Category: People

John Muir: Nature’s Gifted Scribe

Sierra Club founder John Muir was extraordinary, not only for his devotion to preserving nature’s wilderness, but for his eloquence in articulating its grandeur. An example:

Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. The Song of God, sounding on forever (from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir).

All told, he would publish 300 articles and 10 major books, not bad for someone who nearly lost his sight in a work accident.

One of his closest friends was President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903, they would hike wilderness terrain together for two months. Inspired by Muir, Roosevelt designated 230 million acres of public land, including Yosemite and four other national parks and 18 national monuments, for preservation.

Earlier, in 1867, at age 29, Muir walked 1000 miles from Indiana to Florida, taking along only sugar and bread, buttressed by wild berries. (Muir never weighed more than 148 pounds. ) You can read an account of his journey: A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). Excerpt:

Though alligators and snakes naturally repel us, they are no mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, un-depraved and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.

John Muir was one of those rare people that cross our pathway in life’s journey, keenly sentient of life’s best values and eager to share. Of all the nature writers I’ve imbibed, I’ve not found his equal for rendering nature’s transcendent allure with lyrical cadence that informs, moves, and underscores its mystery and  moods, culminating in an elixir for healing both body and soul.

All good nature writing may well begin with Muir.

—rj

 

 

A Profound Influence: My Debt to Tolstoy

I’ve had this fever to devour books since I was a child.
It began when my brother, David, returned from the army and gave me Huckleberry Finn to read. I was eight.

There was this small news store on Philadelphia’s busy Girard Avenue in Fishtown. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I’d often stop there on the way back from elementary school or in summer time, when I roamed the city as a street urchin, sometimes poking my nose where it didn’t belong.

They had this big box filled with what were called Classics Illustrated, which featured comic-style adaptations of literary classics. Founded by the Kanter family in 1941, Classic Illustrated made it into the 21st century.

I’d fish out comics featuring works like Swiss Family Robinson, Moby Dick, Kidnapped, Mutiny on the Bounty, Oliver Twist. They went for no more than a nickel and there were lots of them.

I enjoyed them so much, I didn’t want them to end. This led me to the Montgomery Street library, where I would read their originals. By age 12, I had read scores of literary works. By the way, that library still exists.

Of all the writers I’ve read over the years, Tolstoy stands out head and shoulders above all others, influencing me profoundly. By age 13, I had read War and Peace and at 15, Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy taught me empathy for the poor, disavowal of violence, restraint from eating meat, to live simply and love my fellows.

Tolstoy’s great quest was to resolve life’s riddle: How should we live?

His quest became mine,

I loved his parabolic short stories. I think of The Death of Ivan Ilyich as among the most profound short stories I’ve ever read and taught it for many years.

Tolstoy’s writing creeps up on you. Though simply written, for Tolstoy shunned affectation, it’s the pulsating nuance generated by a passionate insistence that holds you to the end. Make no mistake. He aims to convert you.

Then there is his last novel, Resurrection, moving and powerful, a panorama of Russian life at the end of the nineteenth century. On the attack, he assails the injustices of a repressive, oligarchic society and the hypocrisy of its bulwark, the Russian Orthodox Church.

I wanted to read him in the original, so I studied Russian.

As a college prof, I taught seminars in Russian classics.

In 2001, I went to Russia and visited his lifelong residence at Yasnaya Polyana near Tula, 125 miles southeast of Moscow. I stood in silent tribute at his grave.


If there’s a Tolstoy book you should read sooner than later, my recommendation is The Kingdom of God is Within You.

Mahatma Gandhi, on reading it, exclaimed that he felt “overwhelmed”: “All the books given me … seemed to pale into insignificance.”

Tolstoy and Gandhi exchanged letters till Tolstoy’s death in 1910. Gandhi had also read Tolstoy’s hand-circulated “A Letter to a Hindu,” with its advocacy of love, not force, as the means to freeing India from British rule. We know the rest of the story.

I’m not interested in hagiography. Tolstoy had feet of clay. There existed his stormy marriage to Sofia and his moral intensity in combat with carnal appetites. He endowed his protagonist Anna Karenina with liabilities he despised in himself, annulling her quest for self-realization. In the novel, it’s Levin who Tolstoy aspires to be.

When the Bolshevik revolutionaries violently seized power in 1917, the five year Russian Civil War began. The Bolsheviks, coming upon the Yasnaya Polyana estate, did not blaze it to non-existence as was their wanton elsewhere. Tolstoy had freed his serfs long before the Czar. Dressing in peasant garb, he labored among them, and distributed his wealth.

When German troops approached the estate in their invasion of Russia, the Soviets loaded Tolstoy’s furnishings and manuscripts on a train into the Urals, safe-guarding them for posterity.

Today, Russia continues to revere Tolstoy, for he’s the Russian soul writ large. I never understood the deep spirituality of the Russian psyche until I was on Russian soil. You see it in their art: Bryullov, Kandinski, Aivazovsky. You hear it in their music: Tchaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov. You imbibe it not only through Tolstoy, but in Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. In Russia, poets are celebrities.

Russia is neither European nor Asian. It is itself.

Embraced by the universal human condition, Tolstoy nonetheless intensely sought to free himself from its shackles in pursuit of love, social equity, and non-violence: “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.”

I take him with me everyday.

–rj

Chris Hedges: Truthsayer


I’m always on the lookout for writers of unique talent with mastery of syntax, keen intellect, the ability to change minds, prose abounding in both beauty and resonance. They linger with you. They plant a seed.

Chris Hedges is one of these. Formerly with the New York Times (1990-2005), he currently writes a column for the ScheerPost, known for its thoughtful reporting and in-depth analysis.

Hedges was a 2002 recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, profiling the threat of the global terrorism network in the aftermath of 9/11.

He’s also served as a battlefield correspondent during the Bosnian and Kuwait interventions. It was Hedges who revealed the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

This morning I read his extended piece “Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong”
(January 29, 2023). Sobering, it should serve as a cautionary warning to an escalating conflict that shows signs of getting out-of-hand.

What I like is his even handedness. Non-partisan, he tells it as he sees it. Both Democrats and Republicans have much to answer for. America has been, sadly, an imperialist power, provoking conflicts with no resolution. Like once formidable Britain, its dominance continues to wane.

Hedges graduated as an English major from Colgate University, where he helped found a LGBT group, though a heterosexual. What motivates him is social justice for the marginalized.

Walking the talk, while a ministerial student at Harvard Divinity School, he chose to live in Boston’s inner city, Roxbury, pastoring a small church.

He took a leave of absence from his studies one year before graduating to learn Spanish in Bolivia. To widen his outreach, he turned to journalism, honing his craft by studying George Orwell’s political writings, subsequently writing freelance pieces for the Washington Post.

He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1983.

Reporting from Iraq during the Shiite uprising, he was taken prisoner, before being released a week later. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein offered a bounty to anyone killing him. Hedges was an eye-witness of Hussein’s massacre of several thousand Iraqi Kurds.

Hedges was awarded the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.

Hedges has suffered for his beliefs. He vehemently opposed the U.S. intervention in Iraq, leading to a NYT formal reprimand for “public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality.” Being the man he is, Hedges resigned: “…I have maintained what is most valuable to me, which is my integrity and my voice.”

Ordained a Presbyterian minister in 2014, he’s been teaching classes sponsored by Rutgers and Princeton in New Jersey prisons for ten years in addition to his journalism commitments.

He has authored six books.

Recently, I read his thoughtful piece on Marcel Proust, whom I regard as among our greatest literary talents. Hedges is no nerd. He loves the humanities and is a polished reader in Latin and Greek. Here’s a sample from his essay:

Art – literature, poetry, dance, theater, music, architecture, painting, sculpture – give the fragments of our lives coherence. Art gives expression to the intangible, nonrational forces of love, beauty, grief, mortality and the search for meaning. Without art, without imagination, our collective and individual pasts are disparate, devoid of context. Art opens us to awe and mystery. It wrestles with the transcendent.

Get all you can of Chris Hughes, a truly good man.

–rj

Unlearning Mt. Rushmore: Legacy of Injustice

I just downloaded the late Howard Zinn’s masterful A People’s History of the United States. You might say I’m divesting myself of the whitewash of American history handed down to me by a white culture.

As I write, Trump plans to visit Mt. Rushmore today, July 3, replete with flyover and fireworks, 7500 lottery selected attendees not observing social distancing, few wearing masks.  It sits upon sacred land, 1200 acres, stolen from the Lakota in violation of the Ft. Laramie Treaty (1868) following the discovery of gold in the Black Hills.

We know about Washington, Jefferson and Teddy. I didn’t know Lincoln ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862, the largest mass execution in American history, following their uprising. In the aftermath, the Dakota were expelled, their lands seized. Subsequently, the bodies of the executed, buried in a mass grave, were exhumed and used for cadavers.

The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, held racist sentiments and was previously known for his earlier contribution to Stone Mountain (he was dismissed from the project for his competing interest in Rushmore) near Atlanta with its gargantuan effigies of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.

While not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he supported their views. In one of his letters, he complained of a “mongrel horde” contaminating the “Nordic purity” of the West. In another, he wrote of his successor at Stone Mountain, “They got themselves a Jew.”

–RJoly

A Brief Life Lived Well: Kevyn Alcoin’s Testament to Beauty

You probably never heard of Kevyn Aucoin. I hadn’t either till just recently. How many good people we miss in the stream of life, despite the myriad strands of humanity linking all of us.

Kevyn became famous as a celebrity makeup artist to scores of celebrity women like Cher, Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Liza Minnelli. As an artisan, for that’s what he really was, he sought not to hide blemishes, but to put women in touch with their inner beauty, empowering them. As he put it, “Beauty is about perception, not about makeup. I think the beginning of all beauty is knowing and liking oneself. You can’t put on makeup, or dress yourself, or do your hair with any sort of fun or joy if you’re doing it from a position of correction.”

The journey was never easy for Kevyn, who discovered he was gay at age six. Viewed as different by classmates, he was often bullied and sometimes beaten.

In those days, not really so long ago, women felt uncomfortable having a man do their makeup. Ultimately, as happens frequently, his talent made room for him and he became legendary. He would write several salient, greatly in-demand books on makeup, do TV interviews, and make cameo appearances in several TV shows.

Kevyn persevered daily, though suffering chronic back pain from earliest days, and was later diagnosed with a rare pituitary tumor. While the surgery removing the tumor proved successful, Kevyn’s acute pain continued. In 2002, age 40, he passed away, succumbing to liver and kidney failure from acetaminophen toxicity.

You may like viewing a nearly two hour video documentary, Larger Than Life: The Kevyn Alcoin Story or reading Kerry Diamond’s memorial biography, Kevyn Alcoin a Beautiful Life: The Success, Struggles and Beauty Secrets of a Legendary Makeup Artist.

I wanted to share Kevyn with you, as I found him inspiring in his courage and tenacity, often against all odds, and I think you will too. I leave you with his memorable words for living life in every circumstance:

“Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain… To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices – today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it.”

–rj

And a Child Shall Lead Them

Image result for greta thunberg

Today, May 24, was another walk-out-of-school day for thousands of children in 110 countries, urging their governments to take quick and meaningful action to avert environmental catastrophe. If only the politicians, and us, for that matter, would listen.

It’s certainly, if nothing else, gotten the climate crisis considerable media attention. Of course, it’s 16-year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden who started it all and is featured on the cover of TIME’s current issue as one of the most influential young people in the world. Just nine months ago, Greta stood alone outside the Swedish Parliament, carrying a sign proclaiming SKOLSTREIK FOR KLIMATET (School Strike for Climate).

Seemingly a brave, but naive and futile gesture of a teenager, it’s become a planted seed grown into a world-wide groundswell of young people taking climate change seriously. And why shouldn’t they, since their generation and their children will be affected most?

I like the way she articulates our crisis: “I believe that once we start behaving as if we were in an existential crisis, then we can avoid a climate and ecological breakdown. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We have to start today.”

In March, Greta’s singular protest kindled an estimated 1.6 million young people turnout, encompassing some 133 countries.

Seems she’s even converted her own parents. Both have followed her into veganism as a way of contributing less CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Greta’s mother, an opera singer, now travels by train rather than by air. Greta would probably love speaking in America, but since there’s no train track across the Atlantic, guess she’d have to resort to a freighter; that is, just so long as it wasn’t carrying oil barrels.

Imagine my surprise that not everyone admires this green movement Joan of Arc, one commentator dubbing her a “millenarian weirdo”:

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies (Brian O’Neill, wattsupwiththat.com).

I should point out that O’Neill writes for a smart aleck anti-climate change blog, so I can’t take him seriously, given the estimated 97% of scientists who embrace the reality of climate change and the humans factor for its origin.

Others use Greta’s Asperger’s Syndrome against her in myriad personal attacks, mocking her monotone delivery and fixed stare. I like Greta’s nimble response: “Being different is a gift.”

My heart pounds for you, Greta! I have friends who exalt in nature, yet never join that needed protest to universalize our climate crisis into action that saves both nature and ourselves.

You’ve been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Is there anybody more deserving?

–r. joly

A weekend Romp with Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, 1968

My  daughter has been visiting us the last several days in connection with her Amazon conference in Albuquerque. Since we moved to Santa Fe from Kentucky last July, she’s been curious to see what drew us here, so we’ve been showing her Santa Fe, “the city different,” and nearby vistas like Bandelier National Monument with its splendid canyons and Pueblo artifacts.

Saturday, we took in the local Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, truly a best buy even at $13 a ticket, housing a generous number of her paintings, so many in fact, that the museum rotates their display. Founded in 1997, the museum lures many visitors, heedless of the calendar, and includes videos and lectures reviewing her life and artistry. It also serves as a major research center of modernist American art.

While a deservedly famous artist, initiates may find O’Keeffe often beyond reach since much of her work is abstract. As she tellingly phrased it, “I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it.”

O’Keeffe’s considerable achievement—more than 2000 paintings— can understandably overwhelm. The consummate artist, it seems she devoted nearly every waking hour to her art, mastering many sub-genres, i.e., oil, charcoal, water color, and even with these, ever evolving.

Though I came to know her like many others as a landscape painter, flowers were a favorite subject and she would return to floral themes throughout her life. In all her art, whether of flowers, architecture, or rock formations, she concerned herself with extracting the minutiae hidden to most of us:

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

While not professing any creed, an essentially spiritual essence endows her canvas reminiscent of her beloved Goya, a sense of fusion between self and landscape, the ephemeral tempered by infinity, the primacy of sentiment over reason.

Unfortunately, as she aged, her vision progressively deteriorated as a result of macro-degeneration, ultimately reducing her to peripheral vision and compelling her to seek help in mixing colors. When the time came that she couldn’t paint, she turned to clay sculpturing, molding what she could know longer fully see.

On Sunday we took the ninety minute road trip to Ghost Ranch, where she spent her springs and summers painting just maybe New Mexico’s most exquisite red rock mesas:

Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’. It is a place I have painted before … even now I must do it again.

Ghost Ranch, locale for a number of Hollywood films and now a Presbyterian USA retreat center, tumbles across 21,000 acres.  It had been formerly a dude ranch hosting the wealthy.  O’Keeffe purchased twelve acres of it in 1940, now off limits to visitors.

You can, however, see her winter residence, owned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, fifteen miles down the road in nearby Abiquiu. A designated historical site, O’Keeffe purchased the dilapidated 5000 foot colonial Spanish compound in 1945 and devoted three years to lovingly restoring it.

Image result for georgia o'keeffe abiquiu house

Her principal residence and studio, she lived here for 39 years, often painting from inside her bedroom window looking out on the Chama River valley.

As an adjunct to your visit, I’d highly recommend Lynes and Lopez’ fulsome Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. The tour lasts about an hour, costs $40, and includes her large garden. Yes, she excelled at this as well! It’s a tour Karen and I await eagerly.

O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 at the insistence of Taos art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and, like so many other artists, fell in love with its stark landscape and ubiquitous solitude offering space from the constraints and snobbery of the New York artisan community to paint freely, returning seasonally for twenty years before making the state her permanent home in 1949 three years after the death of her husband, the renowned photographer and art connoisseur, Alfred Stieglitz.

She died on March 6, 1986 at age 98 in Santa Fe’s St. Vincent Hospital, her ashes scattered at her request on the top of Pedernal Mountain, a beloved vista she viewed daily at Ghost Ranch and frequent subject.

On our way back to Santa Fe, we took lunch at the charming Abiquiú Inn. A few steps away, you’ll find the recently opened O’Keeffe Welcome Center with its helpful staff, where you can book your tour and purchase O’Keeffe mementos.

–rj

 

NFL Hypocrisy

The media has been all over this story of Sunday’s NFL response to Trump’s
provocative tweet that NFL team owners should fire players who don’t stand proud when the national anthem is played: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired.”

Even NFL commissioner Roger Goodell got in his licks at Trump, responding that “The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture.”

All fine and good, but the NFL’s last minute conversion to players’ right to freedom of speech reeks with blatant hypocrisy. In July 2016, six Dallas police officers were killed in a sniper ambush. As a symbol of community support for police officers, the Dallas Cowboys asked permission from the NFL to wear a helmet “Arm in Arm” decal. The NFL refused. Where was the “unity” then?

Meanwhile, NFL teams continue to discriminate against free agent Colin Kaepernick, who started the take-a-knee protests during the anthem. Quarterbacks have been subsequently signed without ever having thrown a football in an NFL game.

Now’s the time for NFL teams to walk the talk and return this former Super Bowl quarterback with a 90.3 rating to the playing field. Sooner of later, some team’s going to suffer an injured quarterback. Voila!

–rj

Love for All Seasons

 

“I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crime.” Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017)

China isn’t usually a quotidian staple of the Westerner’s mindset. Let’s face it: our culture operates in Eurocentric mode, which may ultimately hint of a latent bias unrecognized in ourselves, a sense of smugness that they’ve little to offer us, save maybe for bargain-priced goods at your local box store.

Sadly, the death of leading dissident, Liu Xiaobo, on July 13 of this year from liver cancer was inevitably passed over by most Westerners and the media, which is a pity, for he graced our earth with a loving compassion, championing basic values promoting human dignity and the sanctity of individual lives.

A writer, poet and literary critic, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010. Unfortunately, his chair at the reward ceremony in Oslo would be empty. A year before, he had just begun serving an 11-year sentence for sedition against the People’s Republic of China. An outspoken critic of the Communist government, he campaigned for freedom of speech, free elections, and basic human rights.

If you google his name, you’ll find numerous links to salient quotations that speak to the decency of this man, who lived life courageously, and at ultimate cost, for his outspoken criticism of Beijing’s ubiquitous hegemony.

Among his quotations, I like this one best for its vibrant reiteration of one of humanity’s most requisite needs and fundamental rights:

Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.

We live in a time of understandable exasperation with a new Washington regime, with many calling for shutting down views they find untenable, if not despicable. We find truth, promote dignity, and enhance human freedom, however, when we allow discussion in the market place of free exchange.

I don’t want to be under the aegis of thought police, whether Right or Left, and I don’t think you do either. I’m suspicious of all peripheries.

Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, is also a remarkable denizen in the portals of courage. Gifted poet and photographer, she married Liu in 1996 at the time of his incarceration in a reeducation labor camp for having urged peaceful diplomacy toward Taiwan.

Inveterate in her love and loyalty for her husband, she paid him a prison visit shortly after the Nobel Prize. Subsequently placed under house arrest, the government denied her access to cell phone and Internet use, while permitting only a handful of approved visitors.

Presently, we don’t know her whereabouts, although the government says that she’s free.

Two poems presented here pulsate with the salient love they shared as husband and wife and are especially moving in that they were written in contexts of extreme duress.

The first is “Morning,” which Liu penned before 2000 and dedicated to his wife; the second, “Road to Darkness,” Lia wrote shortly before her husband’s death. Both poems have been translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and appear in the current issue of The New York Review of Books (September 28, 2017).

The poignant irony is that these two stalwarts of freedom are unknown in China, all mention of them having been scrubbed from social media.

                 Morning
–For Zia

Between the gray walls
and a burst of chopping sounds,
morning comes, bundled and sliced,
and vanishes with the paralyzed souls
of the chopped vegetables.

Light and darkness pass through my pupils.
How do I know the difference? 
Sitting in the rust, I can’t tell 
if it’s the shine on the shackles in the jail
or the natural light of Nature
from outside the walls.
Daylight betrays everything, the splendid sun
stunned.

Morning stretches and stretches in vain.
You are far away__
But not to far to collect the love
of my night.

            Road to Darkness
—For Xiaobo

Sooner or later you will leave me, one day
and take the road to darkness
alone.

I pray for the moment to reappear
so I can see it better,
as if from memory.
I wish that I, astonished, could glow, my body
in full bloom of light for you.

But I can’t make it except
clenching my fists, not letting
the strength,
not even a little bit of it, slip
through my fingers.

She showed us the way: Reflections on Mary Tyler Moore

LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 08: Actress Mary Tyler Moore attends NBC's taping of 'Betty White's 90th Birthday: A Tribute to America's Golden Girl' at Millennium Biltmore Hotel on January 8, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 08: Actress Mary Tyler Moore attends NBC’s taping of ‘Betty White’s 90th Birthday: (Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images)

A few days ago we lost Mary Tyler Moore, not only an icon from the entertainment world, but a remarkable human being blessed with talent, beauty,  and an infectious smile.  Endowed with relentless fortitude, she survived for so long the debilitating carnage diabetes often inflicts upon its victims.

She wasn’t just a talented actor (seven Emmys and an Academy Award nomination), but a real-life hero, setting an example for all us.

You’d never have surmised from her TV dominance in the 60s and 70s (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and (Mary Tyler Moore Show) her raging battle with diabetes, which ultimately would take her life.

Diabetes can occur as Type I or Type 2. In the former, your pancreas doesn’t produce insulin and you have to resort to insulin injections several times daily to survive. In type 2, your pancreas produces insulin, but either not enough or the body just can’t utilize it efficiently.

Both kinds are progressive and incurable, though with weight control, healthy diet, medication, and frequent exercise, you may be able to manage it, forestalling its many potential complications such as heart and kidney disease, blindness, infections, amputations, and even dementia.

Moore was diagnosed with diabetes Type 1 at age 33 in the course of blood work connected with a miscarriage. In her 2009 memoir, Growing Up Again, she would detail her forty year struggle against this insidious illness, donating the book’s proceeds to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), which she served as International Chair for many years. “I want others to learn how I fell down and how I picked myself up.”

The truth is she had been doing this her whole life. We never really know what life has in store for us, as Oedipus learned in Sophocles’ monumental play of 2500 years ago. For some of us, our fate can seem especially unfair in its harshness and singularity, raising the perpetual inquiry, “Why do good people suffer?”

Moore’s mother was an alcoholic, and so was Mary until she overcame it, prescient of her valiant struggle against a much bigger adversary.

Sometimes we find consolation in another parent, but Dad proved both distant and unloving.

Then, in what breaks a mother’s heart, her 23 year old son, Ritchie, died from an accidental gun shot to the head.

She would have two unhappy marriages, until finally striking happiness in her 33 year marriage to cardiologist, Robert Levine.

In 2011, she underwent brain surgery.

Though she lived to age 80, she might well have lived longer, and happier years, had she been free of this debilitating disease. In her last several years, she suffered from declining vision, kidney and heart issues, and Alzheimer’s.

In her final days, she had come down with pneumonia, a frequent consequence of a diminished immune system, and was on a respirator for a week.  Ultimately, she was removed from life support.

 

With Bernadette Peters
With Bernadette Peters

Short in stature and slight in build, ever humble and always compassionate, she fiercely loved both people and animals, practiced vegetarianism, and gave time to both diabetes and animal advocacy.

Just how did she manage to cope so long and so bravely against her antagonist”? What lay behind her heroism?

In mindfulness therapy, there’s an acronym known as RAIN that may explain how she did it, giving hope to all of us in life’s hard places:

R—Recognition
A—Acceptance
I— Investigation
N—Non-identification

R:  Initially, Moore hid her illness.  Later, she  made it known.

A:  She allowed it to be what it is with all its dissonance in both mind and body.  Mindfulness doesn’t contend; it listens.

I:   She explored methods of ameliorating it through diet, exercise, and medication and ways of nurturing others with like illness.

N:  We are not the sum of our emotions and thoughts.  Our  real Self lies beyond and can provide cognitive catharsis.  Acknowledging her fate, she lived outside the parameters of self-absorption in unstinting, compassionate activism, promoting awareness and hope for her fellow sufferers.

Thank you Mary, for the nobility of your life, its example and inspiration; its quiet dignity, yet marshaled bravery in the darkness of the night.

—rj

%d bloggers like this: