PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

1. Rosewood and Ducktape

        October, 1972. I couldn’t get rid of the headache. I was out of prison now. Free. I’d thought the god-awful headache would dissolve immediately with my release from incarceration, dissipate into the ocean breezes—but it had not. The headache stayed with me from the moment I awoke in the morning until the moment I finally slept at night, never abating for an instant, never diminishing. But the ocean air did seem to help and so I walked or ran along miles of desolate southern California beaches. I felt so strange. Who knew me? Who knew what I’d been through?  I’d survived... But who cared? Would I always be so alone...?.

        The eighteen months in Federal Prison had followed two years of the free-est lifestyle anyone could have lived. What a change. From wild bird to a cage. No living mind can take such a change without snapping something.

        And I’d been innocent. If I’d done a crime that warranted such punishment somewhere I’d probably have been prepared for the inevitability of incarceration. But that had not been the case. I’d just been an outspoken conscience against the Viet Nam mess, a draft card burner, a new Canadian... For these “crimes” I’d been given a six-year Federal prison sentence originally, but I was released after eighteen months with all charges dropped when they finally realized I truly had been following my conscience.

        So at last I was free... But the terrible headache that had developed during prison remained. And my mother’s and stepfather’s strange home was already beginning to glare starkly into my heart. Her condescending words, “You’ve paid for your crime, all that is behind you now. Settle down and get a job. We all have to work for a living...” were anathema to me. The way they referred to my “crime” crushed me. My own family thought I was guilty of a crime, that I had deserved my imprisonment! I realized that I was trying to fool myself. It was THEY who two years before had phoned the FBI and told them I had returned from Canada and was in their home recuperating from an illness. And so the hulking Gestapo had come and placed me in handcuffs—with my hands twisted up behind my back and my face smashed down into the carpet of my mother’s living room floor—and dragged me away to eighteen months in a cell. And now, after all the prison hell was finally over, there I was once again back in their same home—and now I had to listen to them telling me I was a criminal, an ex-con.

        “—I was in prison because I believed in something mom, not because I committed a crime...” I told her for the thousandth time...

        My stepfather would blow-up at me then, rant and rave and threaten. So I’d leave, walk the beaches.

        Very little was holding me from flying far away. Some silly vain dreams kept me there, little else. Every day in my cell I’d thought about what I really wanted to do most when I got out —that was to continue where I had left off before I had ever been locked away — I wanted to get back to wandering around North America, I wanted to hitchhike away from my mother’s southern California home—to head east to search again for the illusive “commune of eternal love” for which so many of my brothers and sisters also had sought.

    And there was a girl—Diane Watson... We had exchanged countless love letters while I’d been in prison. Her letters had lifted my spirits.

    I’d promised her I would come up to Canada and see her as soon as I got out. Although now that I was free I was no longer sure I would want to take any steps that might tie me down in any way... I had some cutting-loose to do first... Perhaps if I had hit the road directly from the prison I might have gone straight to Canada... But it couldn’t happen like that.

        The prison doctor had arranged for my family to pick me up and bring me directly home. They were all trying to convince me that it was conditional to my release. This was because they did not want me to be let out the door of the prison and immediately hitchhike away to some commune and renew my activism, which they considered a crime. They knew they had to release me, but they tried to do it in such a way that I might be kept within the aegis of their scrutiny and within the reach of their devices. So, my mother was put under the impression that I required large doses of a particularly ugly medication, haldol, every day -- and they assured her that I would certainly require supervision for the rest of my life. It was all an elaborate lie of course. Their purpose was to  make me into a zombie and convince as many people as possible that my mental state was the result of my years of smoking pot and doing psychedelics and wandering far too freely across America, participating in immorality and criminality. My mother was so much a part of their insipid system that she automatically believed all their lies. She was innocent enough in it. She couldn’t possibly understand that her government would be capable of such manipulation and deception. In a few years the Freedom of Information act would enable the public to become aware of the great lengths the government had gone to in spreading lies about the famous actress Jean Seberg and deliberately driving her to suicide. This would open the door for a clear understanding of all the government manipulations in the lives of people that the government considered capable of organizing masses of people against their wars. I had already proved I was capable of criss-crossing America and Canada silently and effectively speaking to people everywhere I went. So it was in the government’s interests to prevent me from doing it again by convincing my mother and family that I was a schizophrenic and would always need massive doses of medicine and supervision. I actually had to humor her to some degree during the first days of my release – or she would have tried to do something to force me to take the medicine, something involving the authorities. At least I was out of prison. I could thank myself for that.

        I had forced the government to release me by writing a letter in which I demanded a lie detector test to see if I was in truth a conscientious objector -- and volunteering to pay for it myself -- and sending copies of the letter to newspapers and governors and lawyers and prison authorities, and even the president. They had released me within a week.

      So I forced their hand. But the government was still trying to play some cards that would keep me under its thumb—and it was obvious that when I slipped up they would find a way to take me back.. I knew I would totally free myself from all their puppet strings as soon as I stuck out my own thumb and got off the grid. But I decided to cautiously bide a little time in southern California just so I could use the opportunity to attempt to assay a few possibilities. But staying around long enough to do that wasn’t going to be easy.

        In my mother’s home if I opened my mouth and spoke of these things she looked disdainful and reminded me “—The sixties are OVER! Wake up and smell the roses! Get a LIFE!” And everywhere I went I met others who voiced the same exasperation; cops, social workers, drunken salesmen, even other so-called “hippies”... But something echoed in my heart.. eternal, eternal, eternal... How could that beautiful enlightening hippy rainbow of love be over?

        That’s how we saw ourselves around our campfires... It wasn’t necessarily a Christian thing... Not that we weren’t Christians. But the selfish plastic world around us didn’t include us in their commercial flavor of Christianity. Not the way we ran around nude at any opportunity. No siree! Not the way we made love with total abandon in the most beautiful places, forest grottos, desert mountain tops, windblown beaches—with other long-haired people like ourselves, whose names we sometimes never even knew. Brothers and sisters entwined thoroughly in the vine of life. True, we had underlying us Christian principals of honesty and universal love—but we were a wonderful new Pagan culture. It didn’t bother us at all to take the best from both ideologies, Christian and Pagan and blend them together passionately. Perhaps if Christ hadn’t died so young he would have had time to reestablish the ancient fertility rites. Perhaps he had intended to do that but he’d been cut short. One thing we knew — we were eternal sons and daughters of the divine male and females of the ancient and eternal Universe...

        So, it was about time. Something had to be done! The planet was being poisoned, burned, raped. The human population was strangling, twisted and torn, bloody, diseased, and cosmicly stupid. Entire species of creatures were going extinct in the shadows of mankind’s chaos. The Earth Mother had been forgotten. A patriarchal ignorance dominated and damned Her blessings, bullied and crucified Her messengers. Yet Her vibrant womb still pulsed around all of us and connected us with every other living thing. And the righteous sap pulsed within us all like vital music. We were luscious fruits on the vine of life, the Mother’s umbilical vine that truly spreads out beneath every human being on this planet—but most of them never glimpse... The vine we sucked the sap of, drank the Mother’s milk-nectar, licked the leaves, feasted our eyes on the glory of, clung to with our hearts, nestled in, in the sleep of our happiness, awoke in the arms of, hung by our fingernails to in the hour of our tribulation. The vine we never forgot. No. No. When we made love on psychedelics we connected with the entire living universe in a sacrament so ancient and so sacred that even the greatest poets among us could never find words to adequately describe it. Yet normal "Christians" condemned our lovemaking as “fornication”...  We were young cosmic kids with all our hormones surging, and our lovemaking wasn’t the evil thing they were making it out to be.

        They always believed the love in our eyes was drug induced. As though eternity or even love were hallucinations... We did our psychedelics, yes. But they weren't a drug like the government made them out to be. Rather they were a powerful medicine of enlightenment. The Indians have used Peyote cactus for thousands of years for this purpose. Magic mushrooms too. Or the chemical equivalent, LSD. We called LSD acid—perhaps because it ate right through the phony worlds and melted all preconceived standards into eternal truth. But when they heard the word “acid” they thought of battery acid, like in their cars. When they heard us say we liked to eat acid they thought we had to be about as insane as anyone could get. And what was all this hullaballoo about melting away the fraudulent realities? Hold on a minute! They wondered aghast: where would they be without their Soap operas, their Nixons, their Lincoln Savings and Loans scalawags? No, from square one they couldn’t understand what we were doing. Brothers and sisters immersed in a spirit they could not see. They said we were lost in a drug stupor. What we described as freedom they called “lawlessness”. They said we were bound for hell.

But we lived in a state of Eden Heaven. We had been reborn into a new dimension, a world they could not see. Together we knew the living truth in our hearts—the truth that we were all brothers and sisters who actually had finished our endless karmic evolutions and had arrived in the moment of now, at the end of all times, at the final destination of all paths—in the new Creation, Eden, Heaven, same thing.

We tried to tell them. They answered dismally. —‘You are wrong.  This is not Eden. This is Earth. You are on drugs. You will go to hell.” So we smiled and told them that it was they themselves who were wrong. LSD was the Oracle of our age. Eden is all around us, under the cement, choking on the poisons of this society. The eternal Garden and Heaven were One. We had been chosen to be in it because we see it is still right here, all around us, our Mother Earth. Because they didn’t believe, they would probably never see it. So, we lived in our Eden Heaven, walked in it, breathed it, loved in it—they did not. They must not be ready to be in Heaven, yet. (And if they never bothered to open up their eyes and their hearts—they never would be! They’d better hurry.) But some brothers or sisters invariably pulled us aside and whispered that we should give it up and not argue with them. It was really a waste of breath. After all: We might never have noticed the Sacred Earth if it hadn't been for "the magic pill". And who was given us this sacred medicine? Where did it come from anyway? Could we know? This medicine is what had collected us all together, given us Eden Heaven as a reality, turned motley rabble kids into—brothers and sisters... given us golden words and minds that looked into infinity... This magic medicine... Maybe it didn’t even exist. Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe it was just the touch of God.

But it wasn't peyote or mushrooms that I needed now that I was out of prison. It was the lifestyle I had lived before that traumatic episode had robbed me of so much of my life. I wanted to drift down the highways again, live in communes where everyone knew me as "Pan". It was magical there, in that world. The sisters were plentiful, lovely. They loved sharing massages, making love, creating music together, wandering through mountains and seashores like eternal elves. There was so much more to that life than there was here in Southern California. But I was caught between the two worlds. I owed it to my mother to try to live there in her California world and be somewhat normal. But my heart constantly called me to run as fast as I could out of all those doors and dive into the magical pools of eternal beauty, to be an imp again, to be Pan again... I fought hard against the dream. I sat in my mother's house and tried hard to see myself living in Southern California. What could I do in Southern California to be the normal sort of guy my parents and siblings thought I should be? Big Question....

***

Southern California. Heaven’s providence may have been battling the odds to try to help me in that glut and glitter land which always seemed to me to be a place too polluted for divine spirit to be able to get through—but an odd mixture of gifts did come my way immediately after my release. And I cannot help but see them as only attributable to the strange ways of the Goddess.

The vanity that had somewhat subdued my wandering dream was that I was hoping to turn some newly acquired skills into careers. Basically I had two to choose from. The first was to become a jeweler. In the huge prison hospital where I had spent most of my time only four men out of the whole prison were allowed to learn the lapidary craft. I was one of them. The instructor taught me how to use the machines and I was able to purchase rough stones through mail order houses. I quickly developed a passion for star rubies from India and when the instructor introduced me to a place where I could order a full pound of number three grade for only fifty dollars I sent away for them. I also cut black stars and blue stars from Australia and opal and many other kinds of stone. I knew how to do it now. When I got out of prison I brought a full pound of Star Rubies along with me, many of them already finished into marketable stones. All I needed was silver-working skills and some kind of shop and I figured I could easily end up rich. That’s what I thought anyway.

        The other and by far the most desired possible career was a musical one. I had spent the greater part of almost every day in prison practicing on an old Washburn guitar. (Well, at least when I wasn’t in the hole...) I was playing fairly well, for a beginner. Plus, I knew I could write lyrics—and there were concepts I could put together from my prison experience and far-wandering commune wisdom that would not be the normal everyday fare.  And I knew I could sing well enough to get the points across too. I had strong feelings all those things could come together in southern California and maybe my music would hit some nerves – and who knows???

        So, the first thing on my agenda was to get my mother to give me some of my money—and we made a trip down to Tiajuana to get me a fancy guitar. The new rosewood twelve-string cost $90. I walked out of the shop with the beauty clutched delicately in my hands. Compared to the old Washburn I’d had in prison this instrument was solid gold. I walked down the crowded street feeling like a destiny-bound musical folkhero speeding on my way to riches and fame. But just as I came up to our car someone came into my peripheral vision, loomed there—and diverted my attention so much that the new guitar slipped out of my grasp and fell to the concrete! The wrenching impact completely split the entire side of the rosewood body; the neck twanged forward, irreparable. How miserable I felt as we drove back north to Huntington Beach.

        Now, you may ask: What sort of providence is that? That’s just plain terrible luck! Maybe. It’s just that it plum felt weirdly auspicious at the time. The way it happened was just too strange. I’ll tell you exactly my intuition on the matter. The moment before I dropped it I’d noticed a man was watching me from a doorway. He looked just like a leering prison guard, a half-living gargoyle of death. That’s what startled me so badly. I believe the guitar was a tool given to me from the Goddess of Creation and that the force of evil reached out from subterranean depths to snatch it from me, and with it all the possibilities that might have developed in my life concerning that guitar. I believe the good forces totally knew this would happen, that even this overpowering of one of my more useful abilities was part of the Goddess’s vaster unseeable plan. Stated simply, that guitar might have rooted me in southern California where I might have wallowed in the muck of this civilization instead of continuing out into the world where I would do my honest searching and finding. Yeah, I can just see it. Me with that beautiful rosewood 12 string guitar… If it hadn’t gotten smashed I would have been playing that thing five hours a day and writing songs and meeting other musicians and poets. My life would have gone a different route.

        The Jewelry idea didn’t fare real well either. I was only half-trained. I had no investors, no business skill. All I had was a pound of #3 grade rough rubies. They wouldn’t do me much good at the present. Even the finished stones couldn’t get me anywhere. Jewelers I spoke with offered me a pittance of what they were worth. I’d be better off saving them towards the day when I was on a better footing and could use them substantially. I tucked those away safely in my mother’s home.

        So what was left? Washing dishes in a restaurant? Pumping gas?  Somehow with all the memories of the free lifestyle I’d lived before prison— wandering the highways of north America with spirited beautiful sisters—I didn’t think I could handle returning to a two dollar an hour job in the grimy crimey rat race that was southern California.

        So what I basically had going for me was a broken rosewood 12 string guitar patched with ugly ducktape... like an allegory of my life.

      For the time being I was half in that world and half out of it, wandering around the beaches with my duck-taped rosewood guitar, a silk bag of Tarot cards, and a pocket full of rubies.