Boundless brilliance walking around in such a difficult body.
Your mother fed you all those googoo clusters because she wanted her boy round and happy.
Such voracious hunger for everything –
knowledge, wisdom, love and all the sensual delights.
The interpenetration of all things.
The easy way that your mind flowed across all topics, no matter how banal or abstruse,
like a mountain stream flows over and around all obstacles,
the rocks and the trees and so forth.
Pure and fresh and sparkling with incredible energy and delight,
no matter how sad you were about your personal samsara.
So many hours spent together –
in your house on Grape Street,
in my house,
in so many dharma moments and spaces as we helped build the Shambhala world together
and separately
or roamed beyond it’s early narrow confines
in the riches of the phenomenal world.
You introduced me and connected me:
to the very first computer networks as we played Colossal Cave on Compuserve,
all green letters on black screens
before anyone had heard of the internet;
to countless books we discussed and dissected;
to wonderful men and dazzling women, one of whom eventually became my wife.
Brilliant conversation at dinners, dinners, dinners at Grape Street –
Tessa and Diana and Diana’s husband and the dogs.
How you successfully stopped smoking one day with the Kornman method –
a bottle of Jack Daniels in your desk drawer at work at Naropa.
And many sad and painful times of break-ups and heartbreaks, frustrations and even despair.
And then you left Boulder,
now a long time ago,
to share and demonstrate in the greater world what we in Boulder already knew.
Princeton PhD, college professor, Library of Congress, translating, teaching, performing, transforming, eating, making love, celebrating and always studying and teaching the dharma.
And then came more obstacles and the cancer you believed had been there a long time,
stealing your energy and your sense of wellbeing.
You fought it with passion and intelligence which was an inspiration to all of us cancerniks
along with everyone else who was fortunate enough to meet you.
And you lived so much longer than you or we expected,
an incredible demonstration of the generosity of the dralas and of your mind.
You offered us so much in the past gifted years.
Teachings and transmissions and connections which no one else on this planet could make.
Setting a whole new group of students on the authentic path
and almost, almost getting your epic on Gesar into our hands and heads.
May it quickly be completed by the network which you created
to benefit all of us sentient beings.
Who else but you could pull off the incredible mind trick,
over and over again,
of expounding on this or that with great eloquence, as always,
and then drifting off, mid-sentence into a morphine dream state
returning in 10 seconds or 2 minutes,
continuing the same sentence, the same train of thought,
without hesitation or grammatical error.
Robin who kept falling in love until his last day,
with the beautiful women who were always somehow mysteriously around him,
and with beautiful ideas, teachers, music, experiences.
This past year, he not only produced an incredible body of dharma teachings
but also took great delight in studying Jewish mysticism with a Chabad rabbi in Milwaukie,
started studying and playing the piano again practicing as much as two hours every day,
and traveled to exotic locales with at least one lovely woman on his arm at all times.
An inconceivable tantra of pain
And that is just what I know about.
Ah Robin.
You will be missed.
And you are well loved today as you were on every day you were with us
whether you knew it or not.
And appreciated.
And honored.
The Shambhala virtues of fearlessness, gentleness, cheerfulness, daring, dignity, compassion
and tenderness all flowered in you.
There was no place or space you were afraid to venture into
or out of.
You were uncontained and uncontainable.
You surfed the undertow –
And you overflowed.
As much as you always took
(anyone remember what was left in your refrigerator after having Robin as a houseguest?),
you always gave back much more.
I am grateful for your time here Robin.
And I am grateful that you are now at play in the bardos and beyond.
May you come back to further teach us Bodhisattva Robin
and may you have the perfect dancing body next time.
Tom Hast
August 3, 2007
