In Memory of Michael Sky

by Susan Osborn

In 1983, I was living on the East coast and singing with the Paul Winter Consort.  While facilitating a Seeds of Singing class at a retreat center called Hardscrabble Hill, I had the great fortune to meet Penny Sharp.  We became fast friends, and later began working together.  Penny and her partner Michael Sky were part of a wonderful community based around their home in Lincoln MA. and  I had the chance to teach there several times.

Michael and Penny got married a week after David and I.  Shortly after that, we moved to Orcas Island and they followed the next year.  Since then, Penny and Michael have been at the center of the cooperative housing movement here on Orcas, and for many years Michael served as a practitioner and as President of the Board of our Healing Arts Center.  He was a body worker and a writer, and a guitarist, singer, and songwriter.  In addition, he was  the “Mac” man here on our little island.

We lost Michael in late May to esophageal cancer.

For Penny and Lily…

Those We Love from the First

Those we love from the first
can’t be put aside
after they die they still must be cried
out of existence, tears must make
their erratic runs down the face,
over the fullnesses, into
the craters, confirming,
the absent will not be present,
ever again.  Then the lost one
can fling itself outward, its million
moments of presence can scatter
through consciousness freely, like snow
collected overnight on a spruce bough
that in midmorning bursts
into glittering dust in the sunshine

—Galway Kinnell