Tag: Spirituality

Various lifestyles I’ve lived

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t have selfies through most of it. Most of those shots would have no doubt been embarrassing now.

So here’s how my life’s shaken out in terms of lifestyles.

  1. Straight ‘50s middle class: Growing up in the Midwest.
  2. Hippie: From college to Upstate New York and various moves thereafter, including my first marriage to an emerging visual artist. Well, this does fuel my novels Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Subway Visions.
  3. Monastic: The rogue yoga ashram in the Pocono mountains. See my novel Yoga Bootcamp.
  4. Ascetic: In many ways, this was still hippie as I lived in a loft in a small downtown in a place resembling what I’ve called Prairie Depot.
  5. And back-to-the earth: The next move was a return to my college, this time as a research associate position before leaping on to the interior Pacific Northwest, one with my personal life filled with growth as a published poet, a shift to Quaker spiritual practice, and immersion in backwoods and wilderness wonder. These inspire my novels Nearly Canaan and The Secret Side of Jaya.
  6. William Morris: Steel mill region in what one called the Near East, aka the Rust Belt. Included a divorce and rebound. Hometown News arises in that experience.
  7. Nearly Plain Quaker slash Muppie: The Mennonite Urban Professionals I was hanging out with in Baltimore were the less expensive version of Yuppies. Living in a federal-style brick rowhouse in the Bolton Hill neighborhood was the culmination of my big-city dreams. During the week, I was often on the road with a company car and expense account. This was a rich mix for me, a time of much personal growth, ending in a self-gifted sabbatical year hunkered down in a suburb in which I drafted early versions of much of my fiction.
  8. Yuppieville on the Hill: Relocating to New Hampshire, I wound up living in a complex where I rented a small townhouse. Back in the working ranks rather than management, I was freed from long unpaid overtime hours and the neckties and suits of my earlier professional situations. Contradancing, especially, steeped me in Boston, an hour to the south, while I immersed my personal writing in poetry circles. My love life had many ups and downs.
  9. City farmer: Remarriage prompted my move to the New Hampshire Seacoast, where we bought an old house within easy walking distance of downtown and the Quaker Meeting. That “farmer” label actually befits my spouse, the avid gardener. The property also had the small carriage house you know as my Red Barn. Retirement included serious choral singer and daily swimmer roles.
  10. Island author: We needed to downsize, which led to the remote fishing village with a lively arts scene you’ve been reading about here.

An awakening awareness from a Native perspective

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The realm of religion can certainly express our highest aspirations as well as manifest some of our darkest fears, as I feel I’ve examined in my new book Quaking Dover.

In my research of early New England, for instance, I see too clearly how often the differences between the Calvinist Protestants known as Puritans led to violent clashes with the French Roman Catholics to the north, as well as the other way around. (Not that I’d expect it to have differed if the Anglicans/Episcopalians had been in charge rather than the Puritans.)

Through their mindsets, the English, in their negotiations with the Indigenous tribes, crudely failed to acknowledge intricacies of decorum or ceremony that included food and dancing. Not so the French, whose missionaries to the Natives established bridges between the Native and Christian faiths. The priests even lived in tribal villages.

More critically, the English failed to impose the moral standards of their faith in their transactions with the Natives. Fair trade rather than widespread cheating would have been a start.

~*~

Where I’m now living, reciting the rosary is an important ritual among the local Passamaquoddy, especially at wakes and funerals. One late tribal leader was also a deacon and has left notes of his efforts to his blend Native religion and his Roman Catholic teachings. I’m hoping that some of this will find publication.

What’s the hold?

Are there comforting commonalities of rosary with chanting or even drumming? Or, from my end, might something connect to the long-lost art of Quakers who preached in “tones,” otherwise called sing-song?

Considering a young cousin’s ability to mimic one minister’s exhorting preaching style I encountered among Ohio’s remaining Wilburite Friends, I’m left wondering how much of the Quaker’s messages was formulaic and how much original, either way an emotional outburst not found in academic sermons and homilies delivered from a pulpit.

I suspect there’s a lot to be learned through what Quaker Douglas Steere called “mutual irradiation” when we do what’s sometimes called “listening in tongues” here.

It doesn’t always have to be about religion, either, though it may underpin much of the historical thinking.

One fascinating new voice from the Indigenous view is Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Her websites – lbrooks.people(dot)amherst.edu/thecommonpot/ and ourbelovedkin(dot)com/awikhigan/index – continue her presentation.

I believe we can all be enriched by participating in such sharing.

 

What’s wrong with being elite?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As an editor on newspapers where, in an attempt for excellence everyone was giving of themselves totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.), I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity – not the truth, but pleasantry” – from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football quarterback or automobile.

In many religions, however, the “world” of common subservience and society or what some today are more accurately seeing as “empire” is ultimately a mortal trap. In spiritual practice, then, only total effort is acceptable in seeking a holy transformation of this life. If only we can rise to even a portion of it.

As an ancient New England hymn reminded, “Broad is the way that leads to death / and many trod thereupon / but Wisdom shows a narrow way / with here and there a traveler.”

I see that lyric, by the way, as the root of Robert Frost’s road less traveled.

When I ask what’s wrong with being elite, I’m not talking about social status or wealth but something more elusive – something much more humble and loving.

One commute I can’t complain about

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Some Sunday mornings, my drive to and from the Quaker meetinghouse a half-hour from my home is a meditation in its own right.

Even in fog or snow, it can be refreshing.

Much of the road is through forest, plus stretches along Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays and their tributaries. The route also passes through a tribal reservation and a national wildlife preserve, which does sound a bit exotic though I take it as routine.

Eagle sightings are common, and I have had to stop for deer or turkeys in the middle of U.S. 1. Once I even spotted a moose far ahead on the pavement.

A radio program of classical choral music on a CBC station that comes in quite clearly is often also an element, depending on my mood.

Do you remember the freedom you felt when you first learned to drive? Some mornings, especially when there’s no other traffic, that elation returns.

While I’m tempted to proclaim “What could be more glorious than this!” I will also note many of the scattered homes I pass resemble junkyards – poverty in Washington County is a constant – so there’s a reminder of that reality, too. I suspect there are more dead cars and trucks here than people.

As an added touch, there are no traffic lights, either.

I’ve been meditating for more than 50 years now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Well, I haven’t been living as a monk in a Himalayan-mountain cave any of that time, but it does sound more impressive that being a “meditator” or someone who practices in a contemplative religious tradition that long even when it’s only once or twice a week.

The thought came to me in Quaker worship the other Sunday morning, the center of what has remained my spiritual discipline and community after the yoga-based version faded away over the years – even my rising before dawn to sit cross-legged in front of a small altar and its candle before I tackled poetry and then took off for the paying job for the rest of the day.

~*~

While I can no longer park myself on a cushion on the floor in the Asian style but rather settle in much more loosely on an old meetinghouse bench – do not call it a pew – the bigger change has been in the focus of my sitting.

The goal of the yoga exercise was to transcend, leaving behind mundane awareness altogether. Somewhere you might encounter your past lives, even. If not that, then a natural high, as an advanced version of a drug trip. At least an awareness of an altered state of consciousness that might even address authentic ethereal reality.

Instead, in the Quaker vein, what I’ve found is a time of being mentally and emotionally renewed and even gaining clarity into my daily engagements.

Or, as one quip goes, some of the best barns in New England were designed during Quaker Meeting. In this case, meaning the hour of shared and mostly silent worship.

~*~

The half-century mark also takes me back to my first Summer of Love, detailed my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, a book that has scenes triggering the erotica filter, should you try to order a copy.

While I was preparing to live in the yoga ashram to our south back then, I experienced my first summer with a daily exposure to the outdoors, including swimming in mountain lakes, often naked, Upstate New York. It was a time of great struggle, discovery, growth, and redirection for me.

And at the end of all this, at the closure of our hour of silent worship here in Maine, one Friend (aka Quaker) voiced an insight from a Native perspective that when it comes to time, the focus is on the past – it’s the only one we can know. The future is the one behind us, rather than ahead. Not that there’s that much ahead for me in this lifetime.

~*~

Still, it’s was a kind of day that had me wondering, can life be any better than this? (Even with those aches et cetera of aging.)

Dipping in glorious waters

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t written a real poem
in at last a decade
prose, especially fiction, has taken the fore
plus relocating to a remote Maine island
do I even consider the photography

How else do you think
other than by talking to yourself even silently
or through the fingers or feet

I’ve long preferred instrumental music, abstract
or airs in languages I don’t understand
and usually forget the lyrics and lines in scores
I’ve sung in concert

So I was swimming a half-mile a day
before the pandemic but haven’t been back
in deep water, fresh or surf, indoor or out till today,
my first venture in a little-known river pooling
too rocky for laps but perfect for extending myself
in the familiar chill under a cloud-strewn afternoon sky

yes, it’s glorious and refreshing
in a way I discovered my first year after college
in hippie abandon or the New England coast
and Dover’s Olympic pool later
it’s the sunlight and breeze
stretching above, around

a call to attend to my rooting as well
in meditation, prayer, Scripture, favored poets
all as seemingly impractical

Sitting down to do our annual donations

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rather than making most of our charitable contributions ad lib during the year, we’ve adapted a new strategy since moving Way Downeast.

This is the time of the year when we decide what we’re supporting and then make those payments.

The process means deciding between giving smaller amounts to a wider range of organizations or instead sending somewhat larger amounts focused on a few recipients.

Mailing those checks off always feels good, though we also wish we were sending more.

Welcome to Cobscook Friends

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a small, rural Quaker fellowship, we’re especially happy to be worshipping together in one space every Sunday again, at least through the summer and early autumn.

Covid, of course, had us connected only by Zoom through much of the Covid onslaught and after that, coming together in a physical space on alternative weeks only. We do live at distances from the meetinghouse, so winter weather can often be a challenge.

Not so summer. We’d love to have others join us in our hour of mostly silent centering, beginning at 9:30 on Sunday mornings. The meetinghouse is in the woods along Maine Route 189 in Whiting – on the way to Lubec and many great outdoors trails.

If you meditate in some practice, you’ll fit right in – and if that seems foreign, it’s still a great time for personal reflection. I always find it renewing.

As a professional historian friend said after one of my presentations

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

New England history is all through Harvard. And then Yale and Williams College.

Except, of course, a few mavericks like me. (Even though, humbly confessed, I’m not a historian.)

Well, you do have another opportunity to see why he said that if you register promptly for my free Zoom presentation from Cape Cod at 12:30 Sunday afternoon ( https://bit.ly/QuakingDover ).

Here’s hoping to hear from you there!