In three days,

               come the New Moon, 

                                      Michael "Maxie" Sheppard

                                                                   will be 40 days gone.



Maxie, beloved, and I mean beloved, friend to several of us in the Zaadz/GAIA online community, gave himself to us, to me, as precious few can.



His obituary: as appeared in the Alaskan paper, Homer News.  


His blog: here on GAIA.




We are all richer for his having been among us, indebted to the wild visionary generousity of spirit he brought to our meeting here.





The following is an example of one of our more public exchanges, comments on an entry in this blog.


...about 1 hour later maxie said 
 

Amazing, Kerry.  This piece of son-as-father-to-the-man.  How old were you then?  19 - 20?  What a course to set so young!  I could see myself, having followed such trail that led you to this writing, having written it just so and then as me, proceeded to defy it, to not chop the wood and carry the water of art with such conviction in mind.  This doesn't seem to have been the case with you.  I ignored that part, until now, but didn't miss much of the rest.  You have perhaps missed some of what I have seen, or perhaps not seen it yet.  I can tell you that it does not matter, this part that might have been missed by you, as it, for me, though not regrettable, was still traffic away from the bridge.

Through this writing, I have come to remember my own youthfully "serious" musings and how many of them were subjugated to the immediacy of pleasure and quick reward.  Now, through such painful wanderings, I feel returned to the morning shore where the muse is still the same but somehow the voice is no longer stilted.

love,
Michael

print | permalink | delete about 1 hour later jikishin said  

So it is , Michael,

I put this up and stepped away from the screen, walked across the house thinking of you.

I'm feeling a 'late on-set' of the implications of that early reckoning, re-warding the author with an attention suspended in a long and defuse exile from those convictions.

How happy I am that we are at this, respectively, poised at the habit of begining, following through, picking up where we were left off at our own further entering the world as it further entered us. 

love indeed,  K

print | permalink | delete about 2 hours later maxie said  

Amen, dear brother, amen.

Forty years ago today I sat before a Zenith black and white television set, with red magic marker and glossy white paper, drawing the images being sent live from the Apollo 11 moon landing.


            


Those sketches were for my godmother, April Oursler Armstrong (related to Neil, perhaps, only in my five-year-old mind).

April was the "Dear Abby" for the Tertiary Franciscans, with a long running advice column in the Order's magazine, The Franciscan Herald. An issue of The Saturday Evening Post, one with Ayn Rand on the cover, had run April's article, "Don't Want 'Well-Adjusted' Children".

It was her wedding anniversary. Her husband, my godfather, had just run for mayor against the father of whose estate now funds Vast Sky.

What an impact those images of the earth from space have had on us since! So much of our emergent values revolve around our being able to view the planet whole. Today we scale like none before us. I take for granted that I zoom-in to that scene on a living room floor all those years ago, and back out to beyond the earth's horizons, today. From that first nuclear family, to the planetary one.

With the rise of the global commons and even initiatives such as this site, we see all around us the evidence of the influence of those whole earth views, and all the meaning found therein.