, “My, you were cute back then.” Which pains, in a way: I’m not now? Of course, I was the skinny, clueless intellectual back then – and generally unloved. To my further surprise, my girls declared that the boys in my high school class were generally pretty attractive – “They look put together,” as they put it – compared to those today. Maybe it was all the ties and shorn heads. I thought we looked pretty dorky. Still do, looking back.

A bit later, one night at the office, as one of my coworkers was complaining to another about the latest machinations by her son’s teacher, and his high school’s draconian response, I remembered that I’d been having a fleeting sense that this would have been the year for my 40th reunion – that is, if anyone was still in charge. With all of my moves about the country, though, they’d long since lost track of me. I’d never made any of the reunions anyway, either being unemployed at the time (and thus short of cash), unable to get the vacation time off or budget for the air fare, or even learning of the last one a couple of months after it happened. Lately, though, there have been some tentative Web searches for individuals, which did lead to a posting of some items from The Hilltopper, from when I was editor-in-chief. So now, around midnight, I decided to Google, just in case, a reunion notice might be posted, somewhere. And lo and behold, there it was. The Victory Bell, and then photos from their 35th anniversary gathering.

The Web site itself wasn’t in the best shape. A bit of nosing about did turn up a notice that there would, indeed, be a 40th observance, though because “we’re especially short of funds,” no mailings would be sent out. (As if they had my address.) But do I want to spend an evening in an American Legion hall with a DJ and people trying to make happy? The idea gives me the creeps. I’m a country dance kind of guy, or would at least prefer a setting where conversation would be facilitated, rather than masked.

Still, something in my awareness was pierced, and the emotions could not be restrained. For 40 years, from my perspective, at least, these classmates have been frozen in time. Their supple flesh and worldly inexperience, preserved intact. Jarring, then, comes the notice on the site, informing of the death of one who had been incredibly desirable, with side-by-side photos of her at 18 and then aged. As are notices of a cluster of others, now deceased. I click again, to photos from the 35th reunion, and am appalled. I recognize no one. They’re loud, badly dressed, and have not aged well. Finally, I find a few photos with the people identified, and then admit some are actually in pretty good shape. Another icon leads to a listing that includes married surnames, and the trail of these classmates is no longer lost from my sight. Further Web searches, for instance, present one I’d idealized who is now spouting political drivel, while another – once the epitome of cool sexuality and now apparently divorced in the past five years – is teaching knitting or quilting in a fundamentalist church. I return to the class Web site. Wonder about the Adonis club males, and just how did so many become so grotesque? As for the dress, strange tans, paunches, and wrinkles, the gray or dyed hair, or lack thereof: this is what I thought I wanted to return to, after college. Here, I must confront the reality that some – essentially the reunion crowd – were able to stay in town, largely on the one side of town, at that – while some others have been scattered to the winds. After all, I am among those “location unknown.”

How could I possibly begin to relate to them all of the twists in my own life – the ashram experience, the orchards and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the St. Helens eruption, my Quaker progression and return east, publication of experimental novels and countless poems, the divorce and finally coming to have children when many of them are enjoying grandchildren, to say nothing of having a wife who’s nearly the age of their own children?

I looked at the posted photos and wondered, who are all these old people? Wondered, too, how I ever escaped that circle. (Oh, vanity!)

 

A WORLD QUITE ALIEN TO MY OWN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

As we watched the movie (let’s withhold the title as being irrelevant to my point), I was struck that these were not characters I would – or could – ever draft. Even if I’d managed to conjure up the range of members of the extremely dysfunctional family, they wouldn’t be believable, arising as they do from a world quite alien to mine. (Not that my family didn’t have its, uh, dysfunctions.)

It’s an awareness I’m having with increasing frequency – or at least maybe it’s just a heightened recognition. It involves not just family dynamics, either, but extends to a perception of romantic attractions or destructive people in the workplace or political office and beyond.

In the case of this particular movie, each character was appalling in a distinctive way and played to perfection by a top-line cast, which only added to my admiration of the scriptwriter’s achievement, one author to another.

Could it be I’m simply becoming more and more aware of how wide and varied our world really is?

 

LOOKING FOR AN UNCOMMON GROUND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

If you’re part of a faith community, you can ask this about your own circle: What do we have in common? That is, if we were required to write a “confession of faith” (in my case, for our Quaker meeting), what would we profess? What I’m envisioning is not a listing of what we do together, which our annual State of Society Report too easily becomes, but rather what lies under and behind our actions. I know that some Mennonite congregations from time to time draft what they call a “constitution,” although a corporate “mission statement” may also do here. The idea is to sharpen the focus of what a group already possesses and where it would like to go into the future. It’s a way of acknowledging and enlarging on the strengths and dreams of its members. Think of one retailer’s slogan, “Let’s build something together,” with its unvoiced understanding that they’re talking about people’s homes, rather than their investment portfolios, and maybe you get the picture.

I would hope that what we have in common is something other than similar tastes, income, educational attainment, lifestyles, party affiliation, or the like. Perhaps, in asking the question, we can even come to a clearer understanding of what diversity we, in fact, possess, and the potential it offers us.

Answering the question would, I suspect, be far more difficult than we might originally anticipate. On one hand, answering candidly might actually prove divisive. We’ve seen this as we responded to New England Yearly Meeting’s attempt to revise Faith and Practice for the next generation. On the other, delving into the question might also lead us into a clearer understanding of the core energies at the heart of our worshiping community. I recall Caroline Stephen’s amazement Friends can do anything, considering that Quakers are essentially a body of mystics. We’ve heard others compare trying to get us moving together like “trying to herd cats” or go somewhere with “a wheelbarrow full of frogs.”

What I do know is the difficulty of maintaining a witness – even plainness – apart from a community of faith. Community, with its definition of common unity. In the end, it requires far more than strength in numbers. It’s a matter, I’d say, of strength from our hearts.

*   *   *

Now, for my stab at the statement:

Dover Friends Meeting (Quaker) is a body of individuals and families who together encourage and pursue the New Testament goals of simplicity, equality, honesty, integrity, nonviolence and pacifism, and divine love in daily life. At its organizational core are the weekly hour of open, waiting worship in the presence of the Holy Spirit and the monthly meeting for business, both conducted in accord with the longstanding manner of the Society of Friends.

THE NOVEL AS A TIME MACHINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

Anyone else wonder about the appeal of stories set in another century? Just what’s the attraction?

The future, of course, is one direction, a whole set of “what if” projections that for now cannot be tested against historical development. (Admittedly, Orwell’s 1984 certainly has become an exception in the years since I first read it, gee, was it ’64? As has the movie 2001.)

The past, however, seems to be the more romantic option, beginning with historic period romances and Westerns. I suppose it’s not that far removed from those who inquire of astrologers or palmists or mediums about their past lives, although what I’ve always found most fascinating there is how many people who do so claim to have been Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn or Helen of Troy or the like, rather than one of the common, suffering, exploited populace. No, the stories tilt toward royalty, court intrigue, the power struggles of the rich and mighty – the glittering elite far removed from everyday life. (Maybe that’s our fascination with celebrities, too, as if wealth and beauty leads to true love and happiness, not that it ever seems to hold over the long haul. In pure weight, tragedies trump over comedies.)

My wife sometimes jests that I would have been more at home in 18th or 19th century America, especially in a context of the Enlightenment, scientific advancement, and perhaps opera, along with a flourishing Quaker culture. (Never mind that the Quaker discipline of the time banned music and fiction as superfluous, vain, and untrue.) Again, though, the projection is toward a place of refinement, culture, and ease rather than the long, hard, physical labor of the masses.

So what, ultimately, is the attraction of historical fiction? Is there some time or place you’d willingly be relocated to, if it were possible, even if you could never come back? And, while we’re at it, what about the importance of location, even over time itself? Who and where would you like to be? Just what is it about other eras? Ah, the intrigue! To say nothing of the underlying connection.

FINANCIALLY SECURE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

This was one of the big items that used to appear in the personals ads. The lady wanted a gentleman who was “financially secure.” But what did that mean in practice?

For some, I suppose, it was a seven-figure portfolio … or better.

For others, maybe someone who held a steady job or was supporting himself? Or maybe could simply pay his half of the rent?

Of course, it was ultimately a personal perspective.

So how would you have defined it?

AN EXTENDED VIEW OF MY OWN VOLUMES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s now been 12 months since my first ebook appeared at Smashwords – a list that now presents six of my novels and a full-length poetry collection. That’s in addition to my poetry chapbooks appearing at other presses.

First, I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. What you’re seeing is the fruition of a lifetime of writing that’s now, finally, coming to light. I cannot imagine trying to write seriously without a desire to share it with others – especially when I hear you tell of ways it speaks of your own experiences or sparks related memories.

I also want to acknowledge the fact that these are not works I could write today, not for a decline in ability but rather because each of us evolves and changes over time. My energies, inspirations, perspectives, and focus are different now than they were 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. I look at these works and find much that is wonderfully baroque or surreal or passionately intense and realize I’m in a much different sensibility today – yes, I’m happy to have these souvenirs from the journey, these touchstones and treasures, but they come from my younger years and their visions and even the different companions who shared my life back then, in contrast to the household I cherish now. More than ever, I’m ever-so-grateful I set aside the time over the years to draft and revise then, rather than waiting for my retirement years as so many wannabe writers do.

Let me just say there’s much more coming in the next 12 months.

And thank you.