Magpie Blue is a model for how to live simply. She can show us how to make full use of what surrounds us, how to live in peace and harmony with the universe.
“I can’t believe in a religion where you have to die to go to heaven,” she said. “We have heaven right here.”
She’s a strong environmentalist. As a member of Extinction Rebellion PDX, she’s made a commitment to help preserve the planet.
PHOTO ESSAY: Inside the lives of Extinction Rebellion PDX activists
“I’ve always been a nature person,” she said. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been outside talking to the plants and to the animals. We’re all connected; we’re all one. When you’re a child, the veils between you and nature are a lot thinner. I’ve kept that closeness all my life.”
It’s that kind of connection to nature that guides one of Magpie’s basic life skills: She’s attentive to making use of what surrounds us. She’s a self-described “scrounger,” a “proficient trash picker,” a “finder.” It’s a skill she has practiced all her life. As a child of parents who grew up during the Depression, she came early to understand the philosophy of “use it up, wear it out, recycle it, fix it or do without.” Her dad taught her how to do yard sales, and as an adult, she visits yard sales and flea markets, where she has found and sold treasures. As a trash picker, she often wonders, why are you throwing this away? “I don’t understand this throwaway society,” she said.
At the age of 35, Magpie enrolled in Southwestern Oregon Community College, where she began to pursue a degree in anthropology and archaeology. She was a successful student the first year and a half. In fact, she said, she won an award for having never missed a class. Though she was considered “the old lady in the house,” she loved learning and being in college.
Magpie is participating in Street Roots’ international pen pal project to celebrate International Vendor Week, a program of the International Network of Street Papers. She’s written letters to street paper vendors in Mexico City and Poland.
“I just want to know what it’s like in other countries,” she said.
INSP: Street Roots is part of a global movement
In her letter to Poland, she wanted to know, “What do vendors do with few funds if they need medical care?”
Lack of access to health care in this country is something Magpie takes very seriously. Her husband, Sean, a Navy veteran who struggles with high blood pressure and diabetes, does not receive adequate supportive health care, she said. And it’s not just inadequate health care coverage that angers Magpie about today’s government; it’s the dissolving of environmental safeguards. She’s been to rallies for Extinction Rebellion, joining others to help raise planet health awareness.
But most of all, she’s an advocate for those who experience poverty. “The people who make the rules don’t have to live like us,” she said.
“Everyone of us in this country is one page away from homelessness!”
She’s an articulate spokesperson for the less fortunate, but she’s no complainer. Magpie believes in staying positive.
"The more positive energy you give out, the more you get back,” she said.
Magpie, who sells Street Roots in front of Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, enjoys talking to people, especially those who “believe in the same kinds of things I do,” she said.
As you get to know her, you come to better appreciate the name she has created for herself: Magpie Blue.
“I’m a finder!” she said. She’s like the bird, the magpie, who finds and values what others have left behind. She finds treasures on downtown windowsills in the rain, buried in soil, in dumpsters and trash cans. She’s a sorter at resource centers’ clothes closets. “I let the universe give me what I need,” she said.
And her last name, Blue. Blue is her favorite color, the color of the wild flax flower. Like a hyacinth. Like the color of her daughter’s eyes.
And like the free-spirited finder she is, she finds good in all of us.
“No matter the color of our skin, no matter our religion or lack of, no matter who we are, underneath we are all interconnected. We are all one.”
Magpie is celebrating her 50th birthday on Feb. 19. “A half a century,” she marveled.
Why not stop by her post on Southeast Hawthorne and wish her a happy birthday?