We wanted intimacy--not
a neighborhood where you didn't know anyone on the block, or you competed,
kept up with the Joneses.
A hunter-gatherer or early agricultural community meant that people lived,
worked and sought deeper contact with the holy spirit as a group, and
they all knew one another, from cradle to grave. I used to call my hippie
friendships "a horizontal extended family," as opposed to the
ancient tribal extended family, which was multi-generational, and therefore,
vertical.
We wanted a culture which acknowledged the human body, not just
for sex, but to hug each other, to be naked without shame, to revere the
body with natural foods, beneficial exercise, herbs, baths, massage, deep
understanding. This was not part of the culture from which we came.
We wanted a culture that thrived on gift-giving. We hitchhiked, shared
our food and drugs, gave away our possessions. People who could afford
to buy land invited others who could not to live there.
We opened free stores, free clinics, free kitchens, not just in the Haight,
but everywhere we went. We wanted be living proof that God was taking
care of us and therefore there was no need to hoard.
We wanted to live without the constraints of time. We wanted to wake up
each day and decide what would be the most fun to do that day--or just
find out as it went along. We wanted to go with the flow, follow our bliss,
be here now. This was in complete opposition to the culture from which
we came.
We wanted new ways to value one another, rather than by wealth, status,
looks, achievements, machismo, as our culture of origin had taught us,
and continues to teach us through the media. We wanted to value one another
for being lovable and real.
We valued spiritual depth, which we referred to as "heavy."
We admired one another for being happy. We admired those who offered selfless
service or peaceful resolution of conflict.We wanted a spirituality that
actually caused you to grow as a person, not one in which people attended
religious gatherings for social status. We wanted to be guided by our
own Inner Spirits, rather than by priests.
We thirsted for the spiritual awareness and grace we experienced on psychedelics,
without psychedelics, or in addition to them. Many hippies would spent
their last cent on a weekend workshop that promised to "change your
life forever." That was how so many gurus found followers in those
days.
We wanted to live in harmony with the earth, the plants and animals, the
indigenous peoples of the earth, with each other, with ourselves. We were
the fuel behind the rapid expansion of the environmental movement. We
experimented with living arrangements that we thought would harmonize
with nature. We sought out indigenous tribal elders as our teachers.
We wanted to make the things we wore and used with our hands, grow our
food and medicine, feel all kinds of weather--all the experiences our
modern urban lives had excluded in the name of convenience and comfort.
We wanted to live on the road, have adventures, build things that hadn't
been built before, and live in them.
We wanted to live our mythic selves, give ourselves names that resonated
with our souls, dress in costumes that expressed our dreams, do daring
deeds, dance as if no one was looking, decorate our homes with magical
things, listen to music that took us out of ordinary reality into altered
states of awareness.
We wanted to see life without violence. We wanted media that contained
truth. Some of us risked our lives to find out what the government was
doing and let the underground press know. We wanted to talk about things
in print that we were not allowed to discuss in our culture of origin.
We wanted to live without stupid, arbitrary rules, either for ourselves
or for our children. Some of our children, as adults today, say they wish
we had been more protective of them, or offered more structure.
We only knew what we endured, being as culturally different from our culture
of origin as Chinese are from Italians, and punished for it, and wished
to spare our children these experiences. However, some portion of kids
raised by hippie parents grew up to be hippies themselves. At that point,
one can say, a new culture was born and continues.
...Alicia Bay Laurel
www.AliciaBayLaurel.com
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