Remebrances of remarkable individuals I’ve known whose lives illuminate important truths.
This is the second post about Fidel, a non-human person who is the third in my series about Meetings With Remarkable People. Fidel is now over 18 years old — about 100, in human years. Most people think of cats his age as dodderers, but Fidel has all his...
The third remarkable person in this series is not usually considered a “person” at all. But I and my family have always considered his kind as people (see photo of Willow Hecht, below), and he has for 18 years been my friend and mentor in the art of living....
Nina practiced “the art of dying.” She had started dying many years before I met her, even if her body didn’t manage it until 2002. She saw it as Alan Watts did: “Dying is an art. It’s also an adventure.” One example was that, during the time I knew...
The lovely memorial page to Nina (www.ninagitana.allegre.ca) asserts that “to a Taoist, she was a Taoist, to a Sufi she was a Sufi, to an Oglala Sioux she was an Oglala Sioux.” I don’t agree. When I knew her, Taoism was one of my core sensibilities. I had read...
Nina’s chosen path was paradoxical. On one hand, in her every word and gesture, she was a devotee of Kirpal Singh, whom she had met and with whom she carried on a passionate spiritual love affair. In this she resembled Rumi, the great Sufi poet and mystic, who met...
This is the second entry in a series about my meetings with Nina Gitana, a truly remarkable person. Rick and I parked near the road, walked past some large boulders, down into a stream bed that probably once had a bridge over it, then up again to Nina’s place. ...
Bill Lederer would probably not have gotten along with Nina Gitana. Where he celebrated life’s physical manifestations, the million million narratives in the world, she strove only to leave them behind. Where he was profane and lusty, she was soft-spoken and chaste. Bill, despite having worked in the rigid hierarchy...
Eventually, Bill got old and died. He just couldn’t help it. Didn’t make it to 138. In the long run, I think I failed him as a friend. At one point, when he knew he was getting downright ancient, he asked my wife and me to come live on...
This is the fourth post on my friendship with William J. Lederer, exploring different dimensions of this unusual, remarkable man. I think Bill knew my type: the artistic, mystic type who lived on the edge and was always broke. So to his long list of projects, he added helping...
This third post about William Lederer relates one of Bill’s most charming tales: his writing tutelage under Ernest Hemingway. The basic facts are verifiable: Yes, Bill did spend time in 1940 and 1941 on a gunboat in the Yangtze River, and during that period Hemingway did indeed accompany his...