PREFACE

        This book is about a time when we were young and when the world was a different place. Nobody had ever heard of Aids. Sex was seen by a great many people as being harmless and healthy. Plus we were independent. We broke away from our parent’s traditional ways. You have to add Rock and Roll into the equation too. The Strauss waltzes of the previous two centuries were thrown out the window. Marijuana became the high of choice, leaving alcohol far behind. Then came LSD. World events turned our psyches upside down too. The assassination of Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy made us aware that people with holy dreams were fodder for the guns of our enemies. Their enemies were our enemies because we believed in such dreams. There was a war going on in Viet Nam that filled the evening news with terror. Young men were coming home in body bags. Everything was affecting us at the same time. The result was a lot of young people who came to think of themselves as hippies, who, with their new music and their new conscience and their new mind-opening chemicals and their new "freelove" sexuality, began to communicate together for the purpose of trying to change the entire world by creating a vast love consciousness.

        I wandered all over the continent in the midst of those years and I feel called to write about it. The world has changed much since then. That world couldn’t exist today. Aids makes freelove impossible, at least on the scale of our day. The government understood only too well the depths of our culture’s communication, and took steps to prevent it ever again being a power strong enough to bring down a president and halt a war. The government’s war on pot and psychedelics and our entire culture was designed specifically to eliminate the possibility of any intelligent group of young people from being able to ever again bond together and rise up to stop them like we did so well back in those years. That’s the true reason why the hippy cultural phenomenon was extinguished.

        Today’s history books don’t tell half the story of what we did back then. This book will not fill in too many of those holes. It’s not a political book. I only wrote it to show how young and silly we were, and how much we believed in what we were doing. We had so much fervent music and so much excellent pot and so much incredible sex that we all got very entangled. I have edited much of wildlove out of this book leaving still too much by most people’s standards. Oh well… It is not a heroic book, not an intellectual book… It is just a bunch of assorted memories… Actually it is the story of a segment of my spiritual growth. About four years worth. I wrote it down because I know if I don’t I will someday forget all the details, one by one, until it is all gone. So now it won’t entirely be forgotten…

        We were young and brash and full of it. Our love-makings were as sweet as sweet could be when they happened. We were hippy love-children and we  "made love, not war..." That was our favorite banner. It made us laugh, and we loved to laugh—almost as much as we loved to love.

        What we had believed would last forever didn’t last long at all really. The end came upon us like a dark cold storm and most of us were bludgeoned back into the illusionary "real world" and pretty much forced to forget what we had once known. But some of us found ways to survive and we cherished our memories of the free love society we shared together.

        Not everyone loved us, or the things we believed in. For some people those poetic, passion-filled days were never beautiful. Those individuals from the other side would therefore forget them easily and forever without looking back. And in my opinion those sourpuss individuals have written far too many history books about us, too many dark caricatures of our culture. We deserve better.

        To our enemies our passion was dangerous...  It united us, made us speak together from our hearts, made us join one another in movements, made us shake the pillars of the Multinational Industrial Military Consortiums that thought they owned the world. Who else but us would be brazen enough to tackle such a foe? They wrote their histories about us to depict us as ignorant and pointless. So now it is my turn to write my history which depicts them as ignorant and pointless.

        We were a real anachronism in the world, with flowers in our hair, believing God was love, fasting, praying, giving up the material things to be closer to nature, becoming vegetarians so we wouldn’t be hurting animals ever again. We often thought we had been hand-picked by God or Goddess to have these sensibilities here on this earth, in this era, amidst a nation that was more used to blindly following politicians willy-nilly into pointless wars. In our time we were keenly aware that there was a treasure we shared which wasn’t obvious to most people. To be brave enough, to be open enough, to share love as we shared love ... as divine blessings and remain steadfast.