James Gregory White

1948-1994

Greg White was a remarkable man.  You had only to tell people about him and they knew right away. 

One of his strengths was his freedom from the need for possessions that entangle the rest of us.l   Greg didn't need machines to complete him, toys to distract him, because he could live within himself.  But he could use tools when they were appropriate.  He could master any sailboat and he won races in Norway and Italy and he got to the trials for the Olympic sailing team.  But after he won his races he didn't need to sail any more. He was not dependent on sailing to live a good life.

When Greg needed to look like a businessman, as he did for a while after getting his MBA at Harvard, he could dress like one in what he called his Harvard MBA disguise, but he didn't need clothes to make him a man.  In the same way he didn't need to catch a particular airplane.  One of my favorite Greg stories tells of his waiting for a plane at the gate, but being so engrossed in Moby Dick that he missed hearing the boarding call.  He didn't worry; he had confidence that another plane would be along soon enough, confidence that the world would wait.

Greg had confidence in his friends too.  He knew that when a friend promised to meet him in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge in five years, the friend would be there.  But if by chance the friend had failed to show, Greg would have understood; he was a person who forgave easily. Greg had so much confidence in his parents' love that he knew they would accept him after they found out that he was gay as they had accepted him before.  He trusted that the world would go well enough for him, there there would always be parents, airplanes, jobs, friends, money.  He didn't have the illusions that he would do well in the sense that he would have what more conventional people hope for, or feel entitled to, but well enough for him to survive with what was central to him intact.  It was this sense of himself that enabled him to cope with AIDS as he did.

.Details of a memorial service have not yet been finalized

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Just as Greg was able to give up sailing, he was able when it became necessary to give up his art and his craft and his business.  His art had shown part of him, allowed his spirit to manifest itself in physical things, but his spirit, the divine spark within him, still glowed even when it could not manifest itself in anything physical.  He could still love those about him.  He could still take in the world as the TV presented it to him and interpret this world that he understood with impressive clarity to those who would listen.

Greg's understanding of the world was deep because just as he needed no surplus of material things to convince him he was alive, he also needed no illusions of that ideology and conventional religion and institutional loyalty supply those of us who are not as deeply established within themselves as Greg was.  Greg had come a long way from the college student who felt a young man suspicious because he was only a Unitarian instead of being a member of the Reformed Church.  He could see through those who were weaker than he was and forgive them because, for all his modesty, he knew that he could not expect of others what he could himself do.  He was the captain of his soul as of his sailboat, the kind of captain who knew, who believed, according to the Chinese sage, La Tsu (whose Tao te Ching remained one of Greg's favorite books 'til the end) that

The good traveler leaves no track behind;/ The good speaker speaks without blemish or flaw;/ The good counter doesn't use tallies or chips;/ The good closer of doors does so without bolt or lock.../ The good tier of knots ties without rope or cord. . .

Therefore the Sage is constantly good at saving men and never rejects anyone;/ And with things, he never rejects useful goods. . .

Therefore the Sage dwells in nonactive affairs and practices the wordless teaching./ The ten thousand thins arise, but he doesn't begin them;/ He acts on their behalf, but he doesn't make them dependant;/ He accomplishes his tasks, but he doesn't dwell on them that they therefore do not leave him.

One of Greg's favorite book during this last year was Black Elk Speaks.  He read and re-read the opening chapters, telling the story of the sacred peace pipe given to his people by which they might make offerings to the spirit of the World, then recounting the "Great Vision" given to Black Elk by the Grandfathers when he was a child.  First, of the pipe:

A very long time ago. . .two scouts were out looking for bison; and when they came to the top of a high hill and looked north, they saw something coming a long way off, and when it came closer they cried out, "It is a woman!", and it was. . . . When she came still closer, they saw that she wore a  fine white buckskin dress, that her hair was very long and that she was young and very beautiful.

Then the woman spoke. . .: "You shall go home and tell your people that I am coming and that a big tepee shall be built for me in the center of the nation."  And the man went quickly and told the people, who did at once as they were told; and there they waited for the sacred woman.  And after a while she came, very beautiful and singing, and as he went into the tepee this is what she sang:

"With visible breath I am walking./ A voice I am sending as I walk. / In a sacred manner I am walking. / With visible tracks I am walking. / In a sacred manner I walk."

And as she sang, there came from her mouth a white cloud that was good to smell.  Then she gave something to the chief, an it was a pipe with a bison calf carved on one side to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, and with twelve eagle feathers hanging from the stem to mean the sky and the twelve moons, and these were tied with a grass that never breaks.  "Behold," she said.  "With this you shall multiply and be a good nation.  Nothing but good shall come from it.  Only the hands of the good shall take care of it and the bad shall not even see it."  Then she sang again and went out of the tepee; and as the people watched her going, suddenly it was a white bison galloping away and snorting, and soon it was gone.

At the height of Black Elk' own vision:

. . .All the universe was silent, listening; and then the great black stallion raised his voice and sang. . . .  His voice was not loud, but it went all over the universe and filled it.  There was nothing that did not hear, and it was more beautiful than anything can be.  It was so beautiful that nothing anywhere could keep from dancing.  The virgins danced, and all the circled horses.  The leaves on the trees, the grasses on the hills and in the valleys, the waters in the creeks and in the rivers and the lakes, the four-legged and the two-legged and the wings of the air -- all danced tgther to the music of the stallion's song.

. . .I looked ahead an saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens.  Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whoe hoop of the world.  And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. . . .And I saw that it was holy.

On the day before Greg left us, he was deeply delighted by the news that on that day, for the first time in sixty-one years, a white bison calf had been born in the United States.  The last thing Greg said before he went to sleep that night was "Isn't it wonderful, about the white bison."  He did not need to wake from that dream, where "suddenly it was a white bison galloping away and snorting, and soon it was gone."

All who knew Greg must mourn him because some one of great value has departed the world.  But all who mourn will also know that contact with the spark within him has enabled and will continue to enable the spark within them to burn more brightly.

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem (#43) that seems appropriate:

Could live -- did live --/ Could die -- did die --/Could smile upon the whole / Through faith in one he had not, / To introduce his soul.

Could go from scene familiar / To  an untraversed spot-- /Could contemplate the journey/ With unpuzzled heart --

Such trust had one among us / Among us not today -- / We who saw the launching / Never sailed the Bay!

TT   beAA

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