Excerpt: Introduction Excerpt: Body Freedom Excerpt: Vegan Diet Excerpt: Hippie Counterculture |
 Excerpts: Hippie Counterculture A thriving alternative culture that surfaced during the 60s' rebellion against oppressive society. At its best, it strove to learn how to live in harmony and effect positive, transformative change on all levels of society. Its legacy - pure vision of planetary peace - is alive and growing. Home was a half-hour walk from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, ephemerally the global epicenter of a grand cultural ferment destined to spark a leap in consciousness on the planet. 
I came of age during the hippie culture's richest blossoming. I'd be won over almost instantaneously by the people daring to break free of the two-dimensional brittleness calcifying society, daring to reclaim their co-opted humanity, let the chips fall where they may.At first I'd believed the media's largely distorted reporting. One day in summer 1966, I walked the two kilometers over, cutting thru Golden Gate Park, trusty Yashika-D camera in hand. Ready to play tourist in my own town, I hoped to capture the funny furry people on film. Who were these malcontents with the audacity to make waves and threaten to upset society's nicely established system? These mysterious misfits with the temerity to rebel from our wonderful conformist order? 
I strolled up Haight Street - Johnny Straight Arrow with a crew cut, head imperiously up his butt - one among the droves of your everyday people and the exotic new denizens milling the street. I soon spotted a group of three likely suspects for a photo, three cheerful longhairs sitting on apartment steps. I'd label it in my album "notorious hippies hanging out." Before I could snap a shot they raised their own cameras and pretended to photograph some blank-faced tourists aboard a stuck-in-traffic Gray Line Bus Tour taking pictures of them. I cracked up. I'd suddenly gotten my first glimmer of what the scene was about: Life was a play and we were all actors in it, willing or not. Chagrined, I put my camera away and relaxed into the scene some.  I wandered into a poster shop that caught my eye. Its artwork went beyond the pale of conventional sensibility, and for a moment shorted out my circuits. But if the front room was impressive, the curtained back gallery room, lit by ultraviolet blacklites, was staggering. There, an incandescent wonderland of intricate, inspired artwork, singing artists' surreal visions, drenched in brilliant fluorescent colors, lept out from dozens of posters. They tickled me, fairly gave off intoxicating perfume that melted my mind, the colors so vivid I could almost taste them: cherry red, electric lime, blueberry blue. I walked back out on the street, reeling in a happy daze.
Over several trips that summer before my senior year in high school started I got increasingly complex readouts on the group energies. I saw plenty of what I later realized was run-of-the-mill nonconformist behavior, people flirting with letting go of the system's oppressive values.But I also witnessed near-miraculous sights, sights that became forever etched in soul memory. Standing out like supermen and -women from the "weekend hippies" were genuine, dyed-in-the-wool love children, holy-stoned beings: flowing-haired, full-bearded prophets in biblical robes, staffs in hand, standing on corners bestowing blessings to every passer-by; fiery, unconditional love blazing from hearts split asunder; dazzling earth mothers in granny dresses, sunshine and flowers and visionary dreams pouring from compassionate eyes, yearning to nurture the entire world, gracing us with their presence. "Everybody's beautiful" was the message this seventeen-year-old ugly duckling heard, and I thought, where do I sign up? |
© Stuart R. Ward. All Rights Reserved.