by Joe Brodnik | Joseph Sarosy
Asha had heft. She moved into moments, both empty and full, like a heavily laden ship through calm waters. Silence. Immensity. Slow to turn corners, like those of her lips veering into a wry, provocative smile.
This was Asha in her 70’s. I met her on the portàl of Lama Foundation, the spiritual community of artists she and her husband founded on a beautiful and isolated piece of land north of Taos. By that point, she had already guided thousands of people across the surface of that land, deep into its caverns, and onto a unique expression of personal artistry and spiritual awakening.
She loved this artistry – the ripening of people, land, prayer, and life. It was a creative movement of international significance, something she helped bring about both at Lama and in Be Here Now, the influential book she and her husband Steve Durkee published at the foundation with Ram Dass in 1971. On the surface, Be Here Now is Ram Dass’s journey from Harvard professor to Hindu yogi, but the drawings and composition were all done by hand by Steve, Asha, and the residents then at Lama.
That wasn’t new for them. Years prior, when Ram Dass was still Richard Alpert and teamed up with Timothy Leary at Harvard, he mingled with Asha and Steve at USCO, their New York artist collective then staging some of the first light shows for psychedelic rock n’ roll bands in the 60’s.
That’s the transformative shift in which Asha, then Barbara Durkee, was shaped from a young woman into a mother of four, then spiritual mother to many. It took grit. Raising a family at Lama, amidst the sweat and severity of those early years, required constant negotiations as the community crafted and refined spiritual practice and buildings by hand.
Asha later moved away from Lama Foundation, with some strain, but two of her daughters moved back for periods of their own adult years. That always stuck with me, because children often have a way of resisting their parents’ dreams. Something of substance obviously took root at Lama, and within Asha. It was just a few years ago that her granddaughter spent a year in residence.
That was the woman I met on the portàl, which is just a fancy word for porch – though it’s a big porch. I was in my 20’s, cheerful, a little naïve. Asha had this dangerous and lovely way of gluing me, like most people, to the spot. That was her heft, this slow movement of memory and time. But she didn’t romanticize it. She was as straight and purposeful as a rake, a rugged simplicity in her tone and posture. She took time for people. There was genuine care in her words. Sharpness too. She meant what she said. A rake has teeth for a reason.
Asha was comfortable like this. You could feel it in her bearing, not just her body but her mind. She was not afraid. She welcomed curiosity and judgement alike, all the stupid things that make people lie, laugh uncomfortably, or tell stories that are a little too neat. For her, everything was on the table – that’s how she survived. It was the flood of life and thought, even vanity and ego, that provided the background upon which her calm certainty was raised like a tender white flag over a stormy sea of gray.
Because misfortune did come. Asha’s marriage ended tragically. Lama’s interspiritual quest did, at least on occasion, become spiritual competition. The roots and tangles of love, children, land, and prayer – they had their wounds.
It was the heft she carried. If you knew her, you felt it. Whether you disliked or adored her, or merely tolerated her, she welcomed that. She let you think and feel, even if that meant distaste. It was this full bearing of her weight, her knowing, that moved into the space when she entered.
She exited in 2022, dying quietly with loved ones at her home in Virginia, which by then had become her real community. Lama was a hotbed, a kitchen, a testing ground. Virginia became her sanctuary.
There are many people buried at Lama Foundation, some of spiritual heft that draw visitors and have elaborate shrines. Asha, the founding mother of Lama and a worldwide movement, would inevitably draw more than a few. That is what’s precious about Asha – she chose to be buried discretely elsewhere. The heft that she had wasn’t something she pressed upon others. She used it to tug at a person’s center of gravity and ask them to see not her but themselves.
