photo by Brenda Starr Light
It’s been over a week since Bobby
Furst died, and I’ve been collecting my thoughts on how to provide a small
voice of respect for someone important to many as family, and foundational to
community as its soul.
Like many people who posted their memories, Bobby was also one of the
first people I met fifteen years ago when I moved to the Mesa. Walking into
Furstworld compound 9 pm under a full moon for my first time felt like the
return to an ancient home, deeply missed, and so very cherished. In my heart,
the meaning “Sanctuary of Humanity” clicked a landing code where instant roots
welcomed in all of us, all the time.
I was not part of the inner tribe of friends or performers, yet I knew
there was space for me when I showed up. The last three years I’ve been meaning
to drop by with three, large metal bands from a wine keg. Bobby had scratched
out a sketch of a chandelier of fairy lights, chunks of my jeweled cholla
wands, and these barrel bands, and I wanted to commission him to create the
vision. I’m staring at the metal bands now, as I write wondering at the missed
opportunity. This morning I ran into Kripa at the JT post office. I saw her
sadness even though no words were said.
I know what Death does to time, the heart, and even though the threshold
of cosmic existence is grand in the unknowing, the loss both personal and
collective, is true. My work straddles both the personal and the collective. I
am familiar with un-named shifts, changes, and rearranges that happen as if we
simultaneously walk through, and find a new room surrounding the old space.
This then, is the sense of care and curiosity I hold open for Grief, and give
blessings to Bobby, and his family.
“What Happens When an Elder Dies?"
"When an elder dies, the silence that follows is rarely empty.
It is an atmosphere, charged, disorienting, into which every remaining
voice must suddenly speak in a new register.
For those of us who found refuge and imagination beneath the corrugated
roofs of Bobby Furst’s desert compound, the news feels like the moment a family
loses its center pole: roles loosen, tacit agreements drift, and the ground
itself seems to tilt.
Family-systems psychologists caution that when a parent or sibling
disappears the pattern must be rewoven, thread by aching thread, even while
grief keeps the fingers clumsy. A community, though wider than a bloodline, is
equally tender; it, too, is a living ecology of expectations, shared dreams,
memories and hopes.
Bobby was the local hearth, and his fuel was love. He welded scrap into
sculpture, turned sheet-metal sheds into galleries, and greeted every new idea
with the same invitation: “Get over it, make it happen.” That phrase is equal
parts challenge and blessing, and became a corridor through which creatives
found their own authority, purpose and voice.
More than once I watched a traveling talent find their center of magic
and exhaled as if they had reached water. Michael Meade reminds us that “the
community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it” and Bobby
gave without hesitation. Meade also warns that when those gifts are not
welcomed, “the young people… may burn the village down just to feel the
warmth.” Bobby’s compound was the place where those fires were invited, tended,
and turned into light for everyone.
His passing lands with the same epochal thud as I felt when Lennon,
Petty, Hendrix, and Joplin left. They were personal to me, in that my life
changed from their energy. The same is true with Bobby Furst. Each loss tore
open an unimagined vacancy, not because Death was sudden or strange, but
because the fabric of daily life had been stitched with their genius and their
love.
So it is here: the ache is not a fear of mortality, but the recognition
that Bobby’s particular genius was part of what we called living in the desert.
Bayo Akomolafe urges that in such moments we “slow down… find comfort in
each other, in all the glorious ambiguity that being in community brings.”
Grief, then, is a communal tempo, a deceleration that allows new
constellations of relation to emerge.
In families, the second-born discovers they can cook; the quiet cousin
finds a voice at the table. For us, the community will shift to what is
important and what wants to linger. What continues in this new absence?
Place itself is mourning.
The Mojave has its own terroir, the specific natural environment of
place, a mineral taste that seeps into bone and imagination; Rebecca Solnit
writes that “when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back.”
FurstWorld was the Casbah of this exchange, a micro-climate of torch-cut steel
and outside sofas where strangers became neighbors. Now the land feels paused,
holding its breath, asking who will answer its next invitation.
Wendell Berry says a viable community is “made up of neighbors who
cherish and protect what they have in common," and that community is
finally “the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is
shared.” Bobby shared so much, all of the time.
The shock many of us feel is proof of how thoroughly Bobby mentored our
courage. If the sorrow feels bottomless, it is only measuring the depth of his
imprint. Francis Weller calls grief “a form of praise… the natural way love
honors what it misses.
Praise is exactly what rises now, like heat over the hardpan.
Solnit observes that crisis poses the question “Who are you? Who are
we?” and that answering together can produce mutual aid and belonging. Meade
would add that gifts generate community; Berry would remind us that neighbors
define each other’s possibilities; Akomolafe would insist we not rush the
mystery. Taken together, these voices form the score of a new epoch: one where
Bobby’s love becomes our shared practice. He is still mentoring us.
So we meet, as families do after burial, in kitchens and backyards
cluttered with folding chairs. We pass photographs, create social media posts,
laugh at half-remembered jokes, and discover that the work of belonging has
already begun.
The desert night feels wider than before, but the stars are the same;
only now we must navigate by a constellation that includes one brilliant light
newly absent from the visible map.
In that absence lives an invitation.
If community, as Berry insists, is a shared condition of the spirit,
then Bobby has not truly left; he has simply handed us the still-warm tools:
rusted, beloved, stamped with love, to keep building the home we first found at
his gate, in his smile, in his signs of peace.
Thank you, Kripa for your hug and for prompting me to include my voice
in the tribute for our elder who has died.”
Narrative Essay Written by Brenda Littleton
Tin Flea Press (originally appeared on Facebook June 16, 2025)
Brenda Littleton
