Rest in Peace, Dear Odetta

Oooh! Odetta was amazing. Thank you for sharing this remembrance. Wow.

Thanks Mar., …for letting me know, for bringing that truth-force battle hymn here.

Those acoustics are so familiar to me. Many an evening I'd had my soul fired up and fed in that space. While listening to Odetta, her call to us, I remembered a huge globe, out in the center where her wheelchair rolled, and joining cultural, scientific and business leaders from the Soviet Union and the US as they danced and sang in a circle, holding hands at the end of the Soviet-American Citizen's Summit, almost at the end of the ColdWar. It was in that space that I first heard Desmond Tutu, The Dalai Lama, and first presented my own art publically.

Odetta and my Zen teacher knew each other in the 60s and he considered her a friend decades later. When she came through New Mexico a few years ago I missed her.

Now I have a glimpse of her as the essence that age boils us down to, the simple power, pure and ripe, after all the heat and weight of a million ringers distilled a real human out from under the pain and pleasure of loving much.

K