Moffett Beall Hall left us February 10, 2021, one week shy of her 84th birthday.  She had been in constant pain from arthritis and spinal stenosis for years, lost weight and strength, and could not adequately nourish herself.  Hospital staff at Kaiser Oakland tried everything non-invasive, to no avail.  Her husband was by her side as she peacefully departed.

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Moffett loved intellectual discussion and books.  She loved nature and hiking and gardening.  She was a creator who explored in multiple directions – teaching herself folk guitar from the Joan Baez and Phil Ochs songbooks, writing good poetry, mastering oil painting, wheel pottery, printmaking, and line drawing.  Later she became an accomplished watercolorist.  She translated two book-length works from the French, though she didn’t pursue publication.  She was a seeker and steady explorer who exercised good taste and good judgement.

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Moffett was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Georgetown.  Her father was an officer of a local bank.  She had extended family on her mother’s side in Blacksburg and Front Royal, Virginia.  Her 5-year-old sister died of scarlet fever two months before Moffett was born.  As a girl she walked to the playgrounds at Montrose Park and the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, and she remembered being a good broad-jumper.  Thinking of Zipper, her beagle, would bring a smile throughout her life.  She was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and her best teen friend attended St. Alban's School, affiliated with the National Cathedral.

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Salutatorian of her public high school class, she won a scholarship to Swarthmore College, where she majored in English and minored in French and history.  She was awarded a grant to spend her junior year abroad in Aix-en-Provence, and traveled to Florence.  All her life she sought out museums and relished their offerings.  And she stayed in touch throughout her life with her Swarthmore friends from the year in Provence.

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She was interested in, proud of, her Scottish heritage.  (She always did keep a grip on her family finances.)  She was a member of the Clan Moffat Society.  Utilizing her mother’s research, she succeeded in tracing her lineage through eight generations back to Scotland, where the Moffetts were a powerful border clan.  Her first name came from her mother, nee Mary Moffett Armstrong, whom everyone called Moffett.  (For that matter, her father, John Hanson Beall, was called Hanson.)

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After graduating from Swarthmore with honors in 1959, Moffett spent over a year as Assistant Children’s Librarian at the Washington, D.C., Public Library, where she did everything, but especially enjoyed the storytelling from memory.  She began three semesters of successful graduate study in English at Cal in 1960, and later switched to Russian for three semesters (all A’s).  (When she attended the Yale Summer Language Institute in 1974, she chose to challenge herself with German.)  At Berkeley she was Research/Editorial Assistant or T.A. for Louis Simpson, Martin Halpern, Morton Paley, and Paul Piehler in the preparation of their books and articles.  As a fast typist who knew shorthand, she worked for the Institute of International Studies, the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education, the Bancroft Library’s Oral History project, and the Peace Corps program administered by UC Extension.

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At a 1964 Christmas party in Georgetown she met her future husband, Michael Hall, who had been living and studying in Munich, and when he came to Berkeley for graduate study, they discovered their shared love for the outdoors and art and English lit, and especially their shared political outlook.  Moffett was always politically astute, someone who unequivocally valued truth and justice.  She was an active participant in the 1964 UC Free Speech Movement, subsequent anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft actions, and the defense of People’s Park in 1969.  In her last days of life Moffett was still interested in the progress of the second Presidential impeachment trial.

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Moffett was Associate Editor of The Bowditch Review, a serious forum produced by a zany, brainy commune with the sponsorship of the Campus Ministry Association.  Two-thirds (50 of 75 pages) of the Fall 1967 issue was Moffett’s scholarly article “The Geneva Agreements and Vietnam’s Unheld Elections of 1956.”  She was close friends with the brilliant Huynh Kim Khanh, who had attended her wedding a year earlier.  She and Mike had found a little house to rent on Parker Street in South Berkeley, had fixed it up, and on August 20, 1966, were married there in a ceremony officiated by a Unitarian pastor.

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Moffett loved cats, notably Clea and Patra, whom Mike married in the bargain.  Much later came Ozzie, a big, languorous Russian blue, more or less seduced from his original owners over the back fence, and Zuma, a frequent visitor from the friend downstairs.  Big cats, too:  an enormous stuffed tiger watched television with her during her last years, and she left some nice tiger paintings.

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In the fall of 1969, Moffett and Mike moved to the upper Catskills where Mike taught and Moffett enrolled for a second B.A. (in Studio Art) at SUNY Oneonta.  She was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship for Women but declined it with a three-page letter explaining her priority interest in the interdisciplinary nexus between literature and art, for which there was no specifically “graduate” program at hand.  The couple enjoyed trips to Cooperstown and Lake Otsego, and Moffett explored yoga and retreats at a Catskills ashram.  They spent a summer in Boston – museums!  Boston Pops on the Charles River esplanade! – and she sat in on Mike’s classes with Helen Vendler.  Mike began a doctoral program while teaching full time, so Moffett taught writing at SUNY Oneonta for a year while he struggled to get a dissertation written.  In the end, a recession and the collapse of the New York state education budget ended Mike’s chance for tenure.  (He taught six more years with an incomplete Ph.D. before taking a secure Alameda County civil service position.)

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Moffett was pregnant.  They moved to Rome, Georgia, where Matthew was born in March of 1978.  He became the much-dandled youngest child ever to be enrolled in the Berry College Preschool program.  Matthew wasn’t tolerating mother’s milk, but fortunately Mike’s sister worked for a baby formula company out of Atlanta, and he thrived on what she brought him.  Moffett and the cats found the college-supplied house to their liking, though both new parents soon lost sleep to one colicky little baby, and Moffett didn’t have much time for reading, painting, or museum-going.

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They moved to Waverly, Iowa in 1980 (a car drive from Mike’s aging mother) and bought a nice two-story house.  Moffett loved being a mother and was good at it, and Matthew entered kindergarten.  But again a recession hit the Midwest hard, and as the house lost value the Three Ms moved back to the Bay Area in 1983.  Moffett volunteered at Matthew’s Albany elementary school library (40,000 volumes!) two blocks from home.

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Moffett now combined her skill and care as a mother with her love of the Berkeley Hills and the Regional Parks, and began to enjoy once more the Bay Area cultural amenities that made her feel at home.  She joined the Berkeley Zen Center and began her typically thorough, penetrating exploration of Buddhism’s history, practices, and wisdom.  She was invited to be Head Gardener and spent a year caring for the complex garden with sensitivity for the community’s meditative requirements.  She worked in the kitchen and sat zazen.  She made solid friends and with them went on retreats, including to Tassajara in the Big Sur/Ventana Wilderness.  She prepared for lay ordination and “took the Precepts” under the guidance of the zendo’s abbot, Sojun Mel Weitsman, who bestowed on her a  Dharma name that gave her great pleasure to contemplate:  Sei Ko Tai Kan, which translates as “radiant light, peaceful joy.”

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Moffett shepherded her son through middle school and the wonderfully diverse Albany High School and saw him off to college.  They had amazing intellectual rapport and care for one another, right up to his last visit to her hospital bedside. Matthew’s wife, Cassandra, prepared the memorial website where you may be reading this; Moffett had been welcomed into Kas’s extended family.

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Moffett had taken up watercolor painting under Stephanie Scott at the Albany Senior Center, and used those skills to explore her own vision, which was ultimately one of truth and peace.  Her memorial service is planned as an in-person get-together at the Berkeley Zen Center, once the Covid-19 pandemic has abated and vaccinations have occurred.  Moffett’s books on Zen and Buddhism will be donated to the Center for the library or distribution.

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Donations in Moffett’s memory may be made to the Berkeley Zen Center, 1931 Russell Street, Berkeley CA 94703, or to the San Francisco Zen Center for the upkeep of Green Gulch Farm and the Tassajara Retreat Center.

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Her rakusu (a vest or bib that is hand-sewn according to set tradition by each student who takes the Precepts) lay over Moffett’s body as it was cremated.  With her rakusu Moffett had kept a packet containing photos of her fellow acolytes and best sangha friends, a few of whom have already passed on, like Dolly, and Maylie Scott.  In the packet Moffett included the following poem, which she had written out and editorially improved slightly from its published version:

          

 Parting

  

   Studying under the same teaching,
   Under one master,
   You and I are friends.
   Look out there:  white mists
   Floating in the air,
   Returning to the peaks.
   This parting may be our last meeting
   In this life.
   Not just in a dream
   But in our deep thought,
   Let us meet often
   Hereafter.

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            Kobo Daishi (774-835 A.D.)