This one is really for Ivi.
My earlier mention of Buckminster Fuller started the memory mill chugging again, as I began to recall how the Bucky photo session came about. It was because I got a call one day from my friend, P.T., who was deeply involved in the so-called human potential movement (or however that wave was being characterized) and who was working as an assistant to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of “On Death and Dying” and a leading internationally-known researcher into that subject who famously described the five stages of grief. My friend — this was sometime in the mid- or late 1970s –told me that Kubler-Ross would be speaking at an upcoming event — the World Cooperation Council, if I have the name right– that I should attend, that Findhorn people as well as my “hero” Fuller would also be speaking, and that she could probably arrange to get me a press pass.
So it happens that my friend P.T. was an utterly obsessed dancer (she started taking ballet lessons, in a class of youngsters, at age 30, for example, because her parents would not allow her ballet lessons when she had been a young child and she suddenly realized at that late date that she could still give it a whirl; she also was already a formidable interpretative jazz dancer at that point, even as she was pursuing her doctorate in cancer research). And she had told me that Kubler-Ross had once expressed the regret that she had not spent enough time in her life … dancing! This led me today to try to find the exact quote (from sources like this and this), and I finally found something close on Wikipedia:
In Switzerland I was educated in line with the basic premise: work work work. You are only a valuable human being if you work. This is utterly wrong. Half working, half dancing – that is the right mixture. I myself have danced and played too little.