In Memory of My Mother, Susan Little
by Tias Little
There are so many brilliant and diverse threads woven together in loving memory of my mom, Susan Little. At her memorial, under the great oak trees and along the banks of the Green River, I found myself threading together a few memories of her. The first thread is drawn from the town of Amherst, just 90 minutes away over the Mohawk Trail, where I lived with Mom and my brother Michael in a simple, squat dwelling by the train tracks. It was 15 minutes by bicycle to Amherst Regional High School. Come snow or shine, Michael and I pedaled up Triangle Street and over Main, past the tall evergreens and the high gables of Emily Dickinson’s house.
It wasn’t simply happenstance that Mom lived within a mile of Emily Dickinson’s homestead. Mom, like the poet herself, was always tuned in to something just outside language—something that moved her spirit, demanded risk, and inspired her to be brave. Both women lived amid strong religious and patriarchal traditions, yet each was inspired to follow her own path.
My mother had a feisty side and resisted the auspices of male authority around her. When she arrived at Amherst College in 1979 as Director of Career Counseling and the first female dean of the college, she had little patience for the patriarchal structures that ruled the college scene. Throughout her life, Susan advocated for the rights of women. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment, subscribed to Ms. Magazine, and followed early feminists such as Gloria Steinem.
Emily Dickinson, too, would wake in the early hours to follow her inner voice, communing with something that would never quite sit right in a pew or ring true in liturgy. In the parlor of her family home, she would lace her visions, dashing out inspirations before the rest of the family had risen. In an untitled poem, Dickenson wrote:
I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs—
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading—too—
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace— (lines 1-9).
The “grace” Mom chose came from a quiet path, one also performed in the wee hours, a path that requires careful listening—to her breath, pulses, and the ongoing thread of thought that spins off the spool of mind. When Mom began yoga in 1978, the year we lived in London, yoga was generally for weirdos—ex-hippies, Hare Krishna types, and health-food fanatics. Now you can see yoga in Bud Light commercials and on display at Super Bowl halftime shows. But for Mom, her alone time enabled her to absorb into the essentials of the meditative life—silence, stillness, and interior space.
In the early 1980s, she studied mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose guiding principles became foundational teachings for the mindfulness movement in America. Over four decades, her yoga and meditation practice provided her with flexibility, adaptability, and resiliency. I have many threads of memory practicing side by side on the deck of our summer home, watching her move from Triangle Pose to Half-Moon to Shoulderstand.
Karma spins its threads in strange ways. I always felt such a deep love for my mom, and I resembled her in so many ways—from the shape of my cheekbones and dark eyes to an affinity we shared for the body-mind connection. I would go on to make my livelihood helping others on the yoga mat and meditation cushion, weaving in and out of cities teaching yoga in Dublin, Istanbul, and Oklahoma City.
When I would visit Mom toward the end of her life, she and I would practice together in the family room. We would sit back-to-back on the thick woven grey blankets she acquired from the Boston Iyengar Yoga Convention in 1987. I recall asking her, “Mom, what is your experience like in meditation?” Sensitive, perceptive, and intuitive, she had a capacity to connect to the unseen and the unspeakable. In the private space of prayer, she was intimate and guided providentially. She spoke of the angels who would come to her. She described them as protectors, keepers of the faith. She asked that they watch over her and her loved ones.
