Dolly, Wendell & Gloria: May Their Gifts Go On

In the last few weeks, a herd of the lionhearted have died. This wild combination includes the goddess of country music, the sage of earth-centric prose and poetry, and the icon of feminism in word and deed, namely Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem. (Had I world enough and time, I could also write about Tim Curry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Robin Morgan, to name a few, who have also died recently.)

"The gift goes on," writer Lewis Hyde wrote in his book, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. So I wanted to name some of each of their creative and spirited gifts.

Dolly Parton: There are thousands of good things said by and that can be said about Dolly Parton, but I'll just focus on this one: She was able to stand up for what she believed, which especially included people marginalized or downright attacked for being who they are. And she could do this without seemingly alienating people of vastly different perspectives.

She spoke out often for queer and trans people, for women being who they were meant to be outside of strictly prescribed roles, for often-forgotten or put-down low-income rural people, for people of color, and spectacularly for children.

How did she do this? Through her actions and through "saying it short," something I've learned from Harriet Lerner's wise writing. Instead of giving a big speech about Black Lives Matter, she said, "And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!" She also plowed the royalties she made from Whitney Houston recording "I Will Always Love You" back into the Black community by buying a big office complex in a Black neighborhood in Nashville (as well as in many acts of philanthropy), saying it was the house Whitney built.

In a polarized country and world, she garnered love and respect from people in just about all pockets because her generosity and vision went beyond idealism. Her Imagination Library distributed over 300 million books to children, sending one a month out to each child from birth until they turned five, encouraging children to read, and by extension, to grow up into people who could think for themselves. "My Dolly books," says the granddaughter of a friend.

Wendell Berry: When I discovered Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture in the early 1980s, I landed in a new understanding of what truly feeds and sustains us, body and soul, culture and land, in this world. From there, I tumbled joyfully into his poetry and more of his prose, vastly abundant, always down to earth, and brimming with uncommon wisdom of how to live in this world.

I share here the quote of his Ken and I used at our wedding from what Berry wrote in Standing by Words: Essays:

"The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown. We must not be misled by the procedures of experimental thought: in life, in the world, we are never given two known results to choose between, but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is."

These words speak not only of literal marriage of any real commitment we make to anything -- to a friendship, to land we love, to a vocation or avocation. When joining ourselves with any calling, we are always joining ourselves to great mystery because, of course, that's what deep life is made of.

Gloria Steinem: Steinem embodied one of her quotes, "You are the leader you've been waiting for." Her unconventional life took root early, from being the primary caregiver for her mentally-ill mother at a young age, not attending school for big hunks of times (and seeing it as a plus because she was less indoctrinated), and even not marrying until she was 66, and then to David Bale (who would die within three years from cancer) at the home of Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Another prolific writer (in addition to Parton and Berry), Steinem wrote so widely on so much that it's hard to land on one quote especially essential, so I share a little bouquet of Steinem quotes:

• “Nothing will happen automatically. Change depends on what you and I do every day.”

• “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”

• “If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?”

• “Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”

• “Somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child — a true self who is waiting.”

• “Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”

• “Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.”

• “Feminism isn’t called the longest revolution for nothing.”

• “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

• “This is the wisdom: If we bless our bodies, they will bless us.”

May they all rest in peace and power. May her memories continue to be a blessing as their lives certainly were. May their gifts go on and on.