When I Was A Hippie

It was 1980. Janet and I were hiding out (from my creditors) at Shasta Abbey, a monastery in northern Califo
ia, where we had ordained as Zen postulants. Suddenly, out of the blue, I became very ill, and when the illness worsened, I handled it as I had handled everything in the past — I ran!

We bussed down to the Bay area and squeezed into a small apartment in some non-descript building in Lafayette, Califo
ia. Janet went to work at a stationery store while I tackled a job at Radio Shack, where I knew that I couldn’t stay long before someone tracked me down. We both either walked or bussed to work since driving a car was out of the question, even if we had one. The lingering sensitivity that we developed at the Abbey, which was only exacerbated by my illness, precluded any aggressive activity. And in the Bay Area, driving was an aggressive activity! In order to function in the world again, I had no choice but to desensitize my mind in some fashion, a desensitizing that had the unfortunate results of impeding any further insights from arising for the time being. I needed somewhere to cool out.

The Zen sickness wasn’t improving, and I was getting bone-tired of looking over my shoulder for bill collectors. I knew that I had to change things up, so one afte
oo
I found myself writing Janet another note and boarding my trusty Greyhound, this time headed to Tennessee. With only a few bucks in my pocket, I only hoped they would take me in at “The Farm,” the famous commune headed up by the original San Francisco hippie-refugee, Stephen Gaskin.

As I boarded the Greyhound, I noticed that the smell hadn’t changed — diesel fuel mixed with . . . humanity?

I finally made it to Tennessee and hitched from the bus station to walking distance of The Farm, and in the midst of a wild anticipation of the great new experiences ahead, the Zen sickness mysteriously disappeared. This was always my reactions when leaving a monastery, I seemed to take all the accumulated introspection and blow it on the world again!

A couple of miles later I was still walking and I wondered if I might have taken the wrong road — again. But then ahead I could see a rundown garage-type building in the middle of nowhere. God! This wasn’t The Farm, was it?

Oh no! A longhaired hippy was guarding it! Yep, it was The Farm all right. I had arrived at the gatehouse.

While mentally kicking myself for not doing my homework before spending my last few dollars on a bus ticket, the skinny gatekeeper invited me in. With strict instructions not to go beyond the gatehouse, I remained there for the better part of a week sleeping in a loft with people from all over the world, and being interviewed by a constant stream of hippies asking unusual questions.

The Farm, I was to discover, was chock full of women and kids, thus, newcomers were screened vigilantly. I must have answered all the questions more or less correctly because one morning I was escorted to the main compound about a half-mile from the gatehouse, and from there on to a small three-bedroom house with an attic loft, located a little further — my new home which I would share with 6 men, 10 women, and 11 kids.

About fifteen hundred folks had settled on the two thousand acres that made up The Farm — thirteen hundred women and children and about two hundred men (who worked their tails off to support the women and kids. Some things never change!) The Farm routinely put out the word to young women all over the country that if you have a kid and no old man, you are welcome on The Farm! I reminded myself again to do my homework before traveling cross-country!

The soy dairy (my first assignment), the bakery, and the kitchen fed the whole community, and were the centers of activity. At the dairy, we would soak hundreds of pounds of soybeans every night in gigantic stainless steel tubs, to process them the next day into tofu, tempeh, miso, soymilk, and soy ice cream that the Farm moms lined up for at the windows with their five-gallon buckets

After a short career at the dairy, I helped the farming crew hand plant fifteen acres of tomato plants, then landed a job on the masonry crew that trucked every day to the Nashville area, sixty miles to the north, to build solar houses.

The Farm was extremely active with cottage industries; home building, tie dyed T-shirts, professional bands that toured the country, nuke busters (small, hand-held devices to detect radiation from clandestine government trucks illegally transporting nuclear materials), and other ingenious entrepreneurial endeavors such as a vegetarian restaurant in Nashville. These all helped support the commune, bringing in about a dollar a day per person which we lived on by eating lots of soybeans, baking our own bread, growing many of our own vegetables, and most of all hoping that some of the folk’s parents would kick in some money — or at least some peanut butter and Hershey bars.

The Zen sickness never returned, at least as long as I was at the Farm. I didn’t know at the time how the spiritual world worked, and that this was only a brief respite from past karma that would eventually have to be faced . . . big time. So I had the privilege of becoming acquainted with many kind folks, each spiritual in their own special way, from my skinny, scarred friend who lost his scalp when he tangled his long hair in a potato-picking machine, to the women friends I had scattered here and there all over the commune.

We had doctors and atto
eys, a few dentists — and lots of love. Everybody took a vow of poverty when entering the commune, giving up all of their worldly possessions (easy for me to do), so everybody was in the same boat, and all seemingly in the same house — mine! The married folks and their kids slept in the three bedrooms downstairs while the single people slept in the loft (where one would never know with whom they would end up, and in whose sleeping bag)!

My routine was to get up at four thirty a.m., collect my bagged lunch (three-bean salad) at the food area, and then squeeze into a pickup truck with as many other hippies that would fit before heading for Nashville. We’d toke up a couple of times on the way, which caused mass confusion upon our arrival at the job sight, when we could find it, as we all scrambled about trying to remember what the hell we were supposed to do . . . or even where we were! Then somebody would announce, “Let’s mix some cement,” or some such thing, and all of us, to the last hippie, would begin mixing cement, due to Mary Wonder’s incredible suggestiveness. Once we got down to business, however, supervisors would begin setting out lines and excavators would begin doing their things, and we actually built better solar homes than the State of Tennessee — and cheaper!

Shortly after the “Four O’clock Vibes” (where everyone would become negative for a half hour or so), we would head back to the Farm arriving toward evening, sometime after six, covered in cement dust and dirty as crime — and facing cold showers. The only hot water in the house was engineered by our ingenious and cheap hippie solar water heaters — long lengths of black hose draped all over the roof soaking up the sun’s rays — but the women and kids always had first shot at the little bit of hot water that the hoses produced... and that was okay with me.

The local cops tolerated our driving back and forth to Nashville, for unknown, magical reasons, and one late night, twelve of us, all very high and packed into a dilapidated van like sardines, were coming back after working a few days at our vegetarian restaurant in Nashville. When we had to stop for gas, we found ourselves faced with a dilemma. Actually, the dilemma was behind us.

We pulled up to the pumps and parked, and the police car that was following our wildly careening van, unbeknownced to us, eased in directly behind the old van with its high beams on. Our driver of course panicked. He couldn’t just pull out; that would look suspicious, so he tried to look composed as he stumbled out of the van looking for the gas tank. The two officers slid out of their patrol car and approached cautiously, with their hands on their weapons, pointing out the gas tank to the our dazed driver and saying that everything was cool, and that they were just going to ask a few questions.

Well, I thought it was all over for this bunch of hippies. The cops usually had no compassion for druggies, and when the driver dove back into the van and rummaged through the glove box looking for non-existent papers, mumbling that we would all have to get out, I knew we were finished!

We obediently fell out of the van as casually as we could, attempting to look square (hard to do), and trying desperately not to break up laughing. We knew that if one of us would begin laughing, it would all be over. So biting our tongues, we all just stood there, lined up by the pumps with sheepish grins — a motley crew if there ever was one.

I overheard the female officer mentioning that the plates were expired, which was a chronic problem with our vehicles, and asking the driver if we were from the Farm. He confessed that we were, and pleaded that we were just trying to make it back home, and promised that we wouldn’t cause any problems. When she asked how our free ambulance service in New York was doing, and about our work in Guatemala where we were setting up soy dairies to help the poor folks down there get a little protein, I knew we were saved again!

Abruptly, the male officer smiled and said that we had better be careful driving down to Summertown, and that we had better take care of those expired plates. Then they just got in their cruiser and left!

We all just looked at each other in amazement, and never did find out whether they were good cops, or just going off-duty soon and didn’t want to process so many hippies. But either way, we all were spared some complications in our lives . . . for sure.

The evenings at The Farm were mystical, filled with soft sounds of strumming guitars, laughing kids, and the unmistakable subtle wafting of marijuana. Marijuana was considered to be a religious sacrament on The Farm, as peyote has been to Indians for 10.000 years, and as a result, only certain authorized elder hippies had access to the supply which they shared out a few times a day. The truly disciplined are, of course, completely undisciplined, so the supply was usually plentiful.

To catch my early ride to Nashville most mornings, I was usually up before anybody else in the household, and unfortunately the first one in the kitchen; unfortunately because I had to face the hoards of roaches by myself. The whole place would be crawling with them — big ones, baby ones — all kinds, and all over the place. They were everywhere, under the stools and chairs, in the pans and stove and in every crevice. It would look as if the whole top of the kitchen counter was moving.

We, of course, couldn’t kill them, being pacifists and all, but the moms were conce
ed about their kids’ health and continued to complain, as good mom’s do. So one evening we resignedly gathered around for our fifth cockroach meeting. We had tried everything imaginable of a peaceful nature; psychic triangles in every corner, sound vibrations, visualizing them gone, etc., but nothing seemed to work — it was time for drastic action.

After passing around a couple of joints, (it was against the rules to smoke marijuana alone. That would be considered selfish and not at all spiritual) we decided that we had no choice but to begin destroying the roaches. We would divvy up the dastardly deed of killing a grand total of one hundred a day, and appointed a mom to keep track. We were required to turn in the dead little bodies.

That night we all went to bed dreading the thought that tomorrow we would all become cold-blooded killers. Cockroaches were incredibly clever when you took the time to observe them closely, with their advance scouts and the ways in which they communicated with each other. And with their legions, it was hard not to observe them!

Early the next morning, as I reluctantly prepared to kill my 3.7 roaches for the day and crept into the kitchen looking for the fly swatter, I couldn’t believe what I saw...

There were no roaches! I quickly roused everybody and in a few minutes, we were all standing around in the kitchen staring in disbelief. We came up with a few stray roaches, but no more than you would normally find in any house out in the country. We were perplexed, and as a result, no roaches were killed that day.

That evening, with furrowed brows, we passed a joint around again — our sixth roach meeting. We decided that roaches must be psychic and could obviously read minds, because they knew our intentions ahead of time, and we concluded that killing such special beings would, without doubt, inflict horrible karma on ourselves, so in no way could we kill them. Anyway, our problem had apparently solved itself, and everything was cool!

Well, not quite cool; the following morning after we decided not to kill the psychic roaches, you guessed it . . . all the roaches were back — in force. It was party time! But nevertheless, we ended up never killing a single roach, and luckily, as far as I know, the kids all survived.

Late one night, not long after the roach episode, we woke up to the sound of a chopper overhead and somebody yelling, “Eat your stash, eat your stash,” referring to our personal supplies of psychedelic mushrooms. The Tennessee National Guard and the Tennessee State Police were raiding our commune! Apparently, a week earlier their “eye in the sky” helicopter that regularly patrolled the state looking for marijuana fields mistook the neglected ragweed growing in our fields as dope. You can imagine how much love the State of Tennessee had in its heart for fifteen hundred, in-your-face, hippies!

We had three miscarriages that night resulting from the commotion and the chopper landing in the field; the incident frightened the expectant mothers to death, and the miscarriages devastated them — a miscarriage leaves scars. Early the next morning, our atto
eys, who stopped the raiders dead in their tracks at the gate the previous night, were in the process of marching the big shots out into the fields to surrender our contraband ragweed. State Police lined the road outside our gate, standing at attention with their rifles and shotguns at the ready.

As we drove by in our pickups on our way to Nashville, we just happened to have some ragweed with us, and we did eat our whole stash of mushrooms the previous night. So feeling no pain, as we slowly passed the line of troopers, we tossed our ragweed, like darts, into their gun barrels, as they stood there obediently like wooden statues.

The Farm sued the State of Tennessee for a million dollars because of the duress they caused our community, but the Farm never followed through with it. The folks on the farm were committed to peace, which took a lot more courage tha
I thought. I learned how much courage when I witnessed a near-tragedy one afte
oon while walking toward the gatehouse.

An old pickup, overflowing with nine drunken locals, flew up the dirt road in a cloud of dust and parked just outside the gate. They all poured out and ran up to the gatekeeper, a young, slight guy that had been at the commune since its inception. Two of the young drunks grabbed his long hair and pulled his head back, while another pulled out a large bowie knife and put to his neck. I couldn’t move, it was horrible, and everybody inside the gatehouse froze as well. After what seemed like an ete
ity, although probably only a few seconds, they threw him on the ground, stumbled back to their truck, laughing and yelling, and drove off. We all ran up to the gatekeeper, who was dusting himself off, and asked if he was all right. He said that everything was cool, that he was okay, and that we should just forget about it.

I couldn’t forget about it, and I ran across him about a week later. It was in the meadow where the entire community would meditate every Sunday before our big community meeting. I asked him if he was scared when they put the knife to his throat.

“Yeah, sure, but they were just drunk,” he said.

“What did they say?”

“They asked me what I’d do if the Russians came and raped my kids. Would I kill the Russians?”

“What did you say?”

“I said that right now, there ain’t no Russians, just a bunch of good old boys and me, and I was okay with that. Then they said that I was worthless, and threw me down.”

“You’re a pretty brave guy,” I said.

“Naw, I’m just okay with dyin. I learned a long time ago how the universe works,” he said apologetically, looking down.

The Farm was a real experience where I met exceptional people like the gatekeeper — and like ten-minute Denny (the walls in our household were paper-thin, acquainting everybody with each other’s intimate habits), who was a gifted musician. The three-day concerts that began every July 11 were remarkable, attended by the entire community — a meadow of delicate, hopeful faces turned toward the sun with their long hair blowing in the wind like a field of golden wheat.

The Farm touted four professional touring bands as well as many amateur artists, and with the non-stop music and all the families and kids camped out under the stars, it made one wonder why anyone would ever consider Wall Street as an alte
ative. What a great place for kids, and safe too, with UNICEF regularly monitoring them for any nutritional deficiencies. The only thing they found was a vitami
B-12 deficiency, which we handled by supplementing our soymilk. And our birthing record, using only mid-wives unless complications developed, was better than that of the state of Tennessee.

It wasn’t long before the memory of the July 11 concert began to fade, however, and the October mornings were turning a little cooler, and the days a little shorter, and with no real connections for a warm place to stay, (since I moved out of the crowded, noisy household in preference of a tent) I decided to return to Califo
ia. But I had a problem; people who take a vow of poverty don’t have any money! So I snuck out of the commune without a penny on me and hitchhiked down the old country lane to Summertown.

You know, as I look back on my life now, the happiest times were when I was penniless. There is something about living on the edge . . . an intensity, a realness, a creativity that always wilts in the face of security.

I finally reached town, and brazenly walked into a bank; full beard, dirty clothes, mismatched socks and all, and talked them into letting me make a collect phone call to Janet.nn. . . No answer; phone disconnected. Oh no! Okay, I had one more chance; that she had returned to Shasta Abbey. The guy at the bank raised his eyebrows but nodded that I could try one more time. I think he saw the desperation in my face.

I dialed, and couldn’t believe it; Yoda answered and actually accepted my call, telling me that Janet was at the Oakland Priory, an extension of Shasta Abbey in the Bay area. I called the priory and sure enough she was there, sick as a dog and in bed with the flu, but patiently awaiting word from me, and immediately wired some money for a ticket on my old dog.

I hung up and looked into the eyes of the banker, and I don’t know if either of us will ever forget that moment. There is something about helping people that beats hatred in so many ways.

I was a master of escapes — I could pull off simple ones, like losing myself in the music at a concert, or complex ones where I would surrender myself to someone or something completely, willing to sacrifice my life for them. Within these precious moments, my worries about myself would disappear. I only wished that I could make those kinds of psychological releases permanent without the uncertainty of a fleeting cause or tenuous relationship. What if I could prove in my heart that my “self” didn’t really exist? Couldn’t I then release this “self” forever and be free from its excruciating burden? The unwelcome alte
ative was to continue to believe in my self, where instead of a release; I could only look forward to ete
al incarceration. It was futile, trying to escape this human condition so front-loaded with constant stress, by somehow making something happen. I didn’t believe, yet, that everything, in fact, does change, even the feeling of release. It’s all so impermanent, the good, as well as the bad. Perhaps true freedom isn’t a condition of mind or something brought on by a cause. Maybe it’s just there, always, simply waiting for people like me to realize it.

But I still believed in myself; I couldn’t deny it. Things were changing, however, gradually and strangely. Loving kindness, compassion, gladness, equanimity, these were cropping up without warning in small ways. On the trip back to Califo
ia, the bus stopped for some diesel fuel and a case of motor oil in one of those non-descript towns where you wonder why people live there, and how they make a living. I was tired of chips and candy bars so I ran across the street to a grocery store, praying for some yogurt or something. I hurried in, keeping a wary eye on the bus across the highway, when I noticed an old man, maybe in his late eighties, old enough to have a hard time getting around. He was carefully helping his frail, crippled wife slowly walk down the grocery store aisle with his arm around her, holding her hand. He was so gentle; a lifetime of shared experiences reflected in his patience. Maybe this was the only adventure they had left now, shopping at this local grocery store.

I stopped in my tracks, and right there in the main aisle I wept unabashedly. The cashiers must have thought I was a just another crazed hippie, but how else could I express what I was feeling inside . . . this loving kindness? I only noticed it at times like these, when I recognized the underlying love in others. Only then did my relentless antagonism toward them lessen. But I couldn’t maintain it — this loving kindness, not yet, and soo
I became wrapped up in myself again.

So many times, I had thought that I was on my way toward being compassionate and loving, only to be disappointed time and again as my real self raised its ugly head. I would think about how compassionate and loving people behave, and then I would mimic them as if I was saintly. It was all a sham. I still considered kind people to be stupid, merely marks to be taken advantage of. But then, there were the occasions when my heart soared at the Abbey, allowing me to empty out all the baggage and meanness for a moment when I understood that perfect morality that was the epitome of perfection. I wanted compassion so badly, but the feeling never lasted. If I looked closely, all I saw was me; a person that was despicable. It was all about me, and I could care less about anybody else. But I could now at least see this, and it was a place to start from.

After every lofty experience at Shasta, I would devote myself, however I could, to helping others at the monastery. I found helping others to be difficult, however. I would try to help various lay people who were visiting, and they either didn’t appreciate it, or would become dependent on me to do things for them that they could and should have done themselves, making both of our situations worse. I was not cut out to be a do-gooder; it was more of a concept than a reality for me. My fledgling compassion had no wisdom yet to accompany it, and I wasn’t following my heart, which wanted to take what I found within myself and use it to complement everything around me. I was using my mind to decide what a do-gooder should do, but that was way too contrived.

No matter what I accomplished, a dissatisfaction remained that I could not overcome. Simply helping others was nice, but it didn’t go deep enough. The one who thought that he was helping was the problem, and I had no idea how to approach that.

I seriously questioned if I would ever sincerely develop those beautiful qualities of loving kindness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity. How could I while still harboring these persistent selfish desires? Could I ever acquire enough personal security, or must I forever fight for what I wanted, pushing others aside, always trying to be the first in line and the last in loyalty? What was the answer?

This yearning in my heart was definitely growing, this feeling that I’m on my way home but have forgotten where home is and how to get there. Is it possible that a psychic, unconscious memory of my spiritual roots was drawing me back? Was it by negation that I was discovering the little tricks in life that constantly fooled me and made me forget? Little tricks like the falsehood of permanence, or the promised happiness that always slips through my fingers like water, leaving me discontented and disoriented — and the myth of something substantial behind it all? Were these things steadily pushing me toward truth? I was trying to travel unencumbered now, but I was still hanging on to something. What was it?

I loved every mile bussing across this great country, such a vast, breathtaking panorama with so much promise, and before I knew it, we were crossing the Great Plains and running across the flat, dry salt beds surrounded by the majestic Utah mountain ranges. We quickly blew through Reno, and soon orange smog hanging in the valleys alerted me that we were dropping into Califo
ia.

It was great being back in the Bay Area, and greater yet seeing Janet. She was the kindest person I had ever known. One day, we were walking around downtow
Oakland (I was working for some temp. agency stuffing envelopes) and all of a sudden she popped the question, and I didn’t hesitate a heartbeat. “Sure,” I said, and before we knew it, we were saying our “vow” at the Berkeley Priory in front of Roshi Kozan, a Zen priest affiliated with the Abbey and in charge of the priory at the time. We made only one vow — witnessed by the twelve other people we were living with — to help each other find truth in this lifetime.

We knew that if we became caught in the awkward situation of one foot in this world and one in the next, we would be miserable, so before we climbed up on the stage and peeked behind the curtains, we had to be prepared to walk away from the audience. Therefore, it was good-bye to the Priory and on to Boulder, a small, picturesque town in Colorado surrounded by mountains, and according to some clued-in hippies at the Farm, a very spiritual place. We were about broke after the enormous wedding expenses (two cheap gold rings and a cake), and had to get some money together, but since I was still in exile hiding from creditors, we knew that our stay would be short-lived before they tracked us down through employment records.

I was climbing mountains of mist, or so it seemed. New relationships, different clothes, jobs, houses, towns — holding on, letting go, waiting . . . for something. I had always convinced myself that whatever it was I was waiting for was right over that next mountain, but when I scrambled up my mountains and excitedly looked over the top for my deliverance, all I could see was the next mountain. What was I really searching for? What defining moment started me on this quest? Was it a longing inside, or a flash of some kind——maybe just curiosity? Whatever it was, it was compelling, leaving me with no other choice.

I thought about where I had learned my greatest lessons in life. Was it when I was having a good time, or when I was blind-sided by disaster? I don’t recall many of my childhood birthday parties, but I remember a speeding car running over my little dog and killing him when I was a kid. He lived for a few short minutes, convulsing in my arms. The memory etched itself indelibly in my mind — and it changed me.

It was nice riding the bus with Janet, and soon we were past Fort Collins and heading down the valley toward Boulder.