Richard Fuller died in St. Paul, MN, Saturday Nov. 15 at 81,
from brain cancer, in hospice. From Betsy Raasch-Gilman.
Richard blocks a semi-truck in a 2022 pipeline protest; with Theo & Margie; and Betsy in a 2020 MNS webinar
Richard lived for several years at 1402 Hill Street in Ann Arbor, with a crowd of other MNS-related people in the 1970s. The whole community was frequently described as outrageous, and Richard did his part to make it so. Once he marched in a 4th of July parade with a bedsheet on which he’d written the insightful political slogan, “Beware of anything that glitters!” He participated in the Many Hands Collective, cleaning houses, and briefly worked at Corntree Child Care Center. His interests tended towards the mystical and philosophical, though. In 1979 he attended a workshop which exposed him to the thinking of James Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis. That provided the political and spiritual focus for the rest of his life.
When the Ann Arbor MNS community transplanted itself to Seattle, Richard got as far as Madison, where he hoped to integrate himself into the Lorian community. That didn’t work well, and he also flunked out of a graduate program for the third and final time. In a state of despair about his life, he moved to Chicago to work with a Jungian therapist he’d met at a Robert Bly-led retreat. In Chicago, he re-connected with Rhian Lombard, Paige Chapel, and David and Nancy Finke. Slowly, he re-approached MNS, and tested the waters by attending the Midwest Regional Gathering in 1983 in McNabb, Illinois. That’s where he met me, Betsy Raasch-Gilman. In 1985, we both attended the Trainers’ Gathering near Boulder, Colorado, and fell in love after that.
After two years of mounting long distance telephone bills, I moved to Chicago for a year to complete a chaplaincy residency and test out this relationship at short distance. MNSers who knew us independently thought we were a strange match. Richard defined the difference this way: he was a New Age Hippy Flake, and I was a Hard-Bitten Shop Floor Organizer. (I’ve never organized a shop floor and I don’t bite hard, but never mind that!) However, it worked, and when my residency was done we moved back to St. Paul, MN, together. That was the same year MNS formally laid itself down (1988), and we often described our relationship as our consolation prize.
In St. Paul, Richard started to work for the Hungry Mind (later Ruminator) Bookstore, and stayed there for 14 years. More importantly, he sunk his roots deep into the Twin Cities Friends Meeting (Quakers), and served on just about every committee there was at various points. At his 50th birthday party (1994), he came out as a Gaia Troubadour, and dedicated himself to promoting the idea of the Earth as a single living organism. (Even he didn’t know what he meant by being a troubadour — especially since he couldn’t carry a tune!) In practice, it led him to involve himself in a variety of ecological causes and activities. In a campaign in the mid-1990s against storing spent nuclear fuel rods on a sandy island in the Mississippi River, he dressed as a dry storage cask (in a barrel which had contained garlic) and bounced merrily down the river during a street theater skit in the rotunda of the MN state capitol. He also was arrested for blocking rush-hour traffic. Later, he became interested in sustainable forestry, and organized a group of Wisconsin and Minnesota Quakers into a Quaker Community Forest. (The “forest” was more metaphorical than literal — these were widely-scattered woodlot owners, for the most part.) He also promoted ecological education at the Friends School of Minnesota. In 2022, he was arrested twice for interfering with the construction of an oil pipeline across northern Minnesota.*
Richard’s kindness, his sympathetic ear, his impish humor, and his quirkiness made him popular almost everyplace he went. In typical fashion, when he learned last January that he had the most aggressive and deadly form of brain cancer, he was ecstatic — because he wouldn’t live long enough to die of dementia! The grace and calmness with which he faced the end of life inspired and struck many people. He is already badly missed.
[See updated MNS Memorial Page & CaringBridge.org]