"We had a lot to learn."

Indeed. And we're still learning it. In many cases and many ways, we've learned nothing at all.

God bless you, Gerard.

A hippie wedding I attended in 1971 was conducted by a mail-order minister of the Universal Life Church wearing his best pair of jeans: the ones with the cotton maple leaf I had embroidered over the fraying hole at the knee. The twenty or so of us in attendance stood hand in hand in a circle, and he married us all to each other, never once singling out the bride and groom. (We weren't naked this time; this was in the backyard of a city commune.) Many years later, I began to wonder: Was this wedding legal? We all thought it was, at least for the bride and groom.

Only one who has experienced this life could believe that your details, Gerard, are not metaphoric exaggerations; they are as it was, and it was happening all over the country. There was a lovely, gentle beauty to those days of peace and freedom. We loved Nature: after some good grass or through the miracle of chemistry, we could actually see the earth breathe and the trees nod to us! Our dogs romped free as we worshipfully enacted our imaginings of the primitive ways. It is what we wanted, and we insisted, as dreamers do, that we would make it so.

We were naive. We didn't know our own strength. We didn't know that through our toying with reality we would, in just a little time, fulfill that dream. Some of us would stick with it and become more serious advocates, and would pass the dream on to others who would embrace it, and come to think of it as their due. They would don deceptively traditional trappings and they would take over all our traditional institutions, and the dream would spread throughout our country and even the whole world!

And so we succeeded. Of course we would! We were the best and the brightest, and the biggest generation, and we would have our way.

But our sweet dream has turned sour. It now lingers as an insidious legacy of moral relativism from which we may never return ... but for the dreams of another generation, more sober and wounded than ours. And they have a lot of work ahead of them. They must invent a whole new wheel.

G, alas it is difficult not to look back into our own rolled past....just dont let it bring you down. Be joyous of the fact that your insight today is deep and clear w/o the acid. Everyonce in a great while I stumble on a thought of such clarity that it makes me feel as if I was tripping...and glad I'm not.

Dude that's some major LSD flashback you're having there. Whoa.

Being about a decade younger than you, Gerard, I'm old enough to remember things like this happening, but too young to have participated. I wasn't quite a teenager during the "Summer of Love", so I got to watch my older sister run around barefooted while wearing tie-die and flowers and dating guys that had more hair than the average ape. All while driving our parents nuts, which I guess was a big part of the whole point. It's something we laugh about these days. Fortunately, when it finally came time for her to get married, it was the mid-70s and she'd long since chucked the tie-die and half-assed quasi-Eastern philosophy, and went for a priest and a traditional Catholic ceremony. And a fairly traditional guy; they're still together.

One further point: you have no idea how glad I am that "Lucy" never made an appearance in my life. Even more so after reading your wedding story. "Mary" didn't either, although some of my friends in college knew her intimately.

A delightful edda to impermanence.

I'd always thought it would take a couple of generations to recover from that insanity. After reading the post, I'm upping it to four or five. My kids were old enough to watch it, but too young to be part of it. (Yes, I am that old.)

"And they have a lot of work ahead of them. They must invent a whole new wheel."

Either that, or rummage through the drawers for the blueprints of the old one. Life is short.

But I take your point.

Interesting. A quick search online didn't render a collection of well written remembrances of that culture ... Rather painted VWs and other easily accesible shallow stereotypes. Is any one documenting those stories or will they be lost? Seems like a lot of complex texture with the haze.
"splash the other dreamers with twilight" really nice. (Whitman?). I enjoyed the piece. Thanks.