Tom Huston
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tom was the real deal, which means that he could look a camera straight in the eye and not lose his soul — no pretense, no attempt to look like anyone other than himself just as he was right at that moment. In a tux (really) or flip-flops and shorts he was Tom, looking straight into you as directly as the moon path on his beloved Pacific. He was, to quote and expand upon his wife, Charlene’s, words: a painter, performance artist, poet, inspired diarist, visionary, passionate ecologist, musician, mentor, film-maker, U.S. Navy Underwater Demolition Team Diver, architecture student, MFA, assembler of bouquets snagged from the gardens he passed by, sailor, surfer, world traveler, loving husband and devoted friend. As complex and as integrated as the shifting image in a kaleidoscope, he could love a canyon, a coastline, a sunset, an animal, an accidental Tibetan son, a friend or a woman with equal intensity. Tender as a mother with a wounded animal or a friend in pain, he could be as fierce as one of the wrathful deities on the Tibetan calendars he loved so much when confronted with deception or injustice. When you got Tom, you got all of him.
Tom Huston
I first met Tom when he came to the old Tea House to work on a broadside of one of his poems, and somehow or other he became family, a wise and generous uncle for my daughters and a strong shoulder to lean on. He was the rare friend who never had something more important to do than help you when you needed him, even if it meant concocting a memorable funeral for the family dog or saving your house from the latest fire raging through the foothills. Which is how he became the second father to a remarkable young Tibetan, Tseta, who lived with him, was mentored by him and became the artist he is because of him. After finding no one to take Tseta in for a while — I was living in New York at the time — I called Tom to let off some steam. Immediately he offered his bedroom, claiming that he always slept on the couch anyways. Which, I guess, is another way of saying that Tom had the kind of generosity that was so spontaneous and uncalculated that it could only have come from someone who was deeply and genuinely acquainted with humility and gratitude.
Tom had a well-developed sense of the bizarre and a good sense of humor, like the time I persuaded him to drive a van full of Tibetan monks from Santa Barbara to Portland with a lot of stops in between for performances. When I reached Portland a couple of weeks later, and found them at a theater downtown, the entire group came running up to me to sing the song that Tom had taught them: “Day-O,” with a dance to go along with it.
He was curious about just about everything. A look at his library reveals books on the Tao, next to ones on minimalist architecture; Chinese and Japanese dictionaries side by side with textbooks on celestial navigation; a miniature Bible sandwiched in between the I Ching and a catalog for an exhibition of Polynesian art that he had helped organize and for which he had written a chapter. And a look at the rest of the house, filled from floor to ceiling and out onto the lanai with treasures brought back from who-knows-where (and sometimes who-knows-why) just keeps on telling the story of this restless, inquisitive mind.
And then there was the day that he called up and announced that he had met (re-met as it turns out) this kick-ass woman and could he please bring her to Thanksgiving dinner. And there she was, Tom’s beautiful Charlene, and just what he needed. The night before their wedding, when he was giving a toast, Tom described taking Charlene out on the Siboney. At some point, lying back and looking up at a passing cloud, she imagined out loud that she could see flowers and ribbons drifting down and Tom thought to himself: “Hey, I could use some of that.” Their marriage and collaborations inaugurated a whole new chapter for Tom. No longer the loner, he had found his boon companion. He collaborated with Charlene on Ray Strong: Rooted and Reaching, Lotusland Cactus Garden, and The Light Blue Line project, and also shot some extraordinary footage for an as yet uncompleted project called The Vanishing Landscape Series, just to name a few. In conjunction with the Light Blue Line project, he created a series of postcards of Santa Barbara, painted over to show just how high the waves would reach when global warming began to take its toll. He also did two films of his own: Schooner Dreams, a metaphoric story celebrating wooden boats, and “Maya de Mi Cabeza”
For those of us who knew him well, or even a little, it is hard to imagine a world without him, but then maybe we don’t have to. In some unquantifiable way, the man who learned the flute so that he could play for the dolphins that swam around the urchin boat he was tending and who organized a “turtle crossing” on Chapala Street back when you could still do things like that in Santa Barbara, will always inhabit this landscape we love.
And now I will let Tom speak for himself:
day
morning
dawn’s sweet
air
i tend my field
afternoons
heart
ache of wisdom’s
harvest
i contemplate
the walls of my room
walk out
in the clear evening
immensity
gentle
observe
the proximity of Venus
to the new moon
marvel
oh that glimmering
joinery of gravity
to light
joinery of gravity
to light
praise
i sing