Marcia's Musings: Paying Tribute
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Today, I pay tribute to a man who learned to live in “the world of and”, who embraced change, which is a meaningful space in the philosophy of yoga, particularly in the therapeutic approach of Yoga Nidra, and in Buddhist psychology. For years, David Beehler crafted and mailed his family’s holiday letter. Why? Because he loved to write. Those letters wove stories of his underpinnings, what informed him, why he was what he was and the way he lived. As he grew from boyhood to manhood, he created personal mantras that sustained him and informed the lives of his family and others before he recently died, not yet seventy and way too soon.
Dave and his wife, Tina, lived in “the old neighborhood”, as many of us call it, in the days when we were all young (or younger), raising families and building the community that would become the bustling, huge Lakeville we know now, yet only 17,000 people strong then. (I’m being advised by Microsoft as I write this that 17,000 people is about the number that can fit into Madison Square Garden, just in case you seek a reference point.)
Tina and Dave later moved into a more rural area of Lakeville. By then, though, we’d come to know each other well as we watched our children grow, succeed, and falter, too, as all children do. We sat next to each other at swim events, greeted each other’s kids at the front door on Halloween, and came to respect each other. Later, Tina began her yoga practice at my first studio on Kenwood Trail, and on December 3, 2007, she stepped into Green Lotus when it first opened only a few blocks from the old neighborhood.
Later, Tina brokered a meeting of the owners of Green Lotus and Nutritional Weight and Wellness because, she said, our missions aligned. She was strategic in that assessment. Her guiding efforts bore fruit in the 10-year relationship enjoyed by both companies, one that thrived until the pandemic hit and the landscape of virtually everything changed. Dave’s and Tina’s daughter, McKenzie, a professional journalist now grown with a family of her own, took our teacher-training program while still a teenager with wisdom far beyond her years. To this day, Tina, her mother, Mary Ann, and daughter McKenzie remain deeply embedded in the Green Lotus community. Our shared history runs deep.
Dave and I owned up to having many things in common. Two of the most telling were these: We both grew up working on small family-run farms in tiny hamlets – his dairy farm near Foley, Minnesota, and my mixed crop-and-livestock one near Rock Rapids, Iowa – and we loved to write. Once, when visiting their home, I spotted a copy of my high-school grammar book on Dave’s personal library shelves. I told Tina that this book taught me to love the English language, to understand and appreciate its complexities and idiosyncrasies, and to learn how to write. I lamented to her that my own worn copy had disappeared in one of the many moves I made as a young journalist and that it was listed now as “out of print”. Sure enough, several weeks later a pristine copy arrived on my doorstep, courtesy of Dave Beehler.
Dave and I talked occasionally of how we loved our hometowns, the ruralness of our upbringings, and how excited we were to also have settled into big-city life. We lived in both worlds all our lives, bridged by the concept of “and” rather than “but”. He began his career as a teacher, later walking away from that to attend law school while Tina, a nurse, worked to keep the lights on and food on the table. They’d discussed it and decided this was necessary to begin the family they so wanted. They sowed the seeds of change and learned to not only live with it, but also to thrive in it. Upon graduating from law school, Dave joined the august firm of Robins Kaplan in Minneapolis, where he later became an esteemed partner. How he loved it!
He rode life’s changes, even a devastating heart attack that hit him in his early sixties, cultivating interests and joy: playing dinosaurs with his grandson, listening to country music, watching the Vikings with son Max, playing any song on his guitars by ear, and accepting every cup of good coffee.
Through it all, though, he remained at heart a boy from Foley, one who could milk cows, put up hay, harvest corn, muck stalls, and clear the woods on the land of fallen trees and non-native undergrowth. He enjoyed both worlds, thriving in the world of “and” - powerful attorney and humble farmer, a mover-and-shaker and a dedicated family man, a strong man and a sentimental, emotional one. His annual holiday letters entertained with stories of his growing up and his love of the farm, Foley, his four brothers, one sister, and his parents and grandparents. Many years later, Dave and Tina built a country retreat on that land, calling it, appropriately, Camp David.
David’s words found their way into his personal mantras that he shared with others, especially with his children. When daughter McKenzie eulogized her father in early January, she shared this one with the assembled mourners, in what seemed to me to be a real-life scene right out of the movie, The Runaway Bride. In that film, a wedding is held in a sweet upstate New York country church, the go-go-go Manhattanites representing the groom on one side of the aisle and the small-town folk of shopkeepers, farmers, and local professionals there for the bride on the other. Love in the world of and.
Dave’s mantras illuminated who her father was, McKenzie said as she sampled a couple: “Make a decision, destroy the alternatives.” And “Make the main thing the main thing.” And then McKenzie said, “And the one I think that is most apt for today: ‘Life is most vividly lived through the changes.’”
Change is ever present, our constant companion, from our first breath to our last. We often expend enormous amounts of energy and time fighting change, clinging to unexamined beliefs, longing to go back to the way it was. Change comes anyway. We resist aging, and aging comes anyway, whether we’re thirty or ninety. We ignore threats to kindness and decency, and the threats come anyway. When we study, examine, and embrace change, though, we begin to live this one precious life with a new lens. After reading McKenzie’s eulogy of her father, I researched quotes about change. “The moment of change is the only poem,” Adrienne Rich wrote. “The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance,” philosopher Alan Watts said.
Of the many I read, though, none struck me as being more apt, more real than that of Dave Beehler, “Life is lived most vividly through the changes.” When change comes, walk toward it, all the way to the end.
