Remembering Elizabeth Gips
This morning George Douvas sent me one of his batches of sites he likes. Among them was "ELIZABETH GIPS (1922 - 2002)." I was a good friend of Elizabeth for almost 25 years and so I took a look at where the link lead. There she was, dressed in her ritual garb presiding before a counterculture crowd. My eyes covered the page quickly and lingered on these words:
HELLO HELLO If someone reads this in some future now, and I have dissolved Home, I feel you, dear heart. Do you feel me, also? I see your wide eyes. Hello, hello!
"...but right now the Monarch butterflies just came back from their 3,000 mile journey to wherever it is they go. Their orange and black beauty beats fragile against the fall marigolds and I've got to go out and watch. Instead of sitting around and reading this nonsense, you might consider doing the same."
I met Elizabeth in 1978 at a line for a film called Aquarius Rising made by Fred Wolfe (not to be confused with Fred Allen Wolfe). It was a film about communes and love-ins of the Sixties, actual footage. Elizabeth had lived in the Haight-Ashbury and Santa Cruz during those days and she was something like a real life Maude from the movie Harold and Maude.
Elizabeth did a radio show called Changes (also the name of her still active web site) on our local campus radio station (later she moved the show to public radio KUUP Cupertino,) which was an eclectic blend of interviews, music and Elizabeth's rap. She always had a lot to say and loved to be the center of attention anywhere she found herself.
Besides our psychedelic spirituality, Elizabeth and I were both from Jewish roots. We shared the neurotic fear of death that another member of our clan, Woodie Allen had expressed in his famous remark: "I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
So her posthumous words seemed to speak to me personally. For 16 years, I had lived across the street from Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz, California, home of the famous Monarch Butterfly trees. Elizabeth would park her camper truck with her companion Paddy Long and take walks down to the park to watch the butterflies often. At the end, she had to bring a tank of oxygen with her. A life-long smoker, her last few years were spent battling emphysema.
When visiting with Elizabeth she would often turn the conversation to the subject of death, aware that the lung disease was about to end her life which it did in May of 2001 (the link title was off by a year). I moved away from Santa Cruz the next year but i still think of the butterflies from time to time ... and Elizabeth Gips.
Note: The butterfly picture above is from the cover of The Spirit of Butterflies: Myth, Magic, and Art
