Jane Anne Morris crackled with life. She thrived on encounter and in purposeful work. She seemed born to upend comfortable assumptions and convenient propositions. Her “unpopular ideas” cut to the quick of our socio-ecological mispractices, and her anthropological discipline taught her an open perspective and an eye for cultural patterns. Her thinking aimed at strategic practices rather than shifting paradigms.

Our friendship was launched when we met in the nineties as speakers at a Backyard Eco Conference. Having family in Michigan, she also visited me several times, and I was able to visit her once in Madison.

Jane Anne was a whirlwind, a genius with such intellectual range. She had passion, latent ferocity, integrity, comprehension, and fealty to the facts. Her mind was so quick. She was so acutely observant and rigorously analytical that sometimes her light was almost too bright.

Professor Morris’ visits included impromptu tutorials. While I cooked in the kitchen, she’d discourse on the anatomy of the accordion and then play a few tunes. While I puttered out on my porch, she’d demonstrate tying a score of different knots, explaining the provenance and function of each.

After a day or so of her brilliant conversation, mordant humor, and wonderful storytelling, I would be somewhat relieved to lapse into my own tranquil company, soon to chew over all she’d said. Her standards of conduct were high. Her frugality and resourcefulness made her one of the most ecologically conscientious people I’ve ever known. Still, she understood that “This is a hard world in which to make informed choices.”

Our friendship lived mainly by mail and sometimes telephone. My disheveled files contain the treasure of at least twelve years of our correspondence. In her long, mostly handwritten-with-a-fountain-pen-on-salvaged-paper letters, Jane Anne’s mezzo voice resounds thus: “Yesterday at the Children’s Museum rooftop garden,” she wrote in September of 2010, “my biggest thrill was holding chickens for children to pet,” Her epistles often came in envelopes handmade from colorful magazine pages. They would contain reports of morel foraging, community garden plot harvests in which cukes and okra bulked large, and mentions of “indulging” herself with bicycling, including one birthday’s “full day bike ride equal in miles to my age.”

She wrote of dancing, playing music, hearing loons, seeing vees of canada geese, and wishing her environs could let her see meteor showers.

Rereading Jane Anne’s perceptive, funny and kind letters, and realizing that their author is no more broke my heart all over again.

She was a rager. As a public intellectual chivvying do-gooders to wise up, course correct, do things more for consequence and less for show, Jane Anne would suffer a lot of frustration.

She wrote me that she was frustrated to see “so much busy activity about good issues—but hardly the focused, long-term, big picture planning that the right carries on as a matter of course.” She was dubious about “touchie-feelie happythink approaches” to constitutional, systemic problems. The alternative, for serious progressives, would be to do the homework, study the legal and juridical bases of our democratic institutions—learn the rules and how to rewrite them; show up well-prepared to speak in public meetings, and do the kind of face-to-face listening and organizing that might actually empower community action. Democracy could regain its sinews through a lot of study and long-haul engagement, through speaking incontrovertible truths to power from the microcosm on up the scale.

Her rhetorical talent was stunning. Jane Anne’s writing was uncommonly good. No mere stylist, her every sentence was crafted, substantiated, and edged with wit. Not in My Back Yard and Gaveling Down the Rabble are books that will endure along with her diamond-bright, definitive essays.

It’s appalling that, finally, she had to scrape by on odd jobs, that her years were truncated, and that such a terrible affliction took her down. During that struggle to find work to support herself at or around the poverty level, she wrote of having gone a couple of years without having written, finished, or published anything: “I’m not spending much time in mourning, however, just the occasional wistful mental retrospective.”

Her letter to her friends and colleagues about the nature and trajectory of her illness was a masterpiece of valor, and impossible humor utterly devoid of self-pity.

As ALS overtook her, we had a few phone conversations. She’d muster the energy to speak of her condition and surroundings. Despite her mounting pain and eroding capability, while she tackled the “project of her life,” researching therapies, appliances, and alternatives, she reported on all the dealings with all the parties and the sometimes absurd institutions involved. She managed to be remarkably objective, compassionate, and stoic.

Reverence to those friends and kin who witnessed her suffering and helped her directly, who chopped the garlic and sorted the papers and scouted the wheelchairs and accommodations. Such devotion and generosity are the most eloquent testimony to Jane Anne’s virtues as a colleague, mentor, friend, and relation.

What a life and what a loss to our moment!