A Byrd's Eye View

That was swell.
Thanks.

I remember her at Pomona College. We had many great conversations. She was a character. Wow! She's gone!

I want to say thank you for the video and thank you to all Byrd's friends who wrote about her here on this blog. It is a shock to discover that she has moved on, but I believe she is with her mother Grace now, an angel if there ever was one. From the mud at the bottom of the pool, the lotus flower blooms; so her spirit lives on and rises above sorrows.
She was uniquely talented. She could recite much of Hamlet by heart. During her time at Pomona, she studied dowry customs in Greece and German in Munich. She led students groups in England and Sweden. She worked on the crew of a photo safari in Africa. She was a writer on the Dating Game and she did foley work on the film Fanny & Alexander. A brilliant student of the law and life. I wish you could have seen your birthday cards this September. Bless you, Wendy Elizabeth Byrd Ehlmann.

As Daisaku Ikeda said in his dialogue with Hazel Henderson "Nichiren wrote that wrath can be either good or bad. Self-centered anger generates evil, but wrath at social injustice becomes the driving force for reform. Strong language that censures and combats a great evil often awakens adverse reaction from society, but this must not intimidate those who believe they are right. The lion is a lion because he [SHE] roars." Daisaku Ikeda, from "Planetary Citizenship, page 40-1

So if you belief you are right, you "must not [be] intimidate[d]"

Keep roaring!

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This has been a hard thing for me to realize that Byrd is gone. I haven't seen her in person for many years, but our connection remained strong. It has been great to catch up with her via the blog, but it only makes me want more and to hear her laugh again...
We are doing a little event at the wash this weekend and I will post some photos later as well as a link to an excellent song that was recorded in her honor...

I recently got the very sad news of Byrd's departure from our world.

My association with her dates back to 1974, when we were part of the same group of fledgling freshmen and -women at Pomona College. She blew my mind the way she probably did everybody's with her energy and her wit, her brilliance and what seemed like her rage. The thing that most impressed me over the few years I was in and out of her orbit was how much of that rage seemed to mellow into sweetness as the years went on. Her big heart I knew about, and she seemed to embody the light inside more and more during the time I knew her. She never lost the ability to magnetize a room, or to make the occupants laugh their asses off. I wish I still had that letter she wrote me in the summer of '77 in which she quoted this most-memorable poem:

My name is Leonardo
I am a retardo
I live in the steeple
And watch all the people
And they say, "Hello!"
And I say, "Hello!"
And they say, "What's your name?"
And I say,
My name is Leonardo...

then mused that we probably wouldn't be discussing it in our Survey of English Literature class.

I know little of what happened to her life post-Pomona, but one thing I'm sure of is that no one she crossed paths with will ever forget her.

Jean mentioned she'd be posting (thanks!) a song I recorded as my small contribution to her memorial. Though it's an explicitly Christian song (and I share Byrd's identification with Buddhism as my own spiritual path), the sentiments of joy the song expresses in bringing a life full circle within the circle of all those we have loved and shared that life with seemed to fit Byrd's life and all the lives she enriched to a T.

Fly free, Wendy Byrd.