Michael W. Hathaway

Michael W. Hathaway

11/11/1941–1/2/2019

Authored by Michael Hathaway, with edits by James Griffith, Richard Parker and BB Ha!

Wonderful faerie spirit Michael Hathaway (Billie name: Hank) died on Vashon Island, Washington, January 2, 2019.

He grew up in Southern California and lived his long and notably peripatetic life in San Francisco, Sonoma County, Cambridge MA, Bavaria, the Greek Islands, Kathmandu and Prague. After decades as an environmental activist and poet, he wrote a multi-volume memoir demonstrating “the possible happiness of life.”

His personal idealism and optimism were gifts from his mystical German-born mother and his loving American diplomat grandparents, gifts nurtured by seven years at the progressive and very liberating Happy Valley (now Besant Hill) School. He studied Russian language, culture, politics and history at Stanford —and also rowed varsity crew. Graduating with honors, he went on to graduate work at Harvard, the Free University of Berlin and ancient Charles University in Prague. With fluency in seven languages, he was a cosmopolitan global citizen.

For a time, he seemed destined for teaching, writing and thinking—the quiet life of the scholar. But in his mid-twenties, the Vietnam War intervened, forcing choices on him (like millions in his generation) that fundamentally ended the prospect of an ivory tower life, just as surely as it overturned the nation and the world.

Michael’s deep feelings about the war’s criminality let him to quit his Harvard doctoral studies to become a peace activist, and eventually to serve on the national staff of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 insurgent presidential campaign. That summer, with thousands like him in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, Michael got first-hand experience of the price peaceful protest can carry, and was beaten in the streets during the infamous police riots that enveloped the convention.

It was a startling lesson for someone unaccustomed to violence, inexplicable in terms of the values he lived by and thought the country shared. (Sound familiar?) Sen. McCarthy’s heartbreaking defeat—and Nixon’s cynical victory that November—left him suddenly adrift, searching for a new path through which to live and teach those values.

Learning—lifelong learning—and the love of teaching and nurturing were still at his core, but not to be lived out in the cloistered confines of universities. He morphed into a “longhaired, VW-vanliving hippie.” This alternative lifestyle presented a problem: he began to run out of money.

Thus, in the early summer of 1969, Michael returned to Santa Barbara where with the help of friends he found work as a researcher at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Robert Maynard Hutchins’ legendary progressive think tank. Here he could use his intellect and learning— but also keep his ponytail, VW bus, and spend his off-hours building the local antiwar movement.

After two years at The Center, Michael returned to Europe, where he discovered the beautiful island of Hydra in Greece. Entranced by its beauty and the charm of its inhabitants, Michael realized that his $2,000 savings could buy a handsome five-arched, 440-year old ruin of a house.

For two years he restored his ruin with help from his new friend Yorgo, who had done the same to his own fallen house. The two men found deep connections, not only in rebuilding but in a wider world of spiritual passions.

When Yorgo decided to travel to Kathmandu to immerse himself in Tibetan Buddhism, Michael followed his friend—with life-challenging results. While he had “wondrous experiences and shed many illusions” studying with Tibetan teachers, he also encountered hepatitis and lost 56 pounds— which forced his return to Santa Barbara for medical care and recovery.

Kathmandu gave Michael new eyes and a new purpose. Inspired by Ralph Nader and thousands of then emerging activists, he wrote and published a “Calendar of Contemporary Saints” datebook, filled with vignettes of Michael’s personal “heroes and saints” and hand-illustrated by him in the manner of a medieval manuscript. The book was an instant critical success, winning praise from the incongruous likes of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Jerry Brown, Lama Govinda, several members of Congress, and—in an unsought encounter with the commercial American mainstream—was featured on “The Today Show” by an enthusiastic Gene Shalit.

For the next years, Michael deepened his involvement in Santa Barbara’s anti-Vietnam War peace movement (risky and scary back then, as you can see in Faerie Christopher Colorado Jones’s documentary The Boys Who Said No!). He helped found an alternative newspaper, and spent endless hours working in several other progressive causes. When restlessness returned, he moved to San Francisco.

There he quickly became a full-time environmental activist, work he pursued for the next twenty-five years, first with David Brower at Friends of the Earth and then along with Brower as one of the founders of Earth Island Institute. Begun with modest borrowed funds, a dank office, and some old wooden folding chairs, Earth Island grew into a national success, a model for other progressive institutions of how to build a new society. Today, Earth Island sponsors sixtyfour projects worldwide, with a staff of more than a hundred (and as many volunteers), and a multimillion-dollar budget Michael said “was wisely managed and frugally spent.”

While in San Francisco, Michael founded an “environmental-spiritual boarding house” called Magical Premises. He led a series of tours to the Soviet Union during the emerging Gorbachev Era that established some of the earliest working ties between American and Soviet environmental leaders.

As AIDS became widespread, he took on the deeply painful work of helping to defend, celebrate and expand Gay freedoms while fighting the world’s inevitable fears as he cared for stricken friends.

In the late 1980s, exhausted, Michael made a new home for himself in Guerneville, on the Russian River north of San Francisco. There he worked as a writer as well as a key figure in the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s renowned organic gardens. He regularly hunted wild mushrooms, gardened, and cooked festively for his many friends. He loved his magical home there.

By the start of the new century, though, family called. His widowed mother Erica was growing frail and increasingly infirm, so he moved back to Santa Barbara to love and help care for her in her final years. She passed on in 2006 after ninety-six years of a truly rich, love-filled, rewarding life.

After her death, he decided to devote his own remaining time to writing a series of book-length memoirs whose central purpose was to show the possible happiness and satisfaction of life. He hadn’t planned on more activism until the new Cheney-Bush administration revealed itself as astonishingly dangerous, destructive, and dishonest. So, though now well into his sixties, Michael threw himself for his last fifteen years into the task of exposing and discrediting not just Cheney-Bush but the ever-hungry Deep State behind them. He didn’t slow down after Obama’s election in 2008, as others did; instead he pushed on in a patient, relentless campaign against both the increasingly rapacious and mendacious right wing GOP and the Obama administration’s too-often-complaisant cooperation with “corporate Democrats” in Congress and business, who showed no interest in defending those they’re supposed to represent.

But finally, toward the very end of his life, he decided the best use of his time was to finish his books, to offer inspiration, sustenance and comfort to the spiritually bold and persevering among us. In 2018, just a year short of his death, his magnum opus, The Possible Happiness of Life, appeared—a book which has inspired those few who have read it.

He left a number of manuscripts unpublished, which may yet see the light of day.

We Are Faery

We are Faery come to earth. We are Legend.

Fresh embodiments of the Magical, Pure wildness is our nature and our home. Kindred of rocks, plants, and waters, yea, and all that truly lives, where wildness is, we are.

We’re transceivers, translators, gateways, loci for energies streaming. Other dimensions shimmer and play about our faces; their sheen defines our local shape.

We love earthlife and human form. We offer freedom, passage and belonging, and bring developments till now barely tasted.

Our lives blossom in unique and rigorous beauty: spiritual puzzles and assignments, the losing and finding of Love, and Spirit, playful adventures set in paradises in disguise. And always, in our mythic motion we serve the One.

We are ancient, we are fresh creation. We are Faery. We are Legend.

Feel welcome in our circle if you sense such things, or if you truly love, or hope, or dare. For indeed, ours is the intimacy of godly beings.

—Michael Hathaway (1987) From We Came to Love