As you can see in my Binghamton “hippie” journals, there was nothing brash in my decision to quit my job, go without an income or health coverage, and relocate to study and practice a yoga life fulltime.

Yoga was definitely improving my emotional, mental, and physical life.

Economically, I was marginal, living in squalor (winter in that farmhouse must have been miserable, and getting to work through the snow often an impossibility).

My job wasn’t going anywhere, anyway, and for much of the preceding year before taking up yoga, I had been deeply depressed. As a professional journalist, my income was borderline near poverty despite working weird hours and Saturdays, which did nothing to alleviate my condition.

None of the stockholders, of course, appreciated any of this.

I’m still left wondering why I set a late autumn deadline for the move.

I suspect I felt that the summer would be one to remember, and it was, bringing a period of intense self-discovery and growth. The delay also allowed me time to have a better understanding of my teacher and the community. Was I overlooking something treacherous? In the years since, we’ve seen all too many incidents of financial and sexual scandals in the Eastern spiritual communities in America. As I’ve learned in subsequent years, that was true to some degree in my ashram, especially after my residency.

Crucially, I was single and unattached, even though my love life had certainly picked up.

And so, eight months after my introduction to yoga and then the repeated trips to my guru’s ashram on a former farm in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania more than an hour south of where I was living, I packed up and resettled.

As I would discover, the most important lessons in yoga were not about the physical exercises, hatha, but in the practice of meditation, ethics, and spiritual community.

The real lessons arose as back-to-the-earth skills, along with new people skills, too. I’ve come to think of this as my Master’s degree.

The experience has been abstracted and distilled into my novel Yoga Bootcamp and its earlier version, Ashram.

For me, it was ultimately positive. I wish there was something similar for lost youth today, though I’ve never seen myself in a position to offer that, either.

As I went through my early journals, I started paying attention to their covers, originating in classroom notebooks. I don’t know about you, but trying to write down the meanderings of a college course presentation was usually frustrating. These spiralbound volumes, adapted to my personal life, seem to be no exception.

Still, their covers and endpaper entries provide some perspective of their own.

For consistency, let me say all of them were 8-by-10½ inches unless otherwise noted.

For example?

Vol. 1, undated, cost 49 cents. Upper right-hand cover had a Chiquita Bananas sticker. On the flip cover, I wrote, “The Kid – Yeah!”.

Vol. 2, undated, was a 49-cent Composition Book.

Vol. 3, undated. Indiana University 3-subject divider. Presumably from my first serious girlfriend in retreat. Some Wright State University notes, including French, logic, and Dick Allen’s advanced writing course, which wasn’t yet called creative writing.

Volume 4 included three loose pages from an earlier spiral notebook. First entry had dateline of New York, but was probably from Upstate enroute to Montreal. I’m thinking we took the Thruway to Syracuse and then I-81 due north to the Thousand Islands region. Pittsburgh, Toronto, and Cleveland were likely on an earlier trip.

Vol. 4,  undated, though mostly spring ‘70, meaning English L 381, contemporary American novel with Prof. Terence Martin. Met 4:30 MWF in Ballentine 460. The Progress Line, 50 sheets, 35 cents.. It’s the source of an earlier post and a Chronicle at Thistle Finch.

Vol. 5, undated, also spring ‘70 / political science 665, Frontiers of Public Policy and Action, a grad-level seminar with Vincent Ostrom, 3:30 Wednesdays in Woodburn 345. Classmates included Brian Loveman, George Strump &/or George Stein, Paul Wogaman. Remember, I was only a senior, being surrounded by these stellar grad students was a revelation. They kept the prof on his toes. Tennis, anyone?

Vol. 6, undated, third of the Progress Line spiralbound notebooks. Only the first eight pages were used. The remaining pages remained blank.

Vol. 7, green IU Bookstores, 100 sheets, 60 cents, beginning in Bloomington (fall?) 1968, but ending (after a big gap) post-Nicki in Binghamton, Upstate New York.

Vol. 8, blue IU cover / undated, but seems to begin summer ’70 with Sloth story.

Vol. 9 / 50-sheet Progress Line Urban Geography notebook, backing up to IU. (No memory of ever taking a college geography course … don’t think we ever touched a map there, either. Turns out to be Geog 314, urban geography – anything as long as it’s related to the city.)

Vol. 10, fat, three-section Harpur College tan cover, 85 cents / still no dates! essentially winter of 1971, with phone number at back for “yoga – Steve, 723-7226, 7:30, 131 Clinton St”

Vol. 11, Harpur yellow cover / leaping into yoga. Starts Feb. 28, 1971.

Vol. 12, first of the Cornell books, which I long recalled as legal size – except that I now found they weren’t. Were these among the $20 spree I mentioned in one of my previous Ithaca trips? These do have the extra-wide left margins, about 3 inches, which I still love. Starts in late April ’71, with a bold NIJINSKY in black on the tan kraft cover.

Vol. 13, the Cornell series starts with fyr playing with an old English variation of “fire,”  with date, 22:V:71 and photo editor’s death in newsroom on a Saturday night.

Vol. 14, Harpur white cover, starts with 26:VI:71 and a red Sivananda Camp Retreat Poconos rubber stamp image (I’d used one or two within previous notebooks).

Vol. 15, red Harpur cover. Really settling into a journal now … some verse, some encounters, some intellectual speculation, starting 26:VII:71 – huh, I filled the previous one in just a month earlier?

Vol. 16, yellow Harpur cover, starting 28:VIII:71.

Vol. 17, black Harpur cover, starting 17:XI:71, the night I met Celeste.

Note that I was consistently using that style of date notation by this point.

Now I’m observing that laptop computers no longer have a cents sign – instead, hold down the Alt key and type 0162 or some such, thought that no longer works in later versions of Windows.

While the ashram did eventually have an IBM, with its  Selectric ball (which you manually place into the typewriter) each one with its distinctive typeface, all of that was a step ahead in the chronology.

Does any of this serve as a recap of the earlier postings?

You can see why I’m calling these episodes “spiralbound experiences,” hippie and otherwise.

And pricing et cetera really have gone haywire.

God, I am talking about ancient history even within my own lifetime.