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excerpt from memoir, by poetaluna
Saint Louis Park, MN US

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excerpt from memoir

Chapter One
The summer of love, summer of 1967, was a time of fascination with youth and youthful energy, the burst of baby-boomers onto the pages of history. Smashing away at societys traditions and customs, young people questioned the politics, the religion, and the militaristic intervention of a nation mourning innocence lost. Our idols had fallen and our young men were dying in a war that was not legally declared. The old ways were torn apart and burned, like the American flags worn on patched jean bottoms or torched in public demonstrations, and the exuberance of my peers seemed unquenchable. We cast off all fetters of tradition, nationalism, and racism as we began creative experiments in alternative styles of living. Crash pads to communes, open-ended relationships instead of marriage, our generation sought freedom in every form. Our music blared a primitive echo of the heart-beat while we danced in ecstatic bliss, often induced by drugs, but also induced by faith in ourselves, faith in the natural world, and faith in the changes we felt coming on the wind.
Our generation was the first to be raised in the luxuries of a middle-class lifestyle, the first to have the luxury of launching out on a spiritual quest without sacrificing our safety net. We had the luxury to denounce the materialism provided by our parents so that we were free to study, read and think, discuss and travel, rather than add our hands to the labor at home. Dependent on the economic safe-guard of our parents to bail us out whenever our experiments failed, we took leaps that would enchant the world with our youthful enthusiasm and courage. The economy sustained us in cheap shared apartments as we moved from job to job, saving enough for the next adventure, able to easily afford extensive record collections, music equipment, or tickets to concerts, and just as able to afford a trip to Mexico or a refurbished school bus to go across country. Gas was cheap and there were always food stamps if you got stuck.
The summer of 67 was the summer I was transformed from a girl to a woman. I spent two weeks at church camp. In the evening we would sit cross-legged, sun and wind burnt, exhausted from games, and listen to the camps folk singers. By the time of our last traditional bonfire, we were singing along. I was enthralled by the words we sang, the way that folk music gave me truths to mull over, feelings that transcended my school-girl perceptions of life, the ideals of justice, peace, and freedom.
Where have all the flowers gone? we sang and I remembered the miles of small crosses in Arlington Cemetery, crosses that wordlessly convinced me to become a pacifist. Blowin in the Wind seemed to reach deep into my soul as I pondered injustice, remembering the shocking image of dilapidated shacks where black people lounged on the sagging porches on my first car trip through the South. If I Had a Hammer was a call to action. I felt myself being called, a finely-tuned conscience, separated suddenly from my peers who giggled and worried over zits and hairstyles, had dreams no wilder than a nice house and family. My dreams began to take the shape of the dilemmas of mankind, societys need to change in order to embrace our common humanity, my need to be in the vanguard of that change. I knew that I belonged to a select group, those who wrote and sang and listened and believed in those songs.
I bought my first full length albums: Peter, Paul and Mary and Simon and Garfunkel.
Later, I was entranced by the lyrical poetry and soft sensuousness of Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Donovan. Folk music not only contained a message but I could sing along, could learn the simple chords and play the songs on my guitar. The words warned me that material wealth wouldnt cure loneliness and affirmed my growing awareness that things were not as I had been taught to believe. John Kennedy was dead, murdered, and so were Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Kids I grew up with were asked to sacrifice themselves in a war that seemed pointless and was illegal. Schools didnt educate us to think or to question, only to be good consumers. Churches lacked Christian charity and ignored the poverty around them while worshipping in their elaborate buildings.
I couldnt just tie back my hair in pink barrettes and get by on my smile. I wanted to embrace life in its purest, its deepest, its most transcendent. I ached to sing, to dance, to celebrate our common need for peace and friendship.

The answers are blowing in the wind, Dylan sang. The wind that blew through the 60s into the 70s blew me out of my life as a middle class white Pennsylvanian girl into New Mexico. Santa Fe was an impulse, a need to be independent and to explore. Santa Fe wove her magic around me, her gorgeous sunsets that flashed and shimmered across a vast cerulean blue sky, her easy ambience of coffeehouses and spicy Mexican food, the soft glow of adobe houses squatting in the earth from which their bricks were made. There was a mixture of drifters, artists, spiritual seekers, Native Americans, pure-bred Spanish, Mexicans, and Chicanos. I never noticed the tension between the groups. I was breathing in the awesome beauty of mountains and desert. The mountains drew my gaze upward, blues and greens that melded into the reddish purpling sunsets that gave the Sangre de Cristo mountains their name. I loved the brilliance of the sky that was cloudless for days on end, then suddenly thunder storms would roll across the mountains, turning them into shades of grey. I tossed anchorless on waves of disappointment and frustration but then I would be up-lifted by the heart-beat of nature. By an encounter with someone also seeking. By the freedom I felt walking through a silent snow-drift at three in the morning. By tracing patterns from firelight on an adobe wall while drinking tea.
Rather than answers, the wind only blew questions. Without roots, goals, or direction, I soon lost my way. I forgot the lessons learned in the tempest classroom of the 60staking care of each other and living simply close to the earth. Somewhere along the way, after the Zazen and seaweed soup and Yogi tea and Sufi dancing and Tarot readings and I Ching throwing and Indian print skirt, I lost the essential knowledge of myself as a seeker.
My own loneliness way-laid me. I sought escape through the cheapest trick in the book: drinking. My confusion led to a night of terror with a gun at my head and the realization that I wanted to live. For the sake of survival, as my body healed from post-traumatic stress and heart-ache, I spread the life preserver of my sanity upon the turbulent waters of decision and cast for the most irrevocable one I could find. A child.
My pregnancy was a substitute for a relationship with someone my own age and my best friend Caren knew it. I failed to appreciate how she put up with my endless self-absorption with my belly and my expected one, but she was more than a room-mate or a best friend. She was the only rock of stability when my bar hopping friends dropped out of my life and I took her enthusiasm for my new status as mother for granted.
But then I was introduced to The Brotherhood through a mutual friend of ours, Krystal. I didnt think of them as a group at the time. Everyone stood out to me as individuals. We loved Krystal for her generous, good-natured compassion and her infectious sense of humor. We met others of the group on a one-to-one basis in her company, each dressed in 501 shrink-to-fit jeans, flannel shirts, practical shoes, with long hair. Each person was striking, gentle, well-spoken, and warm-hearted. The kind of people you liked to invite to your house, drinking tea and reading poetry around the table. Flower children. Old friends at first glance. Being little more than children themselves. Ourselves.
In looking back, it seems as though we discovered the secret of youth. Not tied down to the daily grind, traveling on faith and a thumb, periodically scolded or rewarded, embraced or punished by our father-figure, we kept a youthfulness way beyond any of our peers.
The Brotherhood was a commune cobbled together from hippies who had opened their homes to travelers, taken picnics down to the park to feed street people, and rejected institutions, mixed together with a mystical spirituality. A belief in the End Times circulated amongst many of us during the 70s. The belief that a time of transformation was imminent easily translated into the Apocalypse and return of the Messiah. But the Brotherhood soon became a net-work of people who served the poor and lived under the dictates of one man who was charismatic, eloquent, and visionary. Our homes were opened to the homeless, parolees released from prison, the elderly and mentally ill, winos and hobos, and any who wanted companionship. We studied the Scriptures, traveled by hitch-hiking, and maintained homes in Mexico, Israel and Spain. We camped in warm weather, played music together, made our own toys for Christmas, home-schooled our children, and visited inmates in prison and juveniles in detention.
My first experiences of the brotherhood were shared meals at the Santa Fe hostel. The hostel was a collection of buildings that had been transformed into a cozy home filled with comings and goings. Entering the front room, conversations were buzzing quietly, music was being played. A free meal was served every night comprised of donations from local merchants, contributions from food stamps or donations from guests, and government commodities. A long wooden countertop separated the kitchen from the other front rooms and the cooks would wave, offer a taste or invite you in to help grate carrots. Beans, tortillas, and chili was a popular meal, cheap and filling, but anything from hot dogs to beef stroganoff might be served. In warm weather, we gathered on the flagstone patio. Before the meal was served, we all held hands and a simple Thank You, Father or Gracias, Dios was said.
Around the patio, the laundry rooms industrial machines rumbled constantly, the hand-crafted bunk beds in the bunk room were always full, and the sturdy wooden shower stalls in frequent use. The wood-work, lovingly and precisely crafted by skilled members, gleamed with care. The private apartments in the back were reserved for couples, one room a study filled with books including dictionaries of Koine Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. Many nights we enjoyed a simple but nourishing meal and animated conversation. Afterwards, instruments would come out. Guitars, a banjo, a mandolin, a fiddle and flutes sweetened the night. It was hard to tear ourselves away and our house felt cold and empty when we returned home.
I had also fallen in love. Salem was outrageously clever, a spontaneous wit, a mercurial spirit. Once at a party he made me laugh so hard, I wet myself. He could hold the attention on a roomful of people in the palm of his hand, making each feel he was addressing them personally. His charisma was flashy, yet he also wore an aura of melancholy I found myself attracted to, deep brown eyes that looked into my soul. Our brief love affair is conjured up in this image: I am standing in the back yard of the hostel, alone, weeping, because I know it is hopeless to be in love at all, let alone with Salem. Despite the flashing red light in my mind telling me that it would be hard to live close to him, I had concluded that I could live in a split world, a spiritual world committed to service and a suppressed emotional world. What did I know about love? I had always settled for whoever would take me to the next step and leave me stranded. Yoans father, for example, had been clear and adamant that he did not want a child.
Often we met at the Brotherhood house after Caren got off of work, but eventually, as my pregnancy progressed, I joined the group for the meals I no longer had the energy to cook for myself. And for the company and the camaraderie of other mothers who were enthusiastic about children as miracles from God. The ideal that we are His children and could share the responsibility of raising our children together would inspire me to make many of the decisions I would make for the next ten years.

Description: The opening prologue to Flowers in the Wind, a memoir of living communally for ten years

Photo Posted: Nov 24,2012 Photo Viewed: 354

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