Point Reyes Light - November 6, 2003

Martha Glessing, 65, simply lived "in the now"

By Larken Bradley

Inverness resident, Martha Glessing, a writer and Emmy-award-winning public television producer, died at home Thursday, Oct. 30, of complications from ovarian cancer. She was 65.

An activist for ecological, human rights, and sustainability issues, Ms. Glessing worked as a public-relations writer for several organizations including the California Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the Urgent Action Fund.

Last November she was one of the organizers and demonstrators of the naked ladies’ peace photo shot by Art Rogers and published in The Light, which attracted international attention and countless copycat renditions in West Marin, the US and beyond.

Life spent waging peace

Observed her daughter, Erica Nelson, "she dedicated her life to waging peace."

A television producer with KQED during the 1970s, Ms. Glessing won four local and national Emmy awards. Her program Turnabout was a women’s interview show that competed in a timeslot with commercial-television soap operas. Her other credits include a Joan Baez Concert and Wild California.

Born in Missouri on June 25, 1938, Martha Meinert earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Marquette University in Milwaukee. In the 1960s she and her then-husband, Robert Glessing became the editors and publishers of a small weekly newspaper in Seneca Falls, New York.

They eventually sold the paper and moved to Berkeley where Ms. Glessing became an activist in the women’s movement. Before buying her Inverness home in 1976, the family lived in Palo Alto.

Raised as a Catholic, in Marin County she met Lama Govinda who became her spiritual teacher. In 1979, at a Buddhist potluck at Green Gulch Zen Center, she met her partner, Tam Beeler. "It was love at first sight," he said.

In an author’s note included in her book, Wind Cloud, published in 2002, which chronicled the life of a television producer who died from breast cancer, Ms. Glessing wrote of herself, "she has spent the last 30 years humbly cultivating the living spirit of Taoists and Buddhists in the here and now."

Saw life’s ironies

An expressive, vivacious woman who also saw life’s ironies, "she really understood the dark side of the social and political situation," observed friend Sadja Greenwood of Bolinas.

Ms. Glessing loved hiking in the hills above her home. "She switched from the fast-lane lifestyle," noted her daughter, "and urged everyone she knew to embrace the concept of simple living." She periodically wrote op-ed pieces on the subject for the Marin Independent Journal.

In West Marin she had worked for Marin Agricultural Land Trust and at the Inverness Public Library.

She is survived her partner, Tam Robert Beeler of Inverness; mother, Alice Meinert of Peoria, Arizona; son, Gerry Glessing of Rancho Mirage, Riverside County; daughter, Erica Nelson of San Jose; sister, Mary Meinert Case of Sacramento; and six grandchildren. A seventh grandchild is due next month. Her cat, Ching, also survives her.

No services will be held.

The family has suggested that any memorial contributions be made to the Urgent Action Fund at <www.urgentactionfund.org>.

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