Spring yellow, for Easter. I cut branches of forsythia, bring them indoors, find an appropriate vase with water, if Easter’s falling early. And then they open, with a profusion of yellow. Sunshine.
Some, soon adorned with suspended eggs.
FORSYTHIAS
Tag: Culture
SPIRITUAL ENCOUNTERS FROM THE HIPPIE ERA
Nowhere do we see a bigger before-and-after contrast of the hippie impact than when looking at mainstream religion in America.
The idealized smiling family of father and sons in suits and ties and mother and daughters in their hats, dresses, and heels – maybe even with gloves – was once a common image with the church and steeple in the background. But that has become a rarity, and even at funerals and weddings the dress is likely to be casual. Intact families are a minority – weekends are often custody matters – and going to church or temple is a low priority.
Before we blame it all on hippies, we need to look at other influences from recent decades, including the elimination of blue laws, and the expansion of weekend job demands and children’s soccer leagues and the like.
Still, I see a few glimmers where the hunger many hippies felt for a spiritual connection has taken hold.
First is the practice of meditation, which is no longer considered exotic. Even health providers are urging people to turn to it daily, maybe not as a religious pursuit but at least for letting go of some of the daily stress.
Second, yoga studios are everywhere. It may not be with the strong spiritual teaching I feel is essential, but it is another way of opening ourselves to inner awareness and peace.
Third is a recognition of the feminine side of the holy, including the Jewish and Christian traditions. For that matter, think of all the women pastors and rabbis now found across the continent. Others will point to Native American, Wiccan, and other teachings with feminine components that now proliferate.
Fourth is a sense that faith is not an obligation, to be performed as a social requirement, but rather a relationship that includes hands-on, sensory experience. As the axiom went, “If it feels good, do it,” extends to religion this way.
As a fifth facet, I’ll point to outdoors encounters with their Transcendentalist streak. God, as you’ll be reminded, can be felt keenly when you’re close to nature.
Look closely and you can see the hippie influence working. There’s a desire for community and caring, on one hand. And the mega-churches with their rock-concert emotions, on the other, as well as the praise songs with their repetitions function more like Hindu chanting (kirtan) than the motets and hymns of Christian tradition.
But there are also examples of shoots gone astray. I keep thinking of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple and its cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, especially.
As we kept watch in the ashram, the warning was this: “You’re on a false trip.” No matter how exciting it might have felt at the moment, there was always the danger of ego-based excitement rather than a deepening surrender to the Holy One.
For me, then, the most crucial part of the legacy is in having a circle of others committed to the practice, to encourage one another and keep each of us on course, as best we can. This form of discipleship is rather communal, actually – and far from what I saw growing up in the pastor-and-sheep model.
So what are your spiritual encounters these days? And how’s the “inner hippie” responding?
CULTURE SHOCK
It had been ages since I’d gone to the cinema multiplex – you know, the kind in the vast parking lot beside the mall. Usually, when we go out for a movie, it’s an art house in Concord or a volunteer-run series at the Music Hall in downtown Portsmouth.
But Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was showing, and we figured we’d better make it there fast. No telling how quickly anything that quirky, formalistic, and savvy would be playing. (As we juggled our schedules, we realized it would have to be Monday night, overriding another activity on my itinerary – as we discovered, if you’re going to hit the big-box of showrooms, that’s the night to do it. We practically had the rectangular cavern to ourselves.)
I’ll leave it to others to lavish praise on the witty plotting that continually turned in unpredictable yet seemingly inevitable developments; the impressive casting and stylized acting; the precise cinematography; or the marvelous interweaving of actual sites in Germany (the hotel interior was actually the atrium of a defunct department store), miniature models of varied scales, and special effects to create a sense of fantastic and delightful artificiality. Anderson, as his fans know, is a moviemaking genius with a voice and vision all his own. (For one engaging detailed look at the roots of the story, click here.)
For me, though, the outing also invoked a series of culture shocks. Now that I’m “retired,” income’s tight, I’ll admit. I’m spending much less than I did before, and gasoline’s toward the top of my out-of-pocket budget. So the current ticket price (go ahead and laugh, you debonair rounders, when I tell you it was $11 apiece for three) made me gasp silently. (I know a good Greek restaurant where we could have dined out for that.) (I’m I really turning into this?)
From my end, it’s hard to take the very interior and decor of consumer society reflected in these big-chain outlets. It all feels plastic, cake-frosted, impermanent, unnatural. No one would want to linger in the vast lobby (what’s the point, anyway?), and no matter how plush, the showing rooms are – well, showing room sounds like something you’d find in a funeral home, which may be a good parallel, except that in much of the country, the mortuaries are usually in some amazing Victorian mansions. Nothing cookie-cutter about them, unlike these concealed warrens. None of this matches what I consider a theater or concert hall or even a house of worship, the kinds of places I prefer to assemble with others.
The third shock came in viewing the trailers and commercials. I’m still offended to be bombarded with big-screen ads after paying what I consider to be inflated ticket prices, after all, but to be hit twice with a promotion for a new computer game was especially egregious, especially with its pseudo-documentary interviews with its “creators,” a handful of pretentious nerds claiming social value for violent nihilism. I’m sorry, their world vision leads nowhere but destruction.
Actually, it was the amplified violence repeated in the trailers as well that most aggravates me. What in the American psyche so fosters terrorism of this scale? What justifies the reveling in gore for so many (and at such a price, even before we get to the price on our psyche)? Here’s the road that deserves a sermon of hellfire and brimstone, indeed. Wake up, folks, will you?
No wonder I prefer intimate, small-scale, gentle, playful, European or indie productions! They, in contrast, have soul and reality.
Anderson, I must confess, goes well beyond the small-scale criterion, but he earns the right to do so. And he’s generous to those who contribute to the effort, from the visual artists to the payroll accountants. One of the things that kept going through my mind as we were watching, actually, was an awareness of the lavish investment he was expending in the process and the question of whether he’d ever make it back. Well, maybe it wasn’t any greater than those of the futuristic trailers we’d watched beforehand, but still … Hollywood and Las Vegas have more in common than I’d like.
Maybe their biggest gamble is in making works that demand to be seen on the big screens rather than on our laptops or TVs via Netflix.
If you were a moviemaker or investor, what would you do? Or, as a film buff, what are you doing now?
SOUNDS FROM THE HIPPIE ERA
For many, as we’ve already noted, the hippie experience revolved around its music. Just think of Woodstock and the many ways it was the explosion that spread the movement across America and the globe.
Each of us likely has a musician or band we most identify with the era. Maybe it’s tracing the Beatles in their evolution to “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and beyond, including the individual paths after the breakup, or the Rolling Stones or, of course, the Grateful Dead.
I think, too, of Crosby, Stills, and Nash whenever I turn to the jam sessions depicted in my Hippie Drum novel.
Personally, it’s Sly and the Family Stone, Jethro Tull, and the Incredible String Band who most embody the hippie sound in my ear. Maybe with Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, and Leo Kotke or Leon Redbone thrown in. Whatever happened to those folks around me who introduced these musicians, anyway?
Whether you were there or came along much later, there are probably a few favorites of your own. Were they at Woodstock? Did anyone else even know of them? What memories do they stir up? Please fire away in the comments section here!
I’m hoping we got that list of top musicians started yesterday. But there’s more than a list to consider. Get busy. Fire away. And we’ll listen.
WHAT KIND OF HIPPIE WERE YOU? OR ARE YOU TODAY?
Maybe it was a New York Times Op-Ed piece at the time that pointed out six or more levels of maturity or psychological development in the adult population, and then saw hippies as falling into three of them. One may have been second from the bottom, that is, just going along for the ride, while the other two were closer to the top, probably reflecting the appeal the movement had for many college students and graduates and/or social activists (think antiwar/anti-draft, for starters). I found it interesting there was a gap in the middle.
I suspect this is one of the reasons it’s difficult to define “hippie” clearly – we covered a wide spectrum of individuals and motivations. Just listen to the argument today over “hip,” “hipster,” and “hippie” for something similar. These days, I’m leaning more toward something along the lines of the “boho” term that would embrace beatnik and hippie as continuations of a stream of counterculture, but that’s still in embryo as far as my thinking.
What I am curious about today is how we’ve grown and matured along the way. On one hand, Robert Bly’s Iron John took aim at the “soft male,” the sensitive hippie guy, who now needed to gain some inner strength and responsibility.
On another, I recall reading the singles ads back when I was searching and coming across more than one self-proclaimed mid-40s “flower child” who was still clueless and passive, and my reacting, “It’s time to grow up,” even as I intuitively backed away. And that was two decades ago.
But it does seem to me there’s a wide stream of individuals continuing in that Bohemian mode. In my case, I’m still a poet and writer who’s moved into the radical Christian tradition called Quaker. And I have a beard, not that it’s necessary.
As for the rest of you, ‘fess up. The comments section is open!
PAPER-FREE DIGITAL ANXIETIES
Do we read less closely online than we do on paper?
Do pieces get lost in the email and social media deluge of new material? (With paper, are we more likely to revisit a piece and ponder it? More likely to use it a springboard for response or action?)
Do we keep things in our inbox or mailbox folders? Or do we delete most of them once they’re read? (Or do we scan them, rather than reading?) Or just save them, “for later”?
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling flooded. There seems to be way too little time to keep up, and my mind is feeling like a sieve. Now, we’re all on to the next …
WHAT IF THERE HAD BEEN NO VIETNAM ENGAGEMENT?
Oh, if John Lennon had only penned this one! Just imagine, what if there had been no Vietnam engagement?
What if John Kennedy had not been assassinated and had been free to curtail or even dismantle the CIA?
What if the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower had warned of just a few years earlier had not been called into high gear for yet another round of (highly profitable) business? Would it have been brought under control and reduced greatly, with all of the investment directed elsewhere?
What if the Red-baiting bluff had been called and we’d instead seen Vietnam as a civil war rather than a Communist intrusion into the “free world”?
There would have been no lingering black cloud over America like the one that continues to fester. Even without the antiwar movement, I suspect, the nation would have been bitterly divided by the fiasco that ensued in Southeast Asia.
Would our economy have been unencumbered to grow the way Japan’s did at the time we were saddled with the costs of fighting or the accompanying steep inflation? Or the costs we’re continuing to pay in debt interest and veterans’ benefits?
And, oh yes, maybe there would have been no Hippie Trails novels, either.
Just imagine. And then add a comment on your vision. Music optional.
OUR LADY OF THE ICE
Or is it Our Lady of the Puck?
New England is hockey country, and Boston Bruins fans are legion. Rest assured, Bobby Orr would no doubt lead their pantheon of saints.
While statues of Mary are common across the country, I know of no others like this. Behind the mask, the face looks feminine. This repurposed icon icon overlooks Chauncey Creek Road in Kittery, Maine.
HUNTER-GATHERER DIMENSIONS
As I told them:
Although Jnana does not hunt, he observes points at which ancient traditions – including hunting and gathering – influence modern religious practices, meditation high among them. Jnana also acknowledges the role organized sportsmen have performed in restoring populations of wildlife, and has learned from hunters eminently adept at reading animals’ ways in the field. These days, living in New Hampshire, he keeps an eye open for moose rather than elk along the highway.
THIS SECRET SOCIETY OF READERS
One of the more baffling questions for just about any author, I suspect, is the one that asks, “Who are your readers?”
Yes, I know about genres and their core audiences – Chick Lit, aimed at unmarried females in their 20s; Romance, middle-age women; Sci-Fi, geeky males; Young Adult, well, it’s self-explanatory. I even know that commercial radio programmers could target their listenership to hit an average, say, of 24.7-year-old women in the office.
For a poet, though, or the novelist working outside common genres, this question becomes more problematic. I can imagine those I hope will find the work appealing, but the reactions often turn up elsewhere. I’m thinking of a writer who hoped her work would speak to her friends, only to hear them say, “I don’t read books,” as if it’s a badge of honor. (Oh, for shame!)
What that suggests is that rather than expecting a boffo bestseller, we writers might envision a much smaller-scale enterprise – connecting with readers one-on-one, as an underground understanding. Let it be private and personal, then. Our own quiet conversation.
Whether my Hippie Trails novels find their appeal more for those who lived through the era or among younger readers undergoing similar searching is still taking shape. I would hope both. But I am enjoying the feedback I’m receiving, from wherever.
It’s not the big-business Manhattan operation I once dreamed of or the San Francisco counterculture success, either. But here we are, connecting, in our own little underground society. Little do the others know what they’re missing now, do they?
Jnana's Red Barn 