Plants and Healers

by Mary Morgaine

To contribute your story about Frank, click on the link here (http://www.plantsandhealers.com/yourstory.php).

It is Monday, August 24th, 2009, and Frank has been gone from this world now for five days. I have received many questions regarding how and why Frank left this planet so suddenly. I offer these words to the larger circle of what I bore witness to, what I experienced and felt in the last few weeks of Frank's life and what I believe led to his crossing. The sun is bright in the summer sky, pausing neither for life nor death. The days keep unfolding without judgment as to who has come into this world and who has gone. Even in death, life spills forth to fill the moments with its own love for itself, a never-ending cycle of transformational existence. I am honored to be able to share my story within the Great Turning.

One of the last coherent conversations Frank and I had, 4 days before he crossed, was about 'Story'. He was firm in having me understand clearly that the telling of a story could only be, even in its best form, a fragment of the Whole, for there are so many perspectives and conditions that make up the reality from which the story unfolds that it could never be all conveyed simultaneously. With this understanding, I sing my heart song.

It was in Australia, winter 2007, that I first noted Frank feeling less than his vibrant self. He arrived with a cold and the entire time we spent together there he did not feel well. But he did not let that stop him from moving and learning and sharing, and he gained his strength back enough to continue on to New Zealand and then back up to the northern lands of Australia after we parted. While there, near Darwin, in the tropics of that beautiful country, he was bitten by hundreds of mosquitoes and from that he believed he acquired the Ross River Virus, a self-limiting virus said to be gone within a year, that causes inflammation of the joints, fever and fatigue.

Pearson Garden, Asheville NC, 7PM, August 19, 2009

Just hours after his passing, Frank's brother Ken spoke from circle of nearly 200 friends holding hands around the garden. "I think he saw us all as plant beings and he certainly was one himself." Muffled laughter mixed with tears. Frank Cook was the Banyan Tree.

If the name is not familiar, you'll remember the man. Frank stood 6'3" tall with piercing blue eyes and waist length dreadlocks. He wore simple clothes and sandals and carried a satchel over his shoulder. In Carrboro, his home was a loft bed at the residence of Beth Williams and Alan Dehmer. He walked everywhere, once across the entire state of North Carolina, foraging for food along the way. Most of us in these modern times would die attempting such a trek. Frank feasted - both physically and spiritually.