David “Dave” Monroe Seeger April 13, 1941 – October 2, 2023
Dave died at home in Stayton, Oregon in the company and care of his family and hospice team. His spirit remained stubborn and strong right to the end.
Dave was born in Mehama, Oregon to Albert and Edith Seeger. Albert and Edith had six children – Virginia (Rogers), Robert, Lois (Pietrok), Joan, David, and Phillip. At the time of Dave’s birth, the family lived in a home on the North Fork of the Santiam River, later moving “to town” to reside in Lyons, Oregon, where Dave continued school, eventually graduating from Stayton High School. As a kid, Dave loved animals and anything mechanical.
It was during high school he met his future wife, Judith “Judy” Anne Lackner. Even though they attended different schools, they had a few friends in common. After graduation, Judy attended college, and Dave went to automotive school in St. Louis where he excelled. He was so good, the school invited him to stay on as a teacher, but he came back to Oregon for Judy, whom he married on October 3, 1964. They lived briefly in Stayton and Salem before settling in Sublimity with their two children, Christopher “Chris” Michael and Jill Marie Seeger.
Dave was a mechanic for many years at German Motors in Salem, Oregon, before starting his own business, Cascade Motors, which he ran out of a shop he had built next to their home in Sublimity. During his years as a mechanic, Dave was known to be incredibly talented and extremely fair. After closing down Cascade Motors, Dave spent a few years working with his son at his shop, L-5 Vee Dub in Salem, Oregon, before retiring to be a fulltime grandpa to his two granddaughters, Chris’s daughters Jessamy and Annika “Annie” Seeger. Some of the best times of his life were being with “the girls” and going to all their basketball, soccer, and softball games.
Besides his family and being a mechanic, Dave was interested in photography, loved to read, could fix just about anything, liked to go for long drives in the country, adopted the occasional stray cat, and was known for his sarcastic sense of humor. He had a tough exterior but a tender heart. His name, David, means “beloved” and he will be greatly missed, in particular by his wife Judy, son Chris, daughter Jill and her husband Eric Salahub, granddaughters Jessamy and Annie, and Jessamy’s children, his great-grandchildren Lianore and Warren.
4. Good stuff from Lion’s Roar: Detox Your Mind: 5 Practices to Purify the 3 Poisons (“Five Buddhist teachers share practices to clear away the poisons that cause suffering and obscure your natural enlightenment. Introduction by Lion’s Roar’s editor-in-chief Melvin Mcleod”), and How to Practice Metta for a Troubled Time (“Mushim Patricia Ikeda teaches us how to generate loving-kindness and good will as an antidote to hatred and fear”), and To Practice Mindfulness Is to Return to Life (“Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, harnessing compassion, and cherishing life”).
5. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön: “The two witnesses of what you do are others and yourself. Of these two, you are the only one who really knows exactly what is going on. So work with seeing yourself with compassion but without any self-deception.”
10. Wisdom on grief from Abigail Rose Clarke: (who recently lost her dog, her “second heart,” after 17 years) “I am continuing to learn the lesson that sharing the grief is better than trying to continue on as though everything is normal, because grief is a wild thing, and in the midst of it, nothing is normal.”
11. Russell Brand is a familiar story by Rebecca Solnit. “Can we really be surprised when rich and powerful men are accused of sexual abuse?”
12. Slow Factory’s Céline Semaan Gets Real About Sustainability Activism. “Working to ‘Change the World’ is hard. Anyone who ever cared about making the world a better place in any way has learned that change is an uphill battle and resistance can come from unexpected places. Companies don’t want to change. Governments and institutions don’t want to change. Even friends and peers may turn on you and resort to shaming or bullying you for your attempts to create positive change in the world.”
13. Free Your Mind(set). “What if our jobs weren’t who we are, but something we did because our lives were enriched by something more than money? The longing to ‘get rich quick’ has survived thousands of iterations, all of which position wealth as integral to happiness. ‘Think and grow rich’ is one of those concepts, and like all the others, it robs people of the opportunity to build community and drive social progress, two things that can’t be measured by the amount of money in your bank account.”
14. I was sucked into a romantic scam and it broke my heart. “We know romantic scammers swindle thousands of dollars from victims, but the heavy emotional toll receives less attention. Alison Cutler, a recent scamming victim, tells her story.”
17. 11 reasons not to make artfrom Danny Gregory. He made a video about the post I shared of his on last week’s list.
18. What color is your cape?from Patti Digh. “On feeling needed, choosing right helpfulness, and stepping back.”
19. Autumn Equinox wisdom from Lucian James: “It’s a transitional time. In Spring and Summer, things move up and out. From today, things move down and in. An equinox is a pivotal moment – an introduction to the flip side of the year. It’s an opportunity to reset things which have got out of whack. It’s a time to reverse what’s not working.”
P.S. Kind and gentle reader: I am making another trip to Oregon, so there will be no new list next week, but there is an archive of 598 something good lists.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 