#60

Subject met with me at her home in a rural woodland. Born 1948 Arkansas.


It was the ‘70s before I really connected with what the ‘60s were about. I had a strict religious upbringing in a family that had come up from dirt farms of the Ozark Depression – we didn’t have a television til I was 16. My big focus was getting away from home, which I managed to do at 19, when I became engaged and followed my fiance to California. My folks told me I couldn’t go out there because we weren’t married. I’ll never forget the incredible sensation of the plane lifting off the runway at the Fayetteville airport. The ground was dropping away and I was free to live life on my own terms.

I ended up working in a federal prison out there which was one of the best paying but most depressing jobs available. It was a correctional facility, so the inmates were younger or less hardened than the ones they sent to penitentiaries. I sat in an office and typed all day, transcribing caseworker dictation about an inmate’s background, crime, education, psychology. It was an amazing education about a whole world I had never known – mostly lower class urban kids who had a lot of illiteracy, addiction, and no real idea of a career except crime. There were a few middle class kids caught in the early days of the drug war for bringing kilos of marijuana across the border, and lots of guys in for refusing to be inducted. I was shocked by many things there, like the attitudes of everyone who worked there as a career person – they were hardened about the inmates and thought they were all scum and treated them accordingly. It seemed to me that attitude pretty much precluded any chance for rehabilitation. There were “girls” who were allowed to wear makeup and shave their legs and function as female, which the guards said kept pressure off the new ones who came in. But new admissions were mostly raped anyway, and “turned out” to be “owned” by one gang or another. The gangs were organized around skin color. Before this I had no idea about homosexuality, forced or otherwise, or about gangs. I had no knowledge about the urban underclass, or the desperate conditions of reservation life for Native Americans. Within months I had a lot of ideas about how much it all needed to change, and finally I took a lower paying job on the nearby Air Force base, typing reports for an engineering group who tracked downrange telemetry on missile shots.

Right after Bobby Kennedy was shot, my fiancé and I drove to Las Vegas and got married. Our lives revolved around our work, going to the officer’s club after work, drinking and going to parties. I tried to participate in the wives’ groups to exchange recipes and gossip, but it bored me terribly which I thought meant something was wrong with me. We were also going to night classes at the local community college, and going to art shows, and visiting scenic spots and spending lots of time on the beach. We bought a sports car and went to Vegas as often as we could manage, and I felt like we were successful. Although we watched TV and knew about the protests and other stuff, we were very distant from it. We didn’t see anything in the protests that made us feel connected to it, except the general idea that the Vietnam war was wrong. But as more of the officers, especially the pilots, came back from southeast Asia, there was more exposure to a different point of view. And exposure to marijuana. One time we decided we wanted to try it, and one of the engineers at my work said he would bring us some. He came by our house later with a shoe box, and hurried away. Inside was one joint, which we smoked and didn’t feel anything.

The last year of his service in the Air Force they sent him overseas and I came back to Fayetteville to finish my degree. Things at the University had changed tremendously in the three intervening years. It was like a different world. Everyone wore patched jeans and long hair and there were war protesters with their signs lined up at noon every day on the sidewalk across Maple Street from the Union. I really didn’t fit in, but felt OK about it because I was married and older and more self confident. Slowly I met people and began to question my lifestyle. At one point, a person introduced me to marijuana and this time I definitely felt something. It was an amazing experience. Within the next few months, I had tried opium, hash, LSD, and mescaline. Each new drug brought a new set of experiences, mostly a continuing expansion of my thought and understanding. At that time, the drug experience was approached reverently, at least within my circles – I had an experienced guide for my first LSD trip, and there was always the intent to explore spiritual questions or to expand understanding. We kept our experiences ‘pure’ – especially for tripping – no alcohol or other drugs to adulterate the trip, except maybe near the end to help come down.

In the summer of 1972, which I spent with L. in the Philippines, there was an occasion when I had a long conversation with three young local men who explained their point of view about the “imperialist” Americans. They were part of a communist underground trying to get Marcos out of power. I had never considered the “ugly American” viewpoint before, but they explained how the U. S. wasn’t in foreign countries to help the people there – it was about getting what we wanted, exploiting natural resources or using cheap labor for corporate profits, and extending our military power base. This was just one more revelation.

I think the most important thing for me in shifting to a new awareness was sex. Sexual freedom helped get rid of the fundamentalist brainwashing I’d heard all my life where women were vessels of sin and forever subordinated to male domination. Fortunately for me, it was part of the times to participate in “free love.” It helped me gain confidence in myself as a human and as a woman.

I did a few political things – went to some meetings and tutored local black kids; signed petitions and distributed literature about saving the Buffalo River; went door to door for the McGovern campaign. But I felt like most of the ‘60s had gone by when I wasn’t looking. By now, most of the generation was looking for a way out. We joined in the exodus from the city when we bought a gas station/grocery store/apartment in a nearby small town about 10 miles from Fayetteville. Unfortunately, the oil embargo of ‘73 didn’t help our situation and our marriage ended that year.

I met my second husband at the station, and then sold the place in ‘74 and moved into a cabin on land his parents owned in that area. A few months later we got married and ended up on a few acres where we built a small house and started our family. We heated with a wood stove, and carried in drinking water while pumping the spring-fed pond for the first year. We jumped into the whole back-to-the-land farm thing – goats which I milked, hogs, chickens, dogs, cats, a horse, even a calf or two at one point. We put in huge organic gardens and I learned how to can, freeze, dry, and otherwise preserve food. We stored salt, bullets, batteries, and the other supplies we knew we would need when society crumbled, based on what we learned from reading the Foxfire books, Mother Earth News, the Whole Earth Catalog, and from talking with all the other people around here who were doing the same thing. We didn’t know if the ‘end’ would be nuclear, or some kind of political collapse, or what. We just wanted to be sure that our family could be part of the new tribe that sprang up to build a new, better world.

I found it calming to live my life based on what Mother Nature demanded. But with three children by the early 80s, we had to find ways to make money and so we spent more time in town. Some of the animals had to go, and the garden shrank. The more I was in town, the more I paid attention to political issues. In the1980s, I became involved in the local NOW chapter in working on abortion rights. We held demonstrations and vigils and other activities over the 4-5 year period I was on the executive committee. Also I organized a parent-teacher group at the school, and we raised money for playground equipment and other worthy goals. Then in the late ‘80s I became intensely involved in environmental work. In the meantime I had built a successful self-employed career and the farming activities continued to shrink. I felt bad about this, because I felt like I was betraying what I really believed in. But on the other hand I wanted my kids to have piano lessons and dance class and karate. We transferred our kids into Fayetteville schools trying to get them a better education than the small rural school offered, and I was the mom-taxi driving them in every morning and doing the after-school rounds. I wanted my kids to have full exposure to what society had to offer while at the same time to know how to grow their own food and survive on the land. I felt then, and still feel, that they will see a time in their lifetimes when they will need to know those things. It may have been difficult for these kids to grow up in an “alternative”home, at least in some regards, but I think that what they learned will be important, especially knowing how to keep up the establishment front while simultaneously carrying on subversion if necessary.

The 60s thing that has become most upsetting to me is that the corporate/establishment propaganda machine has mostly succeeded in twisting the accomplishments of the 60s generation into some kind of dirty word. Every where I turn there seems to be some kind of perverse co-opting of the generation’s identifying characteristics. Like the music – Beatles music, which I consider holy, being used for TV ads to sell something. Or images of people reveling in pristine nature displayed in ads to sell big gas guzzling autos. Never does anyone give any credit to the ‘60s visionaries who pushed for organic food and natural medicine and improved education and rights for minorities and women, and environmentalism. These things have become part of the culture, but everyone acts like they just sprang fully formed from the head of some corporate Zeus. In the meantime, while everyone is busy benefitting from what the ‘60s generation has wrought, the actual members of the generation are defiled in every possible way – arrested for using the drugs that enlightened us, rejected in the workplace because of long hair or other personal features that have been proud symbols of the movement, ignored, disenfranchised, insulted – even the word “hippie” has become synonymous with “loser,” or “dirty,” or some other denigration. Oddly, I never considered myself a hippie. To me, a hippie was someone much freer than I ever was, someone who knew what was going on during the 60s and was part of it then. So I never felt authentic, but more like a copycat who came along later and said, yeah, me too.

I’m sad that often we are so terrified of ostracization that we fail to stand up for what we believe in. Most of us managed to fit in by disguising our appearances and hiding our beliefs. I can take small comfort in the fact that if “they” didn’t fear us so much, they wouldn’t go to so much trouble to vilify what we stand for. That means we have power, but then, it is power only if we use it. I think as we get older and can free ourselves from the demands of wage earning and child rearing, we will gain greater confidence and assertiveness about our power. Hopefully that will translate into a greater fulfillment of the vision we can bring to the world. I hope it for myself as much as for everyone else of my generation.

#26

Subject E sat on the floor of his living room, leaving me to the couch in a tiny house not much changed since its original construction in the late 1800s. He had to disconnect his radio in order to plug in my tape recorder, observing that there were only two outlets in the entire house. It might have been more convenient to sit at the kitchen table, but the living room held the only fan.


I started college in Louisiana, doing pre-med studies and working to support myself. I had a partial scholarship and student loan money, but I was trying to work a lot so I wouldn’t have to borrow so much. I was so wrapped up in that that I really wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on. I heard about student protests, but it just went right by me. Then one evening I walked through my parents’ living room, and they had the TV on, and there was this boot that was stepping down on the moon, and I said, what’s going on -- and they said, well, we just landed on the moon, and I said, great -- and then kept on going. I was that removed. My life was so intense it kept me away from everything else.

I missed most of what was happening in the world. Even Vietnam didn’t much come into my consciousness until after four years, my 2-S was done, and suddenly I got a letter, saying it’s time for you to report for your physical, and it was like, oh, well, what’s this Vietnam thing? That’s when I began to connect and start paying attention to what was taking place. I had friends who had done some protests against the war, but I was so aloof from that it hadn’t sunk in.

I was 20 before I started smoking pot, which is good, because I had pretty much shaped myself as an adult by then. It was quite a relief for me, because I think I was heading for a nervous breakdown. I had been neglecting myself, not exercising, not eating well -- so the pot lightened me up. I began to shift my attitude, began to not be so serious about it all. I had been so straight. I had found myself not being able to sleep, sitting up in city parks all night long, talking to the stars -- I was doing too much, hadn’t had a date in two years. Very narrow in focus. So smoking pot relaxed all that and began to open doors of consciousness. I began to listen to music more.

Then I went to Houston and found a job, doing simple work, making some money, checking out life. I started doing more drugs -- I was working at a hospital and had access to a lot of drugs, pharmaceuticals -- so for six months I played with everything. The drug salesman showed up every Friday with suitcases and would go into the drug room and restock the shelves. After he left, we would go in there immediately, going where’s the good stuff, really getting ready for the weekend. We’d take all the good drugs home, and so I did that for about six months and then began to realize that pharmaceuticals were poison. I was getting so toxic -- side effects – and so I did a shift and decided I would only do drugs that came straight from nature -- straight from plants, and I wouldn’t do anything else. Nothing processed much at all. And at the same time, I began doing yoga, changing my diet, and tapping into a whole different reality that I hadn’t known existed.

The whole situation snowballed. I did mushrooms -- not a lot of acid, because it was processed -- same with cocaine or heroin -- altho if I’d been given a coca leaf, I would have chewed it. Mushrooms grew all around Houston, and they became an important thing for me. I used these drugs not so much recreationally as to alter consciousness. The mushrooms became very much that for me. Pot was just kind of neat -- you could do it every day, stay stoned a lot and have fun. But mushrooms became the way to do deep spiritual work. I read one particular book called the Psychedelic Experience, written by Ralph Metzger, Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Dass, who wrote Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, and a couple of other grist for the mill -- I think he’s Richard Alpert again now. The book talked about using psychedelics as a spiritual transformative process, and their book was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead because they had discovered that was the only text they’d ever found that adequately described what took place during the psychedelic experience. So using that as a guide I went into it with mushrooms, and got a little frightened by what happened. I had an out of body experience.

Part of what I was going for at the time was to understand death. I had been working in hospital emergency rooms, watching people die almost daily. I was sensing things going on at many levels, and I wanted to understand more what it was. This thing -- life -- it didn’t just end. It was like a transition thing. I would sometimes feel a person’s presence in a room long after they were pronounced dead. And I was often the one who was left to clean everything up, the person included. I had some interesting connections with the people sometimes, just in a sense, which might sound crazy to some people. I began to realize that there was something more going on here.

So I began reading, Elizabeth Kubla Ross and this guy named Moody, who wrote Life After Life, or something -- So anyway, doing mushrooms was to explore that. My out of body experience was like the whole deal, and I was like, whoa, I’ve overdosed. But I realize now I was given what I asked for. Things like that made me begin to pay attention.

Then there were the social influences of the 60s, that were still there in the early 70s, the music, etc. And the remnants of the war -- I was still trying to figure out how to not get drafted because they had gone to the lottery and my number was like 160 something, but then I got a call from the draft board saying the draft call had been cut, and they weren’t going to draft up to my number. It was like [looking up] thank you. It was like, hey this is a bunch of crap, this whole war, why are we fighting this war, why am I being asked to go and die? What’s going on? I had a lot of friends who had gone, and I began to listen to their stories, and began to sense there was something really amiss. That combined with all the yoga and all the consciousness altering stuff I was using caused a whole shift in my reality.

The big thing for me was what I saw in the medical profession. I had gone in with an attitude like, oh man this is what I want to do, that medicine was this great thing, because that’s what I grew up believing. Being a doctor -- that’s how you could really help people out, ease suffering -- I remember as a child feeling compassion when I saw somebody in pain, thinking I wanted to help, and I thought that being a doctor meant I could relieve suffering on the planet. So I went into the medical profession and saw just the opposite. I saw people suffer from their treatment. I saw people go through hell as a direct result of what we did to them. It was like it fractured something in me. When that broke, it was like, ok, all bets are off. This is a wide open game. Then it was, ok, now what do I do with my life?

To try to figure that out, I had to ask the question: what am I doing here? What’s my purpose? I had no idea, because what I thought was my purpose was shattered. So I had to begin looking in other places. I began reading lots of philosophy, exploring ideas, particularly ideas about what it means to be human. Of course it’s much more complex than what I’m saying. I began to become more aware of some of the ideas of the 60s, what people were saying. I began to connect, to think about the Beatles and how they transformed. I saw a great thing happening. I like to look at specifics, but I also like to step back and look at the big picture, to see how it looks, and I found that interesting things were there. And I was in it.

Hell, when I was in high school I lived close to Woodstock, and if I’d had any idea, I would have been there. But I missed all that. I wasn’t even aware of it. I got tickets to go see the Beatles in Shea Stadium, but I didn’t know what it was all about. I sat way up high and watched the kids try to storm the field and get hit by the police. To me it was nuts, watching girls screaming until they passed out. You couldn’t hear them singing. I didn’t have a clue what they were about at that time. But later, I listened to the records and started understanding.

I became familiar with a biologist from England named Rupert Sheldrake and his idea of morphogenic fields. It’s not exactly unlike the idea of the hundredth monkey, which I have heard from some people was not a true story -- but supposedly, some scientists trained some monkeys on this island to wash their sweet potatoes, and there were other islands where the same species of monkey lived -- and washing sweet potatoes was not an instinctive habit, but learned behavior -- but when they went to the other islands, they found the untrained monkeys washing their sweet potatoes.

So Sheldrake said that all species have a morphogenic field or an overlying energy to who they are, and that behavior patterns are part of that. An example of that now would be that young people know computers so well -- it’s like, the older generation started the computer thing, but all of a sudden, kids are being born with almost second sight into computers -- they just know it. He would say that’s because we placed computers into the morphogenic field.

I look back at the 60s as a shift in the morphogenic field, and I think it’s still going on today. The effects are accelerating in some ways, and it’s happened at an interesting time, when there’s all this electromagnetic stuff happening and a shift in weather patterns. All this neat stuff is going on. I think most of the physical phenomena we see is at its core electromagnetic, including weather. I think earth stuff, energy from the sun, spiritual stuff -- it’s all connected -- if you look at physics and go all the way down to the basic blocks of matter, you find that sub-atomic particles are there for a second and then they’re not, they’re light and then they’re particle, flickering between being tangible and being intangible, being pure energy. So if all matter is that way, then all matter is influenced by electromagnetic energy, which is just a way to categorize vibrations. So the whole idea that it’s all mind, it’s all illusion in a way is true, but I still can’t put my hand through that wall, although theoretically I ought to be able to. So to me, the morphogenic field idea, consciousness and spiritually are all connected, all the same thing. These understandings just continue to develop.

I got into gardening when I tried to consider what would be a good alternative to medicine. I wanted to find something that I would feel good doing. I ended up sitting in my back yard years ago, saying, ok universe, what is it I’m supposed to be doing here? But of course, I didn’t get an answer, so after while I started pulling weeds, messing around, and then lights, bells and whistles started going off, and I realized, this is my answer. But it was actually a year before I really understood. Then I connected -- the very best food you can eat is what you grow yourself, coming straight fresh from the earth, so full of life - and you have the added benefits of being out in fresh air and sunlight, working with the cycles of nature, and then there’s all the airy-fairy kind of vibrational stuff. So I decided that’s what I would do.

It was tough trying to make a living at that. I was married at the time, and my wife worked part time. We didn’t need much money because we lived very simply. But then she decided she wanted the whole thing, big car, big home, and her price to stay with me was for me to get a job and bring home $30,000 a year. I said, I don’t think I can do that -- I mean, I entertained it. I thought maybe the universe was telling me to get a job. But I couldn’t do it.

As I became more connected to the earth and experienced personal healing, more of the idea grew for me, this connection of all these things, and I don’t even begin to think I understand it -- the more I delve into it, the more I perceive. It’s becoming more fun in a way, more wide open. It’s exciting. I look around me and see that most people don’t get it, don’t see the connection between ourselves and the soil. They haven’t been taught. In this country we’ve become so removed from nature.

I started writing a newspaper column, Dirty Dan the Garden Doctor -- I wrote sporadically for a few years. It took a lot of time and energy -- I carefully worked the words, sometimes making them vague or broad in meaning. But now instead of that, I’m doing this TV show. It’s been going on for six years. We do a new show every other week. It’s been a great opportunity for me to take information that’s right out there in public and hang it all together in unusual ways, connect things that people don’t connect, and then present it. I excited and pleased to be doing that, because it’s effective and reaches a large audience. I feel like I’m helping shift things.

Social, politics, religion -- the main focus is with health still. Recently I had a piece -- the Republicans decided they wanted to stop all discussion by the EPA about global warming issues. They came up with a bill to suppress any discussion by the government about global warming issues. They’re afraid it’s going to lead to a back door endorsement of the Kyoto agreement, which of course industry doesn’t want because they don’t want to limit CO2 production. So the Republicans proposed a bill -- and I read that piece on the show after I read about six articles about how erratic the weather is, and how everything is going off, and it’s like, what planet are these guys on? Can they not see these major things taking place? They’re afraid of it even being discussed, because their pockets are all lined with money from the coal industry and others. I love presenting this kind of stuff.

One of the stories preceding that was the big temperature shift in California’s coastal waters, how its killing off the phytoplankton -- well, that’s like the beginning of the food chain. People ought to be alarmed, if they have any idea about biology. The seals are starving, which is of course partly from over fishing. So all of life on the West Coast is affected -- but then, here’s the Republicans -- let’s don’t even talk about it. Let’s sell more sport utility vehicles. Hey, folks -- none of us are victims. WE have to understand that we all have power, and our power is the power to choose. We’re all making choices which are affecting life on this planet. It’s not like anyone can say, oh my god it’s happening to me and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. We can choose to drive sport utility vehicles and get less than 20 miles to the gallon, but we need to realize that this is what we’re doing. Be aware. We’re saying one and one equals two.

I get lots of good feedback. I meet strangers almost weekly who come up and say they really enjoy the show. They enjoy getting the information. They say, hey, you guys are getting stuff I never hear about. But fifty percent of our stuff comes straight out of the local newspaper -- it’s just going right by folks.

And this is all an outgrowth of a process that goes back to the 60s, this whole morphogenic shift. What I’m trying to do with the show is work with that shift, and when I get feedback from strangers, then I know it’s working, even tho I have a quote from somebody that says if everyone agrees with you, watch out, you’re doing the wrong thing. But truly, not everyone agrees with me. There was one guy who stopped one day and said, I really like your show, but I almost never agree with anything you say. And I said, that’s great, because you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to take the information and decide for yourself. We’re not trying to say this is the right way to think. We aren’t sure either, that’s why we talk about it. We’re no authority. Just a couple of bozos doing a show. It’s its own reward. I feel like I’m stirring the pot a little, helping the shift. We’re at the end of a millennium and the whole thing is about to change, the way it present itself.

This one author I’ve been reading says we’re coming out of the Piscean into the Aquarian, characterized by a change from rugged individualism to cooperation. We’re not going to survive if we don’t learn to cooperate with each other and with nature. The whole energy is going in that direction. Another characteristic of the Piscean is the parent-child relationship -- and that’s all our institutions, the government -- we know what’s best for you. That’s all going to shift. You can see it -- people want to take responsibility for their own care, working with each other. I see it in medicine, moving away from a tradition of treating the symptoms -- symptomatic treatments are becoming deadly -- drugs and surgery, which maim people and cause them suffering. I mean, properly prescribed and administered drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death. I mean, I worked there - we would give somebody a drug for some symptom, and they’d have a reaction, so we’d run in with another drug, which caused another reaction, and suddenly the person would crash and die -- and it’s like, what’s going on here. It was not a rare phenomenon. I saw over and over again that the drug salesmen would come to the physicians and say hey we have this new product, here it is, here’s a bunch of free samples, pass them out. The drug salesmen are educating the physicians about treatments. Thousands and thousands of drugs, the PDR is immense. The doctors depend on the drug salesmen to keep them caught up. And now we have commercials on TV educating the public, so the public will go and ask for drugs, whether or not it’s appropriate. The drug companies were rich enough to convince enough lawmakers to change things so they could do that.

It’s a great time to be alive and be in the thick of it. If we can keep our sanity.

I was trained in yoga years ago and certified as a yoga teacher. I never taught. My yoga practice now is mostly damage control. I do a lot of physical labor now, construction, painting, odd jobs -- I like that because it keeps variety in my work. I enjoy the challenges and the cleaning of energy, making things look nice again. It’s all healing, especially if you’re happy doing what you’re doing. It all comes from your heart.

I’m afraid that people are so asleep it’s going to take a major shakeup to wake them up. I don’t pray for that. I pray for it to be gentle. The shifting is coming now. The big quakes haven’t happened yet. I think the future is tied to our consciousness. Once people apply their vision, change will happen. We choose what we think about. I mean, if you want to think everything is going to hell, we might. Or if you begin to say you see a possibility, then that might create a change in the right direction. It’s not set in stone.

I’m real hopeful that there are enough people with enough common sense. I leave it up to the universe. I decided that a long time ago. I thought I had it figured out, and it became real clear to me that I didn’t. So it’s like, ok, I give up. In a way, it’s the whole idea of surrendering your will -- and in a way, that’s not what I’m doing. It’s more that I’m aligning my will to the will of the universe, which is more like my deeper will. It’s like we have this superficial will and a deeper will that’s not very conscious. It goes back -- the ideas have always been here. If you study philosophy and stuff, look at the yoga philosophy, or that of the Sufi -- it’s been thousands of years. It’s exactly the teachings of Christ. I was raised Southern Baptist, with the stories of Jesus and all that -- and I looked at that and I looked at the church, and it was like, wait, there’s something really off here.. You guys aren’t doing it! You’re talking about it, but you’re missing the point completely. You talk about Jesus and then you talk about hatred or express hatred -- What I saw in the music and ideas of the 60s are a more clear expression of those principles. So the concept preceeded the 60s. It’s always been there. The 60s are just when it began to bloom. It came thru in the Beatles music. The time was right.

It’s been said of our generation that we bought into consciousness raising and then we bought into money. Maybe that’s true to a certain degree, but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. There’s still a big movement in this generation that’s got the consciousness.

#27

Subject C and I sat in the shade of an old mimosa in his backyard. b. 1942 -- NYC


I grew up in the burst of post-war prosperity. My father was a junior high school music teacher and my mother was a pretty typical middle class housewife. I was marginally successful in school and with no goals of my own went to small Lutheran college in Pennsylvania. When I graduated I had no more idea of what I wanted to do with my life than I had when I was in high school. I’d say that “the sixties” didn’t begin for me until I was living and working in NY City and then really not until the Beatles invasion hit. It was the civil rights struggle that first grabbed my attention although at that time I knew nothing about protest and precious little about inequality in America (my boyhood hero was Jackie Robinson and his story was compelling but I remained ignorant of the pervasiveness of racism in America and ignorant of the Jim Crow south).

Public protest of any kind was a foreign idea to me. I knew nothing of labor’s history or the history of suffrage marches. It seems that “history” in school never made it to the 20th century. Of course there were no protests of any sort at my college. But after college the civil rights movement was getting cranked up, and that got my attention. In 1964, my new wife and I traveled to Morocco and, in a youth hostel in Tangiers, I had to defend the blazing ghettos of Detroit to a group of black Africans. I think civil rights was the beginning of my Sixties consciousness. I found myself cheering for the people who were burning down the ghettos, sharing their anger.

The last 5 years of the decade finally gave shape to my life. The civil rights struggle was on television and in the streets around me, the war in Vietnam compelled me seek a draft deferment by teaching school in the ghettos of NY, and all around me young people were acting up, growing their hair long, taking drugs, dropping out of the 1950s middle class.

You know, I’m a child of the 50s, and I got all that Eisenhower stuff -- diving under my desk for air raid drills, wearing dog tags -- WWII movies -- very much a part of my growing up -- cowboy movies, people acting from principle, regardless of the consequences. My aggressive nature and something else in me resonated with that notion of acting out of principle.

In 1966, I became a school-teacher in NYC - started off teaching special classes of emotionally disturbed grade-schoolers for two years, then 4th grade for three years, then again emotionally disturbed. But teaching in NY’s poor and colored neighborhoods was my way out of Vietnam. They said that with a bachelor’s degree and a minimum number of education credits, I could receive an emergency license to teach in those schools. I never understood why such a deferment was proper. It was tough work in tough neighborhoods but comparison with the experience of combat is pretty lame.

Being in those neighborhoods, dealing with those kids and getting a first hand look at poverty and social adversity heightened my appreciation of the civil rights movement. In 1968 there was a teachers’ strike in New York born of black-white conflict. The board granted the community in the Bedford-Styuvesant section of Brooklyn control of their schools. They immediately fired seventeen white teachers saying they were racist, were underqualified or underperforming. The union struck and I crossed the all-white picket lines together with one other white teacher and all the black and Puerto Rican teachers.
I was, up to then, a United Federation of Teachers union delegate for my school. The split in the teachers in my school by race was symptomatic, I believe, of the atmosphere of fear that drove white teachers to betray their principles.

When I was a student protests were unheard of and I found the 60’s campus protests kind of self indulgent, immature behavior. But in the 60s I drove to Washington DC to march in support of civil rights and later against the war. Me, a white man, talked to my 4th graders about black pride and about racism – as best I understood it at the time. I supported the Black Panthers and opposed the war.

Although the whole hippie phenomenon was happening all around me I stayed separated from it. It was too wild, too druggy, too irresponsible. I didn’t smoke marijuana until 1968. I was unprepared for the experience but ready to embrace the new perceptions I had from the drug. It put me on the path out of the mainstream.

F and I had gone to San Francisco for the summer of love. We had seen people our age – well, mostly younger than we were – living outside of the culture in which we’d grown up and outside the law as well. We did psychedelics for the first time - we stayed with my sister in San Francisco, were given some mescaline, and went to Yosemite to take it. As with my experience with pot this trip was seminal – again it changed my view of the world completely. Not like it made me crazy, or anything -- it gave me the knowledge that there are other ways of looking at things, that my sureness about reality was not very firmly grounded. It informed me that change was possible, that I didn’t have to do what I was “supposed to,” that I could change myself and that I could find other ways of living. This was the overall effect of drugs. I didn’t do psychedelics very many times in my life -- maybe six times. I smoked marijuana when I could get it, which wasn’t very often back then. But I think that drugs were responsible for, if not raising my consciousness, making it acceptable to think new thoughts, to admit to other realities. It made me open to reading about yogis, and reading Ram Dass and Carlos Casteneda, and rejecting my very rigid scientific background.

In 1970 F and I discovered Mother Earth News, and here were these descriptions of people living out in the country, growing food, taking care of themselves, and it was a world removed from my urban world. NY was increasingly becoming a place where I couldn’t live peacefully. I was a paranoid and aggressive person throughout the 60s -- I was angry and it was getting me in trouble and the city was becoming more dangerous. My hair was getting longer and hair covered more of my face. I didn’t know where I was going but the winds of change were pushing me.

I have a recollection of sitting in Brooklyn in ‘69 or ‘70, writing page after page, trying to conceptualize how people could live together, how you could restructure relationships among people as a commune, as a community. This was not based on any experience, it was not even based on reading about other communities. I was dreaming about what might be, but I don’t think I would have been dreaming if the 60s hadn’t happened; I would have continued being an unhappy straight guy. I was still working with a 50s’ head.

F and I went to a few meetings with neighborhood people -- by this time, Brooklyn -- of other ‘’hippies” -- people who were saying that life here in the city, in the mainstream, was crazy, that there was a better way –with Mother Earth News and United Farm rural land catalogs we started dreaming about leaving.

Our first attempt to leave got us as far as upstate NY – only a few hundred miles from the city. We were miserable there, without friends or compatriots. I taught school again and with my beard and long hair and uppity views about teachers’ rights I was pretty unpopular at work. Our first daughter was born.

Our attempt to escape from our NY City life was a failure. The next year we came back close by the city and rented a house in northern New Jersey. We were even more miserable there, both with our circumstances and with our personal relationship. I hustled a piece of a living as a cabinet maker and general carpenter. We came perilously close to breaking up and would have if we could have afforded two rents. We went on welfare. I worked as a stockboy in a department store and walked out after two weeks. We had committed to two years in the house we were renting and counted the days until we’d be free to leave north Jersey and find a new life.

Finally in 1973 we headed out once more. We stopped in southern Ohio and stayed with a friend on his farm, the first experience I’d ever had actually living in the country. We came to Arkansas because we had made some contacts with a guy in Pettigrew -- his letters to Mother Earth News brought quite a few people here. From our first drive through these mountains and the first hippies we met we knew we’d come to the right place.

Our first home here was a little shack up on Wharton Creek near Huntsville that we rented for $25 a month. Located in a deep valley on a horrible road this primitive old homestead was paradise to us. That first year we met M and his wife – they had moved here from California the year before. They had bought lots of land, and said why don’t you come build a place on our land. And we did. We moved to their farm, cleared a space in the trees and put all our youthful vigor into building a house, establishing gardens, and hustling a very small living doing carpentry and farm work.

F, who had a BFA and considerable experience as a calligrapher, started painting signs. We became ‘the’ county sign painters for 7 or 8 years. Even with that we earned barely $2500 a year. We got food stamps on and off, until we found the process too demeaning to continue. We had a second child in 1976 and a third one in ’79. By then we had started a crafts business using F’s calligraphy and combining it with pressed flower collage and making framed pictures which we sold at crafts shows. By the early 1980s it was providing a small, welfare-free income.

We derived great pleasure from our surroundings - sitting outside and looking at a bug on the ground, watching flowers bloom and trees change color and grow, interacting with wildlife and farm animals, growing our own food – and from the wonderful community of friends, all of them in-migrants like us.

We never had running water for the eleven and a half years we lived at M’s - well, we did have a line running from a muddy pond half of the year - in cold weather, the line would burst, because it was just half-inch black plastic on the top of the ground. For years, we hauled all our water from the creek behind the house, a hundred yards downhill, in buckets. We did and our children did. The summer [drought] of 1980 ruined the spring at the creek; it never recovered. The drought killed huge oak trees in our yard -- it was awful.

We didn’t have electricity for the first six years at M’s, just kerosene lamps. Bathing was in a wash tub in the middle of the cabin -- we would ladle water over each other. In warm weather, we had a shower of sorts - water coming from the pond to a hose hanging in a tree.

By the time we left in 1985, F was really dissatisfied. It had become oppressive to live as primitively as we were. Our oldest daughter was 13 and she was ready for something else. After a 3-year attempt to find a new life in Lawrence, KS we ended up back here in Arkansas at this house on the edge of town.


The whole hippie thing of the 60s was truly a rebellion, a cultural rebellion. For me it was a real act of defiance to refuse to wear a tie, to let my hair grow, to have a beard. You have to remember where I came from, culturally, and what expectations others had for me that I pitched overboard. I feel like I grabbed the 60s by the tail, and it kind of whipped me into the 70s and 80s. I really was too old to feel the rebellion from the innocent inside as all the young hippies but the spirit of it had a firm grip on me.

None of my college classmates that I’ve had any contact with followed the course I did. They all went on to become doctors, lawyers, ministers, college teachers, professionals of one sort or another. I never found anybody who freaked out, which is all I can call what I did, relative to my generation. But in no way do I regret my choices. I found my way to a freedom I didn’t have when the decade began. I found I could dream of another way of living, that I could act in ways that suited my feelings and philosophy and not be tied to what others thought I should or shouldn’t do or think or believe. I think I’ve become a more compassionate person and certainly more conscious of how people live together in the real world. And these are the basic values.

I have a job now, a business, and we can afford rent on this house. When we were doing craft shows we needed some kind of tent to keep us dry, and a fellow craft exhibitor and I designed and built one. When we took it to a show other exhibitors wanted to know where we bought it and so I started to make them – in the shade of an oak tree using hand tools - with the help of C sewed the tops on an industrial treadle machine in her tepee. Now we have drill presses and power band saws and C has electricity and commercial sewing equipment.

It is said that the ‘60s were about self indulgent youth, about sex and drugs and parties and rebelling as children rebel. It is said that all that noise and fuss had no merit and can’t be looked at for its long term effect. My feeling is that the experience of the ‘60s (and ‘70s) changed not only America but the world. First of all, the rebellion didn’t just happen here. It happened in Prague, in Paris. There were lots of places where the youth were saying the whole mind set of their parents, of the ‘50s, was crazy and hypocritical. It was the ‘60s that brought anti-war protest to the mainstream. In the ‘50s, there was no such consciousness. War was glorious, heroic. The ‘60s exposed the underbelly of the principled America we’d been taught about in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It was shocking to see television pictures of dogs attacking black people in the south. Up to then I knew nothing of Jim Crow. The ‘60s gave the lie to everything I had been taught, all the values I had been brought up with. My search was to find some ground to stand on because what I had been given as a child was pulled out from under me by the ‘60s. I couldn’t rely on any of it. I had to rely on what I thought, what I felt.

Then there was the practical thing of working with those new ideas. I don’t know of any communes that have succeeded but our communities here in the Ozarks have survived. I have learned that change itself is necessary and inevitable. I have learned not to be complacent, not to become too established, because everything will change. And that’s not a consciousness I grew up with. I grew up with the idea of immutability, that there are principles, things that are absolutely true -- and the ‘60s said there was no truth, that you have to find your own truth. The hippie idea was that each of us has to find his own truth.

All those people who took on the values of the ‘60s came from the ‘50s -- and much as they wanted to change, there was an awful lot ingrained. And we repeated some of the mistakes we rebelled against and failed at our attempts to create a different way of life - open marriages, communes, exotic religions. But understand that we had no basis for these experiments. We didn’t know, for instance, how to live together, and it was proved out time and time again in the many failed communes. They would break up because people had no experience in the principles of communism or the practice of it. When they tried to live out their ideals they constantly ran into themselves, or their former selves.

So much changed when I came here to Arkansas. We really were divorced from the mainstream, and this setting made it possible to be. I didn’t have a radio, no tv, I didn’t read newspapers. In 1974 we founded Headwaters School. We were establishing our own world, and we stumbled numerous times, but I think it’s testament to our determination that many of the people who came here in the 1970s are still here. We still talk about community values. We talk about who we are as a group and how we function together. It’s an ongoing topic of conversation within the community of people who came here -- old hippies.

It’s taken me a long time to learn how to be a good teacher, how to lead learners to learn. I taught two of my daughters for three years, here at home. Thinking about it, I became a better teacher. I think I’m a good teacher at this point, but I’m not doing it professionally. I’ve been warned by several principals I met while taking an upper graduate level course here at the University that I’d never make it, that the system would chew me up. The system these days requires that you to do it their way precisely, that at 10:15 am you’re teaching science, and following the prescribed curriculum. And those folks are undoubtedly right. The only way I -- and I still fantasize about going back to teaching because I think I am good at this point -- the only way I could do it at this point is to go into a really bad school where I won’t be bothered, where they’re not going to make me walk any lines, and I know I could connect with the kids. My solution to the educational crisis we have now is to fire the entire administrative staff, put more teachers into classrooms, and have no more than ten kids per class. You don’t need expensive books, you don’t need elaborate equipment, you don’t need athletic stuff. One teacher, seven to ten kids and a small budget, and then go -- my guess is that 90% of teachers would become successful, because they wouldn’t be dealing with an impossible situation. Most teachers didn’t become teachers because they didn’t have anything else to do with their lives. They had – and have - ideals, but they’ve never been put in a situation where they could put them into practice. I still might find myself back there one day. I think there is a possibility. I’m not sure I could function with the system the way it is now. I want to give back and I think I have the skills to do it but I don’t know if it will ever happen for me. My sister went back; she’s teaching in Harlem, one of two white teachers in a totally black school. She’s a really good teacher and puts a lot of energy and time into it. She’s in a state of perpetual exhaustion compounded by the frustration of large classes in a difficult environment.

I think that in my interaction with the local community here just being whoever I am has always had an influence. I just finished working with some local guys on a job and we talked about stuff, about owning your own land and immigrants coming in, current events. I don’t try to push my point of view -- when possible, I just state it and let it sit there. Think about it if you feel like it. I don’t proselytize. I think that the consciousness and ideas of the ‘60s have permeated the general culture in ways. For instance the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood is straight out of the hippies and ‘60s, and the black power movement – that idea of our interconnectedness and responsibility for each other has spread to a large portion of society. If it is nurtured, it could be brought out. The whole environmental movement -- so many people have accepted these principles and ideals that they are now mainstream.

So many ideas that are now mainstream were dismissed as hippie dreaming. The sense of social justice that came out of the civil rights movement, the first time many of us had to think about social justice, happened to us in the ‘60s. Life-directing experiences like meditating, being conscious of what we eat, doing yoga, greeting each other with hugs – all have insinuated themselves in the mainstream.

# 21

Subject L. and I met at her rural home, surrounded by plants and the steady rasp of cicadas in the nearby woods.


Folk music and a good friend who liked to play folk music were my first awareness of Sixties culture. I went to an all girls’ Catholic high school -- in retrospect, I think I had a pretty wide range of experiences there. I went all the way through Catholic college, and it was not a conservative or repressive environment, at least at the time I was there. My most respected professor -- of philosophy -- ended up leaving the priesthood and getting married. There was a lot of choice. The basic thing was, what you got out of it depended on your experiences. That background, for me, was that it was alright to ask all kinds of questions, and nothing was taboo -- There was a lot of conversation and questioning, different backgrounds and lifestyles.

In high school, I was interested in social causes, like civil rights and integration. When I was a junior or senior I did work through some classes, went down into the inner city in the mid to late 60s to work in the housing projects. As a sideline I did some work with the school for the deaf -- we learned sign language. But once I got to college (in 1968), I became more aware of the Vietnam War and that whole thing. My focus shifted from civil rights into the whole Vietnam era. My taste in music changed too, from folk to rock and roll. Another element that ran all the way through my life, and was especially strong in the late 60s and early 70s, was this back to the land hippie peace flower child thing. I grew up in suburbia but had grandparents who lived in the country, which caused my mother untold grief because I wanted to be a country girl. As a child, I’d go to my grandmother’s and cry when I had to leave. I also loved small towns. I didn’t see anything good in suburbia, although now I do see the convenience.

I was a sociology major in college, and I was going to save the world. I had one very good professor -- the department was split between two people: the head of the department was a sociologist, and he was very interested in people getting a good background in all the readings and the theories, and then the other fellow was very practical, social work oriented. I don’t think I appreciated the sociologist enough, but I was really impressed with the social work guy, so in college I ended up with a sociology/psychology degree. We had classes where we were working and it brought to the forefront the actual reality of working in that field and how bureaucratic it was, how difficult it was to actually get things done. I enjoyed the hands-on social work more than the theory.

When I did graduate in ‘72, there was a hiring freeze and there was no way to get a job. By the time I got a job offer, it was two weeks before I had my daughter, so I didn’t take it. When my little girl was young, up until 8 or 10 yrs ago, I worked as a volunteer in some sort of area related to social work things, women’s centers, adult day care centers.

During college, I became a vegetarian, and I was sympathetic to a variety of issues, but there weren’t any major protests in the small town where the college was. I had an early and very strong interest in environmental issues, which didn’t go away, and I was interested in Buckey Fuller’s work. I managed to get them to bring him to the school as a visiting scholar, then I was excluded from the formal dinner -- school politics. He was pushing the geodesic dome, and it was related to environmental issues in that there was a lot of passive solar and low use of natural resources -- very efficient. He also had an automobile that he had made that was extremely efficient -- the dymaxion car. I tried to find out if there were schools that worked on that -- you could get into a specific program, but there weren’t many schools offering just plain environmental programs at that time. I started getting involved in World Watch -- back in ‘71. Their state of the world report was really dire, but some things have been done that they said needed to be done. But from the perspective at that point in time, we figured that we’d be long gone by now and the earth would be a crisp cinder. I also had a lot of awareness of the nuclear arms race. I was more involved with social and environmental issues, but I wasn’t involved in protesting the draft or the Vietnam War, even tho I had friends who went off into the war and friend who went to Canada.

Getting back to the land was extremely appealing to me, going back to when I was a child, maybe more so than a lot of people. I had fancied living in a commune but never did. I lived with groups of people, but not on an official commune. When I left college, I got pregnant. That changed my life. I was a single mom, and pretty much deserted by everybody for awhile there. My family was there but not there. I’m the oldest of five children, and there was the recommendation from a particular parish priest that my family shouldn’t allow my younger brothers and sisters too much exposure to my evil influence. My family was actually more supportive than most of my friends, because my friends felt that there was no excuse for me not to get an abortion. My plan had been to travel the world, the whole thing, go back to the land, somehow do all these things, which now as an older person I realize weren’t going to work well together. Maybe I could do them consecutively, but I couldn’t do them all at once. I was sidetracked -- which disappointed everybody but me. I was pretty happy about it (being pregnant). It was an accident, but once I found myself pregnant I had no doubt about what I was going to do.

I was on welfare, AFDC until F. was two. I had good friends, and lived in a community in the country, and that’s where I met C. He and I moved in together. He was graduate student and had no income. After we met, I began moving into what I do now, which is archaeology and anthropology. I had been interested, but my college did not have an anthropology department. I guess from the point where I was interested in sociology as a social science, I was almost more interested in anthropology, in its cultural aspects, where you’re going out learning about cultures you can interact with. When I met C. I became more interested, even tho I was in the middle of working at the women’s shelter. I just took F with me. I spent probably fifty percent of my time doing volunteer work when she was little, basically working with poor people. In women’s issues, it was primarily the women’s shelter. I did that in Illinois, then again in Tennessee when C got a job, and I worked as a field cook. That was pretty interesting, I cooked for 16 people. Then we moved to Alabama and I found places to work. I did start working part time in archaeology, but also continued doing volunteer social work.

C came to Arkansas in conjunction with his profession, and by that time F was in first grade, and I started doing archaeology, and volunteered at the battered women’s shelter. After three years, the government contracts changed, and our jobs abruptly ended, and that was right after our second child was born, so we decided to start our own business. We bid on government jobs. C is the archaeologist, and I do the business aspect. I enjoy the field work and have done some of it, but I do the money and personnel management, editing and quality control, and we’ve been in business for 15 years. The last two years have been difficult for the whole profession. All the cutbacks, all kinds of upheaval, again trying to change the procuring process, and the death knell for the small company in this field.

We grow a big garden. For years, we’ve done organic gardening, pretty successfully. I enjoy gardening a lot. I did a lot of canning, but now I do more freezing. I do more specialties, like pickled okra. In Alabama, I was very organic, only not the point where I was making my own flour or anything. Eating good, home grown organic food was very important to me. I had neighbors who thought I was an abusive parent because I did things they didn’t consider good parenting. I did not give my children sugar, which was their term for love, their way of demonstrating love, and I also didn’t believe in hitting children. I worked temporarily as a substitute teacher, and I did a good job, but they didn’t want me back because I wouldn’t hit the kids. The teachers all carried a paddle, kind of like a ping pong paddle, right on their belt, and I didn’t believe in that.

I’ve run into downright bigotry here in Northwest Arkansas. People can be bigots in all different directions, and I’ve run into my share. I think that’s where the anthropology part comes in handy, gives an uninvolved perspective. Observing people who fancy themselves big liberals and yet they’re not truly liberal, because if you don’t go with exactly what they think is good, then your ‘aura’ is wrong, you’re not cosmically cool enough. Maybe I’m not as liberal, maybe I’m not as cool as they are, I’ve never really gone with that. I consider myself conservative in some areas, especially in terms of the environment.

I used lots of drugs. I used nicotine and alcohol in high school. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 13, and quit when I was 22, when I got pregnant. I drank heavily in college, for the first year or so, but then I considered myself superior to the riffraff who used alcohol because I had better drugs. I enjoyed pot much more, but I didn’t get to pooh-poohing alcohol until I got to the hallucinogenic drugs, which I did do the last two years of my college career. That was combined with the back to the land thing, and I did it for the spiritual part of it too. I do think that hallucinogenic drugs do expand your consciousness. I do believe that. Yet, I would be petrified to see my high school age child get anywhere near it -- I lost a couple of friends to drugs. I formed strong opinions about drugs then. I’m very against speed. My experience was that speed turned people into monsters. My basic opinion now is that I wish they’d (the government) stop wasting all their (our) damn money fighting marijuana and I think we’d have a lot of support from a lot of people. My personal feeling is that it (drugs) should all be legal. That would be the best way to go at it, the most effective way. Then maybe we could deal with the people who have the real problems. I had friends who were heroin addicts, I thought they were crazy but I still liked them. I had friends who fell into speed and they were no longer my friends. And those are the people who we lost, people who went out of second story windows. I never knew anybody using heroin who was that crazy.

I no longer imbibe, because I found in my late 20s that what marijuana did for me was put me to sleep, and I didn’t need to go to sleep. I had a thyroid problem, and I think that was one of the reasons I was so reactive. I finally did have to have one gland taken out. Both C and I have communicated our attitudes on drugs to our children, because I think we need something honest, and I think this baloney that they’re teaching in the school systems is harmful, because these kids are too smart, and they all of a sudden realize that marijuana is not this evil substance -- like T-- already will spout off that it’s only a gateway drug if you have to keep going to people pushing other garbage. To me, tobacco is the worst drug we’ve got out there right now, not counting speed and so forth -- it’s so readily available, so addictive. C’s been trying to stop smoking since I’ve met him, he’s been smoking since he went to Vietnam. T says she went to some sort of music thing, and she said 80% of the kids in there were smoking cigarettes -- kids under 18, 20. My brother has been a strong member of NORML for years, and I’ve sent him money, but we don’t give directly because of work restrictions. At least as archaeologists we don’t have to be very straight to keep a job. I think that’s why I’ve developed some of my attitudes.

These two sides of the spectrum, liberals (progressives) and conservatives (traditionalists), the terms are used to stereotype people. I think one of the main earmarks of a truly liberal person is tolerance. I keep trying to teach my children that. The main place we give money is to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a teaching tolerance program, which is fantastic. I think it’s a thread that’s gone all the way through my life, trying to fight intolerance. You can find intolerance everywhere, in right wing ultraconservatives and in the yuppie liberal political agenda -- I may agree with more of the liberal political stances, but I don’t agree with the social attitudes that close out others. We can learn something from everyone. I attribute my desire for tolerance partly to some of the drugs I took in college, because the experiences showed the kinship of people, that we’re more alike than different.

I’m optimistic about the future. I think you’re born that way (optimistic). To me, if the glass is half full/ half empty, why not think of it as half full? What’s the point in the thinking it’s half empty? I think that human beings can do it. Looked at historically, things are getting better -- maybe not as fast as I’d like. I think we have ourselves up against the wall environmentally, but I think the human being per se is trudging along slowly in a positive direction. Look how long we’ve been around -- we’ve made immense leaps and bounds, just in the last century or two, the centuries we’ve got recorded information. But then, based on my experience in anthropology and archaeology, in some ways it appears we haven’t changed at all. In other ways, both physical and the whole spiritual/moral aspect, I’ve seen just in my short lifetime some change for the better.

I like my kids, and I think they offer promise for the next generation. I think there’s a dual reason for our children’s adherence to our values. In my experience, in some ways it was more difficult to discuss and explain, rather than to just whack a kid for some misbehavior. But these kids grew up asking questions, thinking about things. Also, I think the information age has had a great impact. I’m reading a book called On Photography by Susan Sontag, really interesting, and it makes you realize that a lot of these changes (relating to the information age) started with photography because all of a sudden images were available everywhere. We all talk about the influence of television, video, how the world has gotten so much smaller. But I think some things have gotten better, and even tho on a personal level maybe people are not that much more improved than they were a hundred years ago, there’s a perception that we are. Look at the emphasis on all this human rights stuff -- . And when people are actually interviewed about these things (such as human rights, the environment) they say these issues are important to them. I think the culture is changing. You don’t have to go too far out to see differences, and I think it’s spreading -- the integrity of the human being is becoming important -- our definition of who deserves respect and integrity has become a lot wider.

One of my pet peeves right now is this whole thing that’s going on with homosexuals -- how can people be such bigots, it drives me crazy. I have two siblings who are homosexuals, and this is not a life that they choose -- it’s who they are. Assuming we accept people are born as homosexuals, for people to say that they are just born evil or choose to be evil, that’s beyond my comprehension. This sexuality is a divergence, different because most animals are born to reproduce, and obviously homosexuals do not have that drive to reproduce. It’s an issue that really gets my goat. Take Trent Lot’s stance on the guy they’re trying to make an ambassador to the Netherlands—a gay man, extremely capable—Lot is holding back the vote because Lot says he’s (the prospective ambassador) a sinner and being gay is a decision and we don’t want such an evil person representing the U. S. Lot stated that homosexuality was a moral choice and they can go get it fixed if they want to, that people choose to be homosexual, just like someone would choose to dye their hair —then the first lovely person to support Lot was our representative here from NWA, who said the prospective ambassador had some kind of gay agenda. We’ve tried to figure out what this gay agenda might be --

Anyway, it goes back to my thing about intolerance. I’ve tried to teach my children to be tolerant and have a sense of humor. I think if you go from there --

# 54

Met with subject near his Fayetteville home. Born 1949, Michigan


My sister bulldozed the way for me into the 60’s. She is six years older than I. After transferring from Oberlin, a well respected liberal arts college in Ohio., my sister was attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI., U of M. She got somewhat involved with the civil rights movement while there. My parents, specifically my father, really didn’t like that. Their most discussed fear was the possibility of her getting arrested and what their friends and neighbors would think if they found out about it. My father wanted her to transfer again to a different school. She agreed and decided upon the University of California, Berkeley campus and would pursue an advanced degree in marine biology. At that point in time, Berkeley didn’t have the student activist reputation it was about to develop as the Free Speech Movement (FSM) got going soon after my sister transferred there. She became very involved with the FSM and was arrested several times.

She and I stayed in touch, as best we could. There was a point at which she was banned from coming home or having any communication with any of us -- mostly my father’s doing. She was very intelligent, had worked several summers at Ford Motor Co. where my father had worked for 20+ years and she had received a Ford scholarship to college. Consequently, a lot of my father’s co-workers knew my sister. Through a series of events it had become general knowledge that his daughter had “gone off the deep end”. Much of the details were also general knowledge, i.e. getting arrested, involvement with the FSM, and dating a black man.

One of my last conversations with my father before he had a heart attack and died, we got into a pretty big argument after he admitted to me that he had recently voted for George Wallace for President.

I didn’t see my sister for several years while she lived in California and we were not supposed to be in any communication. She wrote me birthday cards and sent other communication to me via a friend. It is unfortunate that this huge schism in our family was not resolved until after his death.. He died very suddenly of a heart attack in 1968.

As I graduated from high school, I was planning to go into the Air Force. My girlfriend and I were going to get engaged as soon as we were a couple of years into school. I had chosen entering the Air Force because I wanted to learn to fly. It hadn’t occurred to me, when you’re up in those planes, what you drop on the people on the ground. I went to the U of M. too. As I got there, some lights started going on pretty quickly. I had started having conversations with, first, my dad, that quickly got very conflicted and then he died. My mother tried to pick up his torch, but she didn’t feel the same as he did.

When I graduated from high school in 1967, there were two kids in high school that had ever smoked marijuana. Where I was in suburban Detroit, it wasn’t happening yet. That summer the black communities in Detroit and all over the US burst into flames. John Sinclair and the White Panther Party were just moving from their commune in downtown Detroit to Ann Arbor. The Black Panthers and the Black Muslims were just beginning to organize in Detroit and I knew nothing about either of them at that time. My sister told me I should look into a CO [conscientious objector] status -- don’t just register. I remember talking to my high school counselor, and he said, “Oh, CO’s are just for Quakers and other ‘unusual’ religious people -- that’s not for you, you can’t do that -- just get your 2-S deferment”. A 2-S was a deferment to go to school -- and initially, that’s what I did. Then as I got to know people who were involved with setting up a draft counseling center I got interested in helping. They needed people to act as counselors and I went to a training program offered by the American Friends, Quakers. That’s the point when things started to add up very differently for me.

At the same time, I had a lot of good profs and people I got to know personally at the University who were showing me things I’d never seen before. New ideas. Pretty quickly it seemed pretty clear to me that “we”, the US, were making some major mistakes and that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing. Soon before his death my father had shown me plans of the assembly plant that FoMoCo had planned to put in what was then Saigon. He made it very clear.

He said, “The reason we’re over there is so Ford Motor Company and other people can go over there and exploit cheap labor.”

He didn’t think that was ok -- it was complicated. He wasn’t just this totally crazy right-wing racist. He grew up in a small town in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, as did my mother. He had no exposure to blacks, some exposure to Native Americans, who were mostly people who had real serious drinking problems in the UP. He came down to Detroit, this wide-eyed kid, and the guys -- the blacks and the other people that were around Ford’s headquarter’s in Dearborn, MI, Rouge plant, were a rough bunch, common laborers making good money. It was a real rough and tumble environment. He didn’t come into contact with blacks who made the best citizen role model. He got an impression -- and it was hard -- as I got older I started to see. He had just wanted the best for his daughter and saw his daughter doing things that could possibly create problems for her in the future. He didn’t know how to express that very well. He and I actually had had a very good relationship. And most of the time, my sister and he did too. All through school while she lived at home she had toed the line, had been a good little daughter, pulling straight A’s, was popular at school. Earlier I had always heard, ”Why can’t you be more like your sister?” And then all of sudden, “OK, if you want to work on drag race cars and hang out with these motor-head kids -- just don’t get involved with politics or racial issues and civil rights.” So she really broke the ice for me.

I was working at Ford Motor Company during the summers. I was still drag racing. I’d never identified with hippies. Summer of ‘68, after the Summer of Love, my sister was at Golden Gate park -- I didn’t have a clue. I was a motorhead.

But next year as the Vietnam War was raging on, I did get involved with draft counseling as I mentioned earlier. Because I was living in Ann Arbor near Detroit and Canada just across the Detroit River, I soon found myself helping to get AWOL’s out of the country. Helping young fellows my age leave military service and move to Toronto. There was a huge community of people who were deserting the armed forces. I made several runs over there with people. People stayed with me who were AWOL, people who had joined or had been drafted. I heard several young guys say, “Oh my god, what am I doing in this army uniform.” Large numbers of these guys wanted out regardless of the difficulties it would mean for them in the future. We were draft counseling mostly in Detroit and Ann Arbor with AWOLs. The volunteers were committed people working loosely within the American Friend’s service -- networking all over the United States -- a big operation getting people out of the country. We shuttled hundreds into Canada, people, friends, wives.

As I got more involved, I began to change and became more involved with other political activities as well. Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, got started on the U of M campus and I got involved. During this whole period, I was still in school. I transferred into the veterinarian program at Michigan State University, MSU.

I ran into some big problems there -- we were demonstrating to abolish ROTC, working with a small group. We had regular weekly demonstrations at the ROTC building -- maybe a dozen or two people at most -- it was a much less active campus than Ann Arbor. We’d go on radio and do talk shows about why the military should not be allowed to recruit on campus. Then Nixon invaded Cambodia. There was going to be a huge increase in the draft. Then some of these disinterested students on campus got more concerned since now it might be THEIR asses out their in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

By then I had come to the conclusion that I should not continue taking a 2-S deferment and was 1-A. I was really just waiting for my draft notice when I would be leaving school and immigrating to Canada myself

My girlfriend’s mother forbad her from getting on my motorcycle -- I was just a troublemaker -- I was going to wind up in jail or in Canada or both -- a lot of things were changing very quickly.

Then we had another one of our weekly demonstrations at the ROTC building and 1800 people showed up. Two of us had bullhorns as usual -- we hadn’t anticipated so many people -- we saw a parked car, people taking something out of their trunk -- walking toward us – a bullhorn with a BIG amp. Another one of these guys had a box full of stuff -- their bullhorn was massive and they were much louder than we were.

The guy with the bullhorn told us to “Shut up!” They said, “We’ve come from Detroit, we’re from the Hole in the Wall Gang -- it’s time for you to have an option -- instead of being involved with these rinky-dink demonstrations, it’s time to ‘seize the time’ and change the basic operating rules of how demonstrations are going on. Those of you who want to participate in ending the ROTC program, we’re prepared to do that right now.” They then uncovered this box with dozens of Coke bottles filled with gasoline and rags hanging out the tops.

We tried to speak but they were much louder and ignored us. They had obviously decided what to do. This was one of the first “actions” of the Weather Underground -- the ROTC building was badly burned but not destroyed.

The next morning I got called into the dean’s office and he said, “Young man, you’d better transfer from this school, right now. And -- pick a new career, because I’m going to see to it that you never get into another vet school here or in Canada or Europe.”

I did not see it coming but my career plans had been interrupted that afternoon during that demonstration. My life had been permanently altered in a matter of minutes. It was a very radicalizing experience. I tried to explain, “Wait a minute…”

Ignoring me, he went on, “Well, you called the demonstration and you couldn’t control it -- you’re responsible as I see it.” We got called into the police department, the FBI -- the whole thing. His message had been pretty clear so at the end of that semester I transferred, ending back at U of M finally.

I saw people I’d been working with politically burn out. When I finished school, some friends and I started a garage in downtown Detroit to help people learn how to work on cars. I had also helped start the Ann Arbor food coop when I made some major dietary changes and decided to become vegan. What started making sense to me was setting up alternatives to the mainstream. I got involved with the cooperative community and doing things in groups. I lived in a communal situation in Detroit. We taught classes in auto repair. I did engine rebuilding. I was making good money, actually. And I was having a really good time. I grew up a lot in three years from being a sheltered college kid to living in inner city Detroit learning to work with a lot of different kinds of people, different races, gaining respect for people who were able to survive in that kind of environment.

My politics matured. I saw it wasn’t as simple as the black and white issues I might have looked at in college. My mother’s mother had lived with us part of the time and she had introduced me to cooking and baking. As a little kid, I loved it. I had a great time making pizza, making cinnamon rolls -- she had lived in the upper peninsula and worked as the scratch baker and cook in a lumber camp for about forty lumberjacks, cooking all the meals. She taught me a lot. So while I was working at the garage, some friends said they wanted to start a collective bakery. I got into whole grain baking, trained with some people in Lansing I’d had known -- when I left I decided I didn’t want to keep working on cars -- it was like, god, what a backward way to move around -- we had switched over to just working on Volkswagens -- I had completely forsaken my Ford heritage.

I thought it was very likely there would be a severe economic shakeup -- which hasn’t happened yet -- and I also wanted a warmer environment. I was really tired of working on cars with slush dropping on me, my hands cold. This lady I was with was a finish carpenter, and I was a mechanic wanting to get into baking, and we traveled around the country looking at different places, and it came down to flipping a coin between Ashland, Oregon and Fayetteville, Arkansas. That was in ‘74.

I had a friend from Detroit who was teaching chemistry at Kingston High School. He’d been in the Peace Corps and had bought land near Ozark. We came to visit and met some of the people he knew, one old woman who made rugs and I hit it off with all the people. They were friendly, straight forward -- I never liked being in the -- what would you call it -- I’d go to Boulder and be like, oh god -- too much affectation -- and Berkeley was much the same. I felt more comfortable in the backwoods areas like the Ozarks than I did in these chic cities. I continue to feel comfortable with country people. I go down around the Gulf to play around -- this same friend now lives on a sailboat near Biloxi. I run down there with a catamaran I have and going into towns in Alabama or Mississippi I have a good time. And I realize that my being a white boy gives me a lot of privilege that if I were black or a woman could make my experiences very different here in the South -- but there is nothing gained by my beating myself up about that either.

I seem to hit it off fine with people that others would go, oh god, you know -- weren’t you worried they’d hit you with a monkey wrench or something? It was working in Detroit that I learned to be comfortable with the working class. A lot of it comes from what I’ve done because even though I’ve been to school, I’ve ended up working with my hands and doing work that’s blue collar. I’ve done welding, worked as a journeyman electrician -- I’m glad I went to college -- if I hadn’t gone -- I went back to my high school reunion a couple of years ago, and it was scary. Some of these people were like -- same mentality as high school -- most of them very unhappy -- I’m glad I got out of there.

I wanted to buy property. I got involved with several others in a farm near Cane Hill, AR. We built a home out there -- but the property never was properly deeded and while it was supposedly collectively owned, it actually stayed deeded to this one couple, who ended up having marital trouble and the whole thing blew up in my face. I ended up losing my house and getting only a fraction of what I had invested. It was my own stupidity, to build a beautiful three story solar home without assuring my ownership before hand.

I had started my business then, baking regularly. Initially, a lot of my time was spent learning more about gardening and making my business succeed. It was set up as a worker owned business -- it was pretty helter-skelter for several years. The garage and bakery stuff in Detroit had been set up that way -- the only other business that was run that way around here then was the Ozark Food Coop and soon after the Ozark Coop Warehouse.

By the early 80s I had a partner with whom I had been living for several years and we had begun a family. We both were working with people who didn’t want to see the bypass cut through beautiful farmland near Springdale. And I got to know a woman who was working around Gore, OK, named Jesse Deer in Water -- I really respected her and what she was doing, working with the Cherokee against the nuclear processing facility there. And I got to know Carrie Dickerson, who was instrumental in the fight against the proposed nuclear power plant at Claremore, Okla. She raised thousands of dollars and was inspirational to me. Then Ben Spock appeared on the scene wanting to help in anyway he could. Both Ben and his wife, Mary, got really involved. We saw that we could raise money making jams that helped pay for legal intervention to stop the Black Fox Nuclear plant..

From that, my interests went to looking at nuclear power and nuclear weapons. We did a bunch of surveying around Gore, and it was scary, the number of cancers and other things that were obviously a result of that plant’s existence. Then we started looking at the plant at Russellville -- and some other people -- we started making trips to the public documents room at the Russellville, researching the plant -- then Three Mile Island happened, and we started really pushing to get the plant closed. We continued to go down to research operating history which we then publicized.

My partner was very supportive. By then we had two children. Both of us were burning our candles at both ends. Very busy.

I knew a little about what the United States was doing in Central America but. I’d never been involved with public political actions concerning it. OxFam contacted me –my partner and I had been steady contributors -- I don’t know why they did this but they contacted me and asked if I would be interested in going to Nicaragua with a Tools for Peace program they were doing throughout Nicaragua to appraise how they should spend $300,000 that they had earmarked. They asked me to look at irrigation equipment, tractors, farm buildings, etc. As I considered this OxFam offer, Duncan Murphy came on the scene with people who had been involved with exposing the US intervention there. Before I actually spent nearly two months in Nicaragua and saw the horrible effects of US intervention there, I got swept into that work.

I went to Nicaragua for six weeks. I saw schools bombed, hospitals bombed by terrorists the US supported, with bombs we had supplied. I kept asking myself, “What is going on here?” I looked at it more, studied it, got engrossed in it, came to see we were making a terrible mistake there. I was involved in that for four years.

There were some reporters at the Gazette who alerted me that they would pay for an FOI if they could use part of it for articles. People had said we were being watched by the FBI. I didn’t know what might have been in my file but was curious enough to agree to their offer. I got this large stack of primarily blocked out pages back. More pages than I had assumed would be there but no real surprise. It was clear that my phone had been tapped, I’d been followed, and my public Nicaragua presentations in various cities had been recorded by what was undoubtedly very expensive taxpayer financed, undercover federal employees. This was while Reagan wanted especially to silence people who were involved with a major anti-US intervention public political organization, Citizens In Support of the People of El Salvador (CISPES). I wasn’t really surprised the federal investigation had greatly expanded the group of dissidents they had under illegal surveillance. Pretty much standard operating procedure for our intelligence community in the US. The stuff I was doing, exposing US support and arming terrorists and brutal military regimes throughout south and central America -- they didn’t want us to do. I had been aware that I was possibly, no, likely, being watched.

Earlier I had not felt like I quite fit in with the “counterculture”. I had considered myself working class. Going to Ann Arbor, being in the college environment did something to me. My first year of school I was in a dorm, and my roommate was this party-going fraternity pledge. He just on my own as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want that. All they were interested in doing was getting drunk and seeing how many girls they could lay. I met this guy from England who lived in the dorm. One night he said, “ Here listen to these guys with these earphones.”-- it was the first time I ever heard a group called The Cream. I went, wow -- they’re really good. He goes over to his dorm room door, rolls up a towel and shoves it under the door and says, “If you’ll smoke a little of this and then listen, you’ll REALLY like them.”

I knew what it was, and I was a little frightened maybe. He said, “It’ll be fine…just try it once.” And he was right, I really did like the Crème afterwards. Then he brought out this album with a picture of a dirigible blowing up -- the Hindenburg -- Led Zeppelin’s first album, before they had released it in the US-- I listened to it and thought this is REALLY good.

So several Friday nights after that while most of our dormmates were partying, getting drunk and throwing up 3.2 Budweiser beer, we’d have a towel under his door, listening to music that friends of his were sending from England. Definitely opened my eyes to some new ideas -- That is how I got to know people involved with draft counseling because they came over to visit him. One of their dads had been to Togo, Africa with the World Health Organization and brought back some green contraband. Seems the doctor father had given some of it to his son -- so we tried it too. I remember not being able to find my dorm room down the hall. This was just prior to the citywide legalization of the public recreational use of marijuana in Ann Arbor and the John Lennon and Yoko Ono concert there to raise money to win the release of John Sinclair from prison for giving a narcotics officer a free marijuana cigarette at the White Panther commune.

I could see things getting a whole lot better or things could go to hell in a handbasket. I want to continue to work in a positive vein. I’m going to be going to Cuba. Their major trading partner is no longer exists since the fall of the Soviet Union and there’s been terrible poverty and malnutrition under the decades long US embargo. I’ve always been interested in this little country so close to the US, thumbing its nose at the US for the last thirty years. And as I’ve learned from others about what we’ve done to some of our neighbors in Central America, I feel almost as if I have something of a personal responsibility to undo some of the damage. I stumbled onto several thousands of dollars worth of food processing equipment for soy foods -- and the Cuban agriculture department is working with OxFam and others -- so I’ve been getting this equipment moved down from Missouri, cleaning it up, getting it ready to go, shipping it to Cuba -- I hope to go down and help assemble it and set up a good sized soy operation in rural Cuba. They’re trying to pull as much land as they can out of sugar production and grow more soybeans. There’s a lot of mental retardation among the young kids in Cuba because of lack of protein. They’re pushing hard to educate people about soy beans.

We are also involved with monitoring Nuclear One at Russellville. We’ve involved the Arkansas Public Policy Panel in getting a few VISTA volunteers to watchdog at the plant. They’re now storing high level waste on a parking lot -- and they’re still operating these old Babcock-Wilcox reactors like the ones that failed at Three Mile Island.

I’m more drawn to do things on an international scale than I am local politics, although I realize local stuff is also really important. My personal interest seem to point me more toward international projects.

#53

Subject talked while chopping vegetables and cooking in the small kitchen area of her urban cabin. Born 1953, Texas

I was young--in junior high and high school--during the Sixties. You’re not too conscious at that age. But I remember sitting on my parents’ bed, watching the evening news with my father. There was always an update about the Vietnam War--bloody, terrifying scenes-- and sometimes that segued into protests against the war. I didn’t have an older brother or friends who were dealing with the draft, so the war wasn’t personal to me. I remember a very low level of dissent among a small minority of people -- wearing black armbands to protest the war -- in my high school in Corpus Christi, Texas. I wasn’t part of that.

I didn’t try marijuana until my sophomore year in college so I may have been a little behind the times. I went to college at a small women’s school in Missouri and remained fairly distant from the new cultural Zeitgeist, as it swung into the 70’s. I think it takes awhile for a movement to take form--I would say the Sixties as a movement was fairly amorphous, even to itself, until the Seventies. I think the intellectual convergence started happening in the Seventies, and continues today.
When I transferred to the University of Texas in 1973, I attended one or two demonstrations before the whole protest movement shut down. They were large-scale events, maybe about Watergate, or the war. I’m not sure. I was interested in attending and observing, just as I was interested in the streakings that were taking place at the same time. People would gather spontaneously at one of the fountains at the UT campus, usually in the evening, and then, strip down and run naked through the crowd. It was fun. I didn’t personally streak. Like most, I was a voyeur.

My parents persuaded me to get a degree in business, so here I was again in a fairly conservative environment. I was the radical in that group, which indicates that a personal ideology was beginning to take shape. The first energy crisis took place in 1973, during my undergrad years. It shocked a lot of people into an awareness of limitations. Later, as a graduate student at UT in Austin, I studied community and regional planning. One day I woke up and read the paper. There was a story about a small town in the Rio Grande Valley, Crystal City. The city had a municipal power plant that supplied all the electrical energy for the town. Problem was, Crystal City couldn’t afford oil for its turbines. People were going without electricity, so they were extremely vulnerable. It really disturbed me that these low-income people were suffering. That was a Seventies kind of social consciousness, building from Sixties. As a general rule, we were much more activist back then. When something was screwed up, people tried to take action. So I went to a place on campus called the Center for Energy Studies and talked to the associate director. I said, “Somebody needs to study solar options for Crystal City and other towns like it.” She loved that idea and got a grant. In putting together the team to work on the project, she hired me. That’s how I got into energy and environmental issues.

When you’re into alternative energy, it’s solar energy, it’s the whole appropriate technology movement, and then you’re into organic gardening, and you’re starting to look at alternatives to conventional society in many arenas, including alternative forms of living, more ecological ways of living, and ways to be self-sufficient in case the doomsday scenario--smacking into the limits to growth and subsequent collapse--does occur.

Unlike the Vietnam War, my concerns in this arena were not hypothetical or detached but personal. This may have a seed of the Sixties sprouting forth. To me, the Sixties were about being a part of something larger than ourselves, concern for a greater and more idealized society than our own. Some of that concern took the form of reaction against pre-existing norms, and some of it took the form of going in completely new, creative directions. When I and others remember the Sixties with fondness, it’s because of a feeling that we were part--even if only in a very small way--of something greater than ourselves. We don’t have many opportunities to experience that in our lives. Sometimes we’re part of a team experience that’s really remarkable, and we remember those team experiences, but on a broader more collective level, it may happen only once in a generation. I feel lucky to have been on the fringes during the Sixties and smack in the middle of it during the Seventies.

The environmental issue has been a significant thread in my life ever since. It’s a concern that manifests in the way I live my life and my work--some of which has been directly involved in ecological matters and some of which has been totally unrelated, but to which I have brought an ecological ethic. If I were to take my life and try to unweave it, environmentalism would be a major strand of color in the tapestry.

For example, one of the ways it manifests is living simply. I’m trying to live a life where I’m not working all the time in order to have material goods. My priority is having time for contemplation and leisure, and purposes other than the accumulation of goods. So I live in a small cottage, about 900 square feet, a building I bought for a song in 1990. It was a shack. Slowly, over the years, I tore it apart and renovated it from the top down and the bottom up. Now, it’s a sweet little place. It’s not fancy in any way, but people walk in and have a sense of comfort and appreciate the aesthetic. It’s right in the middle of town, but I have a quarter acre with a large garden. There’s a wood stove, so I’m fairly well set up if Y2K happens. There’s a concrete pond in the back yard for water storage and an old well too.

Right now, the main force of my energy is directed at writing. I write environmental/ecological pieces for magazines. I’ve also spent a couple of years working on an essay that reframes the environmental crisis from a pro-humanity framework. I think the underside of the environmental crisis is that it has bred in many of us activists and foot soldiers in the movement a lack of faith in humanity, a sort of disdain for humanity because the language in the environmental movement has been cast in terms of a second great fall from grace or as another manifestation of original sin. We believe humans are the cause of the problem and don’t have what it takes to solve it.

But going back to the Seventies…As the decade progressed, I found myself getting involved in other issues too. Feminist and lesbian politics, collective and cooperative households, organic gardening. I loved living in collective households, and they worked pretty well. Certainly as well as any romantic relationship works, in terms of expansions and contractions, the good times and the not-so-good ones. Since the early 90s, I’ve been active in the co-housing movement, trying to launch two different groups in the Fayetteville area.

Co-housing takes the cooperative/collective/commune model and brings it into our times. You own your own home, which you can buy or sell at your pleasure. So you’ve got autonomy and privacy and flexibility. But you also have community because cohousing is a group of people who are designing, planning, and building an intentional community from the group up and later managing it themselves. It’s really a neighborhood. Physically, it looks like a planned unit development or PUD and it’s usually designed from a very ecological standpoint. The scale varies quite a bit. Cohousing runs from eight units to hundreds of units--an eco-village. In addition to owning a house, you have an undivided interest in community property--the common house and other community features. Generally, the common house has a large kitchen and is a place where people can gather for meals. It may also have child care facilities, maybe a workout room, a laundry, so you don’t have to have a laundry in every individual house. And sometimes they have guest rooms, so you don’t have to build your own home as large. The idea is to also share meals several times a week so you don’t have to cook every evening. Beyond the common house, they may be other community assets--a workshop, community gardens, a softball field-- anything you want to have, even a swimming pool.

The idea came from Denmark in the 70s, when low-income families were trying to figure out how they were going to get home after work, put dinner on the table, and take care of the kids too. They invented co-housing, and it’s been very successful in Denmark. There it’s practiced in a high-density apartment format. People who come to co-housing tend to be social innovators who live and work at the margins, or beyond the margins, of society. They are also more educated and more politically active than the average person.

In terms of spirituality, I’ve been exposed to pantheism, transcendental meditation, goddess-based religions--ideas and practices that burgeoned in the Sixties. These and especially experiences with Nature led me to a universalist view, as opposed to a limited or Christ-centric view of spirituality. Nature is a very important part of my spirituality. Sometimes its a way of getting out of the mind, feeling more connected to the web of existence. Sometimes it’s a joyous aesthetic experience. When I lived in Alaska for 14 months, I had profound spiritual experiences of encountering spirit within the old growth forests. Right now, I’m a member of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers because their universalist theology matches mine. The theology is pretty straightforward. It’s basically about living our values. For Quakers, these values or testimonies are equality, simplicity, integrity, and peace. What could be more Sixties than that?