Tag: Romance

THE UNENDING MYSTERY OF MUTUAL ATTRACTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 18 Comments

To my mind, one of the great questions about the human condition is just why an individual is romantically attracted to one person but not another.

We can start with physical attraction, of course, which opens a whole list of possibilities. Since I’ve always been a heterosexual male, I suppose my checklist would start with blonde, redhead, or brunette, although I must confess that on a few women, bald can be incredibly stunning. By the way, I happen to love long hair, which to my good fortune my wife possesses. We can move on to blue-eyed, true green, hazel, or brown eyes. And that’s even before we get to height or shape or … you get the picture.

Of course, things get really complicated after that. How much do we want the other to share our deepest interests, even to the point of being a mirror image of ourselves, and how much do we want them to differ? Where are the crucial points of commonality and mutual life’s mission – and how much deviation can we accept or allow? And just how do our emotional styles work together … or clash? What about our attitudes toward money, time, wealth, possessions? How much risk can we tolerate? And so on and on.

For me, keen intellect is essential. One who reads widely, at that. And then there is the spiritual side as well as strong ethics.

On top of it all, one of my measures, if pressed, would ask if this is someone I’d like to gaze on over the breakfast table. And, I could ask, is hers a voice I would always enjoy hearing. Would she always have fascinating stories and insights?

No matter how much I once tried to refine the list, though, something was always missing. In all my years between the collapse of my first marriage and the beginning of the one that counts, I came across a few women who were top candidates on paper but, when we were together, nothing clicked. So what was the missing magic? In the end, I still haven’t a clue.

I come back to this question of mutual attraction when I consider the Apostle Paul’s counsel, “Better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9), and ask, “What if heterosexual marriage does not quench the burning?” My examination of Scripture long ago led me to conclude that the ideal of Christian marriage is not so much the bearing of children but rather the “suitable helpmeet” and that, in turn, points toward monogamy and a unique kind of balance I see as more than an equality in the relationship. You can see where I’ve landed on that debate.

Of course, that also spurs another question – one that involves keeping the focus and the flame strong. Anyone have any suggestions there? These are, after all, central enigmas of our human condition.

SO MUCH FOR ROMANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

A reporter assigned to cover a large singles scene mixer returned to the newsroom with a telling image.

Three women had been remarking about an earnest young man who wore a tag proclaiming himself an “Incurable Romantic.”

As they snickered: “Sounds like a venereal disease.”

~*~

And you wonder what happened to the traditional English love poem? Please think again.

THE CONUNDRUM OF DATING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 18 Comments

With the publication of my latest novel, Promise, I’ve been chancing on a number of blogs addressing the issues of dating and romance, and, to be candid, I feel so blessed to be in the relationship where I am.

From what I’m reading, the first date – usually fraught with terror – is a dinner followed by some kind of anxiety leading to either silence (usually one-sided) or a less-likely follow-up.

From my own distant past, I realize how little some things change, even when they should. There have to be better ways to interacting with potential partners in more natural, less stressful settings. Simply having fun, for starters, rather than having to put everything on the table in something that resembles big-stakes gambling. Well, if you enjoy gambling, maybe that’s fine, but it’s not something I ever would have wanted in a mate.

For contrast, Amish youths have want seems to be a far saner way of finding a suitable companion. From age 16, the kids are active in social groups that include both boys and girls, and out of their playful outings and interaction with other similar groups, they get ample time to evaluate the others before centering on the one. And then it’s pretty much a lifetime agreement.

Similarly, in my novel, Jaya and Erik build the foundation of their relationship before they go out on anything resembling a date.

Anyone else have that experience? Or, for that matter, any suggestions for those looking for ways to meet the right one?

Promise

THE YEAR 1980

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The earth itself is set to erupt.

~*~

Thunder pealed again, and everybody packed up. Outside, Roddy and Erik danced in the eerie dusk. A soft drumming in trees sounded like drizzle, but instead of water, powder fell. Everyone appeared amazed, even elated. Weren’t we fortunate to have a volcano blow up in our face! Then Jaya recalled history: “Oh, Pompeii! Will guides conduct tours here, showing the world exactly how we victims perished? Is this the way our world will end?” Something gripped her, insisting they get home or die in the effort. She dragged Erik, protesting, to the car and raced through the grit. Autos in front of them were invisible, even their taillights, until Jaya was almost atop them. The ink blot overhead closed in on the far horizon, sealing off the last natural light. Plunging through this tar-paper snowfall on a route they knew so well, Jaya recalled the many times she had joked about being able to drive it blindfolded.

Promise~*~

To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

HIPPIE, HIPSTER, OR WHAT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

An identity debate is raging in some corners over who is or isn’t a hippie versus a hipster. It goes back in part, I suppose, to the defining line between hippie and beatnik, even though I could point to many points where they blur together.

For me, the bigger question invokes the world of those individuals who don’t feel at home in the mainstream but rather gravitate in a bohemian direction. Yes, there have always been those who go out of their way to look the part of the movement … and those who just are. With hippies versus hipsters, I might draw a line in a person’s stance when it comes to non-violence and equality and the like, but there were always degrees when it came down to specific instances. These days, in my reexamination of the hippie movement, I keep arguing that hippies came – and still come – in many varieties.

That’s part of the reason I find myself smiling when I hear the theme for the local arts and technology charter school’s prom: Victorian Steampunk.

Sounds cool to me. And like a lot of fun. Besides, it really is a sweet group.

Sure beats ours back in the mid ’60s.

The hippie era, I might add, had a thing for Victorian style anyway. Even if we didn’t put clocks in our stovepipe hats.

 

MYSTERY OR MAGIC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

“A long time ago, when wishes came true” is my favorite opening in the Grimms’ collected fairy tales. Much better than the formulaic “once upon a time.”

As I look back at my own “long time ago,” the “wishes came true” part of the proposition easily has me wondering just what I really wished for all along, before landing here? What specifics would have spurred the leap from fantasy into reality and shortened what often seemed an all too long and painful journey?

After all these years, I broached the subject with a longtime correspondent and there we were, reflecting on that point way back when our lives might have taken a different path. Meaning why didn’t we take the leap and marry?

“Well, you essentially believe in mystery while I expect magic,” she said, a reaction that long left me wondering about the difference.

Yes, I could almost hear her peals of delighted surprise at unanticipated happy turns and realized that reflected her idea of magic.

And yes, I suppose I could be labeled as a mystic, in part from all my years of meditation, with its sense of an underlying unity of the universe. (For more on that, go to my As Light Is Sown presentations.) As a mystic, I am instead seeking harmony and rightness that accompanies, well, I’ll just call it the Holy Way for now. Essentially, nothing happens by sheer accident; we just know so little of what’s going on behind the scenes when a miracle occurs.

In contrast, as the commentaries on the fairy tales insist, when good things happen in their stories, it’s a one-time deal, never to be replicated. Except that the good folks live happily ever after.

That’s why I’ll still take the mystical over the magical. I’ll take a miracle any day, while magic can be tricky.

HISTORIC UPDATES, CONTINUED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

As I said at the time, so long ago now …

No changes on the love-life front. Maybe I really don’t have the time or energy these days to invest there. Just too much going on with the writing and publishing – plus the Quaker responsibilities as clerk of Quarterly Meeting (which is something like being bishop of New Hampshire congregations would be in some other denominations).

Besides, am trying to be careful this time not to connect with my previous patterns – a radar that seems to pick up on emotionally troubled romantic partners or seems to draw them to me. Important thing is to keep myself nourished and centered. There are, however some encouraging new friendships, including those arising from a local poetry group (the “Prozac Poets” meeting at Barnes and Noble) and a weekly open reading in Concord. Will be the “featured poet” at another, which raises its own set of concerns: do I basically read from one extended series or period, or do I instead select a sampler from the past thirty years? Any suggestions?

Am leaning, at this point, toward opening with a Hindu chant that’s supposed to be efficacious at warding off tigers and poisonous snakes and closing with a wonderful quote by William Penn, a piece that wasn’t written as a poem but certainly works as one and points toward both Walt Whitman and Greenleaf Whittier. After the opening chant, I would say a few words about poetry arising in the sacred, which includes sexuality and even the more successful sacrilegious efforts, then go into a long piece, “Flight With Sun and Moon,” from the early 1970s. After that, I anticipate a grouping of five micropoems to change the pace, then maybe three sections from a longpoem, Recovering Olympus, followed by five more micropoems, leading into three to five pieces from one of my more recent “Police Blotter Love Poems” series. I would then end my own work with a five-page piece from Maine, addressed to my favorite poet and the influence he’s exerted throughout my own moves during the past three decades. Guess I’m just thinking aloud here. Sound reasonable? Like all good plans, it’s subject to a slew of revisions!

Yipes, it’s time to run already. Another Tuesday, the last day of my “weekend,” and the sun’s just set (well, it is late afternoon) – need to get something to eat before running off to a poetry reading. Some good stuff being done around here, as well as the usual dross.

Am looking forward to all of those pictures you’re promising in your always scintillating ‘zine. And no, no way are you what they accuse. You’re a poet, remember? But you already know that.

Oh boy indeed!

Aquarius Tracker

DEAREST MADAMOISELLE, LOVELY AND EVER CHARMING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time: Hey! Somewhere along the line, the Postal Service lost a letter, it seems. At any rate, I’ve been wondering about you, how you’re doing, whether you decided to run off to New Mexico or Arizona and start having babies one-two-three or whatever. Even whether I’d said something that offended terribly. (So much for self-esteem, right?)

At least, thanks to the wonders of Computer Era (or, too often, Computer Error) I be able (that, I’m told, reflects Chicago schooling regarding the conjugation of the verb to be) to resurrect my last letter to you. Is this the one you responded to, meaning I never got your last letter? Or did you not get this one? And the poems in the new Indigo, um,  are they the two you didn’t know you had or, surprise, are they the ones I sent in July? Mysteries, mysteries!

At any rate, I’m anxiously awaiting the new issue – and all the news – and maybe even the missing letter!

On this end, to update from what’s there: Am still waiting for the chapbook … the usual unexpected delays and complications; in this case, a near-fatal blood clot suffered by the editor’s wife.

As you can see, I’m in the midst of a major computer conversion – from a fourteen-year-old XPC II system and nearly 300 five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks (Word Perfect 4.1) to a 6.4-gigabyte Pentium II Windows 98 Word 97 unit with both HP scanner and inkjet printer. It’s taking much longer than I anticipated; am still not on-line (one step at a time!) It’s like household he-man repairs and remodeling: everything takes three times longer than you believe it will, should, or can. Just ask your Italian father: if he’s anything like my ex-father-in-law, the one I miss greatly, these jobs are just that. (One of Sam’s great lessons to me, by the way: be sure to leave something undone for tomorrow!)

So I built, from kits, a new credenza and hutch, plus a “utilities cart,” projects that proved the timing theory: the credenza that took the salesman two hours to assemble took me six or eight, in part because the instructions are written in three languages but proficient, from what I could determine, in none. Ditto for the printed illustrations. Then, when the electronic goodies came, there were all the boxes to unpack and the new wiring to figure out (and whatever you need for the big rebates seems to get lost with the trash). Guess I’ll never purchase again where there’s a rebate involved! Just give me the discount, now! To say nothing of the software to install, nearly wrecking my Windows 98 in the process. (A Sunday morning phone call to Hewlett Packard nearly averted that!) At least much of the software installation is so much easier than it was a decade ago! My computer guru, the one I’ve “hired” for a bottle of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels, has been a big help, dropping on me a stack of magazines that could be used instead as the coffee table; his real challenge is in rigging the system that will allow me to convert and transfer a dozen or so novels and tons of other writings from the old system to the new. All this must seem foreign to you, who appear so much at ease with stylish desktop publishing! (So when did you first delve into cyberland – and desktop and all of the great touches you display?)

Hmm, that’s interesting, the date on the page break and all. One more thing to figure out, eventually – modifying these damn templates to my own style! (Spent a couple of hours a few weeks ago trying to do that, only to finally learn I couldn’t do it – see now there are other ways to go about it, thanks to a $40 book that tells me what Microsoft’s can’t.)

Did get away for a week in a small cabin in the Maine woods – no heat and no glass in the windows, but there was a fireplace as well as sliding shutters across the screened windows: good thing, too, with the nights getting down to freezing! Snuggled in with a stack of novels to read, learned to canoe solo on the five-mile-long lake and winding river, and even drafted some decent poetry.

*   *   *

How long ago all that seems! Well, it does come from a few years before I acquired the barn and everything that’s gone with it … including a great wife and family. Which makes it ancient history, indeed, even without the computer updates.