Let’s start with a pitch I once considered using.

“Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and I’m a retired hippie. One of millions and, unlike many, I’m not embarrassed to admit it was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its potential. What is often overlooked is that the central element was the hippie chick. My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrates her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to a rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town. May I introduce you to the full story?”

Well, that attempt has now been woven into what stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Still, as I also proclaimed:

“In many of my novels, the hippie movement opened their minds. Or at least their horizons. Or even a few hearts. What’s most opened yours?”

That led to these points:

• Crucial to the outcome were personal transformations that few today will speak of.
• We’re still caught between two worlds (or) unfinished business. I wanted to present my work as letters from a retired hippie or letters to youth and a call to action.
• I wanted to tell them I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we messed up.
• And yet, it wasn’t all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.
• Looking around, there are the old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.
• It was a youth movement. What you need to know about its legacy is this.
• Economics:. globalization and digitalization versus small-is-beautiful. As for the tax base? And the kleptomaniac One Percent? How about selling yourself into slavery?
• Relationships: the restructuring of marriage and family (dare we consider ashrams and similar shared householding).
• Environment and the earth: Global warming is a reality, despite years and millions of dollars expended in its denial.
• Justice and equality. Dare I say more?
• Alternative lifestyle. Think of clothing, the arts (Edge City), food, even basic skills such as use of a broom or hammer.
• Drugs, alcohol, etc. Legalization is one thing, appropriate usage another. Jail is not the deciding point. Oppressive life situations, however, are.
• Yup, the whole system of shaping our children.
• I’m not going there today, other than to say deep readjustments are in order. I hope they get to the bottom rather than enrich the most elite of society.
• Discipline and self-discipline. For me, that leads to the next.
• Spirituality and religion. Personal experience of something divine and then holy community.

Now, back to those contributor’s notes possibilities:

• As an unabashed political liberal, Jnana despairs for public sanity.
• He knows nothing good can come from a politics of hate.
• Jnana is a Lincoln Republican who votes Democrat by default.
• I was UPROOTED, repeatedly. In location, relationship, my career, even faith.
• The undertow or rip current, pulling me away. I expected to live in large cities, my life filled with opera and symphony performances. Instead, it’s been mostly small cities in rural conditions.
• My life journey has had little resemblance to what I anticipated from college on. Repeatedly, it seemed I was uprooted – in location, career, relationship, and even spirit – just as I began to address a situation fully. Outwardly, the result has been fragmentary, unified only in the mind and heart that embrace its many facets.
• In recent years, much of my experience of wandering and sojourn has constellated in an investigation of the metaphors of Light and Seed as they were expressed in the early Quaker movement. I now perceive a semblance between the Dharma bums of Asian religious practices and the vagabond ministry of itinerant Quaker ministers, and find comfort in their legacy, with its parallels to my own movements.
• After throwing myself into business crusades and tumultuous relationships, I consider myself a survivor. I love classical music and opera, mountaintops and the North Atlantic, Quaker Meeting and New England contradancing.
• For me, poetry is a state of mind. Its essential element is silence, linking it to sacred (An impossibility, of course, considering the nature of words. And yet!)

Or, to reconnect with Ezra Pound, literature is slow news, something allowing some breathing space and reflection, rather than the minute-by-minute confusion before us.

Which takes me back to Scripture, diving into antiquity for parallels to today.

Now, let’s sit back tonight for some gloriously fleeting pyrotechnics. Something that might inspire and awe almost everyone.