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“May we be at home like a lotus in the muddy water,” says Judith Lasater.
Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD uses this expression as her tagline, and is Christy Pipkin’s yogi. Pipkin practices yoga as a part of her daily life.
In eastern philosophy, the lotus flower is a symbol of divine beauty and the expansion of the soul. For Pipkin, a woman of 50 who lives her life with admirable calm and grace, it also symbolizes how things aren’t necessarily always easy, or clear. Yet, we manage to flourish nevertheless, even when the waters are ‘muddied’ – mostly in proportion to how much of ourselves we allow to stay open to giving.
ast year, when Pipkin had a recurrence of breast cancer that she thought she’d beat a decade ago, she managed to see it as a gift. “I’ve been lucky,” she says, aware that this may not seem like a normal response to cancer. “That is my reality, it’s what I’m dealing with, and I’m lucky I get to. I know some of that comes from having incredible circumstances – I have good healthcare, good doctors, compassionate care, a great family to help me get through, and a lot of things many people don’t have the advantage of.”
Annie Nelson, Willie’s wife and a close friend of Pipkin’s whom she refers to as a ‘spitfire,’ says it simply: “Christy is a good friend, she’s fun, she’s a great mother, and she’s strong, all at once. When she got sick this second time, for many, that could have knocked them down. Instead, she just kept going.” The Nelsons’ generosity and support of the work the Pipkins do has been “invaluable,” says Christy.
Christy Pipkin recognizes that her work – extraordinary as it is – and her family and friends are the sources that fill her with an extraordinary calm and vision.
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do." ~Edward Everett Hale
Christy Pipkin, the youngest daughter in a huge family of nine children, was born in Austin. Yes, she’s one of those few people we know who’ve been around to watch the city grow from a small, funky, cowboy-hippie town to an ever burgeoning metropolis; and for the record, she loves it just the same. She spent some of her formative years in Washington, DC, while Kennedy was in office and beyond, where her energetic parents were labor organizers. “That time made an indelible mark on my sensitivities to race relations, immigration issues, peace activism. We were the family that marched for peace, attended candlelight vigils and debated politics around the kitchen table. Thanks, Dad!”
Pipkin is committed to impacting the world by staying informed and open. “We can all physically do something to affect change,” she believes.
“I appreciate that my parents and many older siblings were straightforward about why we were involved in contesting the status quo. I had a real understanding, and still do, about what’s underneath advocacy or protest,” she says, realizing that it’s not enough to set oneself against the status quo.
Pipkin’s father, whose black and white photo she has perched atop an antique bookshelf in her stone house, was a big man, pictured with billowing smoke around his intense, spectacled face. From that one photo, one immediately knows so much about why Pipkin, though rather genteel in manner, is a force of nature, like the floating but rooted lotus. “My parents were tough Midwesterners who met in college in St. Louis,” she says as she reflects on their love affair and her father’s untimely death at only 56 from a massive heart attack. “They lived hard, and with conviction,” she grins.
1000 Voices For Hope
After working to rebuild the Mahiga Primary School in rural Kenya, The Nobelity Project has committed to building the area’s first high school. Sponsors so far for the $250,000 project include The Nike Foundation and Architecture for Humanity, and dedicated, generous Austinites including Ben and Melanie Barnes.
To complete funding of Mahiga Hope High School, the nonprofit is launching a new fundraising campaign, 1000 Voices for Hope. Supported by a beautiful new music video, the goal is to enlist 1,000 donors to contribute $100 each. “Join the choir!” says Turk, referring to the campaign’s first donor, Willie Nelson, with more great Texas musicians also set to pipe in. To watch the 1000 Voices video, and to make a donation, go to www.nobelity.org.
Just For (Austin) Fun
Favorite Restaurant •
Fonda San Miguel
Favorite Musician (not counting Willie!) •
Bob Schneider (or see below)
Favorite “Rock Star” Crush •
Joe Ely (or see above)
Favorite Club •
Who knows? I'm too old to go out.
Favorite Swimming Hole •
Jacob's Well in Wimberley
Favorite Place to Practice Yoga •
In Giocanda Parker's classes
and at the airport between flights
Creature Comfort You
Feel Fortunate Enough
Not to Have to Live Without •
Chai Tea, Malbec and my best friends
Favorite Author •
Turk Pipkin (awwww…)
On “-isms”
The values passed on from her parents obviously still resonate with Pipkin. “I think any belief based in ignorance creates division among people where none really exists. Racism, sexism, nationalism, prejudice against gays and lesbians – it's all learned behavior. Put a bunch of babies in a playpen – they don't care what color the other kids are or what language they speak. They have to be taught to see the difference, much less fear, much less hate. Hate has to be taught. Sad notion, considering how much there seems to be in the world. And with the backwash of fear and hatred comes oppression, deprivation, sometimes genocide and war. If we want a peaceful world we have to work for a just world.”
On Marriage
Christy Pipkin graduated from Austin High School and went on to UT to continue her studies in dance. It was at that time that she met her husband of over 25 years, Turk, a 6-foot-7-inch formidable force-of-nature in his own right. While Turk is a former standup comic and mime, Pipkin herself also enjoyed all forms of theatre, and performance art. Perhaps it was their mutual love for all things theatrical that brought the Pipkins together, but whatever it was, it has stuck. “Marriage is work,” says Pipkin, when she talks about how she is often asked what the secret is to their long relationship. “I’m not sure when the word ‘work’ became a bad word. Work is a privilege. It’s something we ‘get’ to do.”
On Work
Christy Pipkin’s current work is as a humanitarian, activist and executive director of the widely acclaimed nonprofit organization known as The Nobelity Project; an ambitious undertaking that she and Turk built together in 2006. The work is far reaching, and affects change everywhere, from Austin to Kenya and beyond. “I don’t always go with Turk when he travels abroad,” she says. “It can be costly, and we’re careful with our money, as we’re aware of how much impact even a little of it can make on the larger community. Besides,’’ she adds with a motherly grin, “someone has to stay here and manage things from this side.”
As executive director and leader of a two-person staff, (the project also has a very involved, small and diverse Board of Directors that are enormously committed to the work), her responsibilities include a wide array of projects that range from film and documentary making (for which Christy acts as executive producer), to building schools, to helping to establish web-based giving infrastructures and educational programs for schools and teachers here and beyond. “We are always looking for ways to educate and reach teachers. They are notoriously overworked and underpaid,” recognizes Pipkin. “So we want to break through the noise of their individual classrooms and give them something easy to use that inspires their students, so they don’t have to work so hard at engagement,” she says.
On Cancer
Cancer has a tendency to be very personal, almost shameful. My first round, when I didn’t have chemotherapy, there were many people I never told.” Christy’s first breast cancer diagnosis a decade ago called for a mastectomy that didn’t include taking the skin. “So in some ways it was a lot harder, because I isolated myself from people’s energy, and compassion. But, when you’re walking around with no hair (this time she had to endure chemotherapy and radiation treatment) you get compassion. People are genuinely loving. To be the recipient of that was very life-changing.”
“I understand now,” she says with a knowing smile, “that I can access the strength to do whatever I want to do. I know even if it comes down to dying, I have the strength to do even that.” She goes on to remember her travels, seeing so many children in dire circumstances in third world countries. “They are always breaking into beautiful smiles or playing with their brothers and sisters even as they’re hungry. The strength of the human spirit is amazing. It’s a shared spark of life.”
Finally, Pipkin reflects. “Love is not a limited commodity. It’s an endless resource – from within. We can all ‘give’, without any concern about going empty. Maybe that’s the biggest thing I learned in all of this. It’s a renewable resource.”
On Family Life with a Home Office
Since the Pipkins have two daughters: Lily, the youngest, who is a freshman in the band at Westlake High School; and Katie Rose, a freshman at UT and a celebrated and gifted visual artist; Christy is committed to staying close to home, and sees her everyday life as ‘‘ordinary.” “The only way we do so much work on as little money as we do is because we work as a team, running everything out of our house. The girls are used to this household being a working household, and they often pitch in.”
The Pipkin girls have traveled with their parents some over the years, but an emphasis on stability has always kept everyone grounded. Though the house is often a whirlwind of activity, it’s warm and well-lived in, with nails in walls everywhere that hang various and changing art works created by Turk the photographer or Katie Rose the artist. There is a huge grand piano in one room for Lily to play, and CD’s everywhere for this musical, artistic family to enjoy and learn from. The multi-level house is nestled in a lush wooded area near Lake Travis, and the grounds are home for a large deer family the size of Christy’s family of origin. “We try to keep them on the other side of the fence, but they manage to slip in every now and then. So be it,” Christy says as if she’s fond of them, no matter the menace. In many ways, the life that Pipkin has created for her family is a rather traditional American one. And her husband Turk acknowledges that she is at its heart, the centerpiece. But in many other ways, it’s not.
Christy, Through Turk’s Eyes
Turk Pipkin sits at his cluttered desk tall and, right now, proud. He looks through photos on his big Mac screen of his wife and daughters where he has literally thousands of photographs of their lives together, most of them shot by him. He is an actor, writer, photographer, filmmaker, producer, director, nonprofit foundation ambassador, juggler, chess player and golfer, to name just a few.
austinwoman: Is Christy your muse?
Turk Pipkin: Christy is not my muse. She may be the muse for lots of my friends who secretly have crushes on her, but for me she’s a true creative and business partner. Christy has a lot of creative input in my writing, in my ideas for projects, in my fundraising efforts. She has an enormous capacity to perceptively and patiently get things done. Everybody loves Christy, and loves working with Christy. There are two types of producers, and one is a joy to be around, doesn’t waste people’s time. It’s work the way work should be. That’s Christy. There are two parts to art in business – the process of doing it, and of living in the moment and enjoying it. Christy accomplishes that balance naturally.
aw: How did Christy’s second cancer
diagnosis affect your lives?
TP: I’ve learned that we’re all challenged by problems in our lives. When Christy got sick, we considered it just another part of life. One thing we have accepted is that you’re cancer-free until you’re not cancer-free anymore. This decade of our life has been happier and more productive than any other decade, and we’ve been happier than we’ve ever been. I know it sounds weird, but that’s attributed to Christy getting cancer. It forces you to look at how you want to live your life.
Turk’s golf and chess buddy Willie Nelson also chimed in about Christy and his admiration for her. In typical Willie style, his assessment is succinct. “I've known Christy almost 30 years. She's been a great producer and a good friend. She scared us with some health problems but showed what she was made of by beating all the odds. There it is – short and sweet – just like Christy!”
This She Believes
“A high school? Are you nuts?”
Last fall we were wrapping production on our new film, One Peace At a Time, and Turk had just arrived home from Kenya. He’d been shooting at the Mahiga Primary School where The Nobelity Project had helped install power, clean water and a computer lab. The footage of the kids was beautiful and I felt like we had pulled off a small miracle.
But there are some people that see small miracles as proof of larger ones. Still, Turk’s idea of building a fully functional high school at Mahiga seemed plain crazy, and I said so. He looked at me and then at our then 8th grader, Lily, and dealt a low blow. “Education should not end at the 8th grade.”
Now I’ve always thought of myself as the voice of reason in our lives. I bring up the what-ifs and what-could-go-wrongs on every project, and worry them through. I borrow trouble or play the mean mommy. Sometimes I just say, “No.” But it was 2008 and the season of “Yes we can.” So I added the high school proposal onto the agenda for our next board meeting, secretly thinking that the board would find a way to bring the vision back to earth.
An hour before the meeting, my doctor called with results of a biopsy I had undergone the week before. As you can imagine, the word “cancer” was pretty high on my list of words I didn’t want to hear. Fear welled up in thinking about what lay ahead: the tests, the treatment, the impact on my family, the help I’d need.
Shell-shocked and too late to cancel, we held the meeting anyway, and Turk made his pitch to build the first high school in that region of Kenya. I watched the eyes of our board members, all with home and work pressures of their own. They lit up at the notion that we could actually do this thing. And as I cleared my throat to voice my concerns, a small miracle of my own happened. The concerns disappeared.
Looking at life through the lens of my new reality, somehow, in that moment, I saw that I, we, can do anything. Commitment is self-renewing. Compassion is an inexhaustible resource. No matter the how or how hard the way, small steps get you down the road. I can raise my hand at every opportunity, and there are other hands to help at every turn. I believe that sometimes the best medicine is to simply say, “Yes.”