Flashback Download: The Summer of Love

[Continuing from previous posts] Spring slipped into summer, 1967. Higher consciousness was spreading. Its signs were everywhere.
Buffalo Springfield sang, “Somethin’ happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear . . .” Grace Slick asked, “Don’t you want somebody to love?” and noted that “One pill makes you taller...” Jim Morrison and the Doors advised us to “Break on through to the other side.”

Some local promoters were hyping that summer as “The Summer of Love.” Many of the young people who had been here during spring break went back to their home towns or their college campuses to tell their friends that “something is happening” in San Francisco.



So they came – thousands of them – hitchhiking, or piling into a friend’s car, or scraping together barely enough money for one-way bus fare. By mid-June the Haight was simply bursting with young people from all over America. They were so young, so naïve, so pure. Almost immediately some of them got ripped off for any money or possessions they had. And there they were on Haight Street—barefoot, homeless, and penniless – owning nothing but the clothes on their backs, panhandling for food money, and asking everyone who passed if they knew of a place where they could spend the night.

Many of them were told to go to 703 Shrader Street and ask for Sylvia. I would sit and talk with them for a while and get to know them a little bit. And – unless they were under 16 – Big Mama would usually end up telling them that, yes, they could sleep on my floor if they could find a space. I figured they were better off on my floor than sleeping in some laundromat or hallway somewhere, or going home with someone who would take advantage of them. I’ll never know exactly how many people passed through my apartment that spring and summer – somewhere in the hundreds, at least. And I treated each one as family - (Inasmuch as you have done this . . .) – for as long as he or she was there. It was an open, flowing here-and-now time.

There were free concerts in the park every Sunday that summer – at first down in the Panhandle, then later out at Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park proper. I went to a few of them, but after a while, as I became more and more pregnant, it was more fun for me to stay home and have the whole apartment to myself for a few hours. Then I was always glad when the concert was over and my huge live-in family started straggling home, usually acid-eyed and grinning.

Part of my Awakening was that I was no longer willing to give any of my energy to the “establishment” – no longer willing to work within the “system” – no longer willing to support the government and the military-industrial complex with my labor or my tax money. It all looked so corrupt and so based on false values to me that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I supported myself, Todd, and a varying number of other young people who were also in the process of finding their own values and dropping out of the decadent system. It was amusing to see that the square society considered hippies to be decadent, and we thought the same about their culture and government.

I remember the family returning after one concert totally blown away by this hot young guitar player they had just seen for the first time – some previously unknown kid named Jimi Hendrix. Richard, the drummer, had hooked up with a new band – “Anonymous Artists of America” or “AAA” – and he had moved into a large house on Portrero Hill that the band shared. One weekend afternoon Richard and some other AAA members came to get me and take me to the Avalon Ballroom where Richard would be playing a drum solo. Big Brother and the Holding Company was also playing that afternoon, and Richard and I got to hang out backstage a few minutes with Big Brother’s new female singer – a Texas girl named Janis Joplin. This was before Janis was famous. She seemed like a warm, friendly young hippie girl to me.

I was casting the I Ching first thing every morning, before Todd got up, with my morning cup and bowl. It tuned my head into a nice high frequency, and I wasn’t put off by its cultural gender bias. I found it accurate as an oracle and full of deep wisdom.

Two underground newspapers were common in the Haight at that time – The San Francisco Oracle and The Berkeley Barb. There would be someone on almost every street corner selling one or the other. The Oracle had an office on Haight Street and captured the metaphysical vibes of the surrounding scene. I remember an interview with Alan Watts on his houseboat in Sausalito. The Barb was published in Berkeley and was political, satirical, and activist. I liked the Oracle best.

There seemed to be two kinds of hippies – the political activists, centered in Berkeley, and the spiritual hippies, focused in Haight-Ashbury. I had stopped paying attention to politics a while back, and now that I was experiencing this profound spiritual awakening, I was much more interested in bringing in the Aquarian Age that I was in confronting the establishment. I didn’t want to deal with the establishment at all. I wanted to ignore it – withdraw my energy from it – and focus on living this emerging value system. It looked to me like the old way was so corrupt and distorted that it would eventually crumble – and all the sooner if tuned in people stopped giving it energy.

Then there was the night that Danny, one of our family at the Shrader Street apartment, dropped some acid and took a bath while he was coming on to it. And there in the bathtub he broke through his childhood conditioning and realized that he had been taught a lie by his parents and society. He had been taught that nakedness was bad, that naked bodies were shameful. But as he bathed his own naked body, coming on to the LSD, he realized that naked bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. They were natural. They were beautiful. So he got up out of the bathtub, walked down the stairs, out the front door, and on up to Haight Street – buck naked. He made it down several blocks of Haight before the cops picked him up. They kept him until morning and then released him.

That’s the way it was in those days – droves of us were getting high, getting in touch with big hunks of out-dated conditioning, and freeing ourselves from it – sometimes in rather dramatic ways. Not everyone could handle coming face to face with their inner stuff. Some of the young people were sincere spiritual seekers – or at least seekers of a lifestyle that made more sense to them than the one their parents were practicing. Others were just conforming – following the crowd – imitating those they thought were hip – and taking psychedelics without spiritual intention and without having done the inner work prerequisite to positive mind expansion. The word “psychedelic” comes from the Greek word psyche meaning “the human soul, spirit or mind”, and del(os) meaning “visible, manifest, evident,” These substances make the contents of your mind visible, manifest, evident. And if your mind is full of fear, then ingesting these substances may manifest fearsome entities around you, and you may have a bum trip. If, however, you have done enough inner work to be comfortable with the contents of your own mind, and if you ingest these substances with the intention of increasing personal growth and understanding of Spirit, and if you are in a setting conducive to same, you can experience Love and Truth—visible, manifest, and evident all around you.

I clearly remember the first time I ever danced alone in public. It was at a concert in Golden Gate Park early that summer. I was on acid, and Todd was with me. I don’t remember now what band was playing, but I had been hung up about my physical appearance for years, and I hated to do anything that would call attention to myself in a crowd. I hated to be looked at. Even at the Fillmore that Palm Sunday, I didn’t dance. I stood on the sidelines and watched – mind-blown – but I didn’t go out there and do it myself. Still too hung up. But that day in the park I finally did. The LSD and the music and the crowd finally overcame my self-consciousness, I became Earth Mother again, and I danced – all by myself – raising my arms and moving my large body whichever way the music told it to go. It felt wonderful to close my eyes and just let the music move me. And guess what! When I opened my eyes, nobody was looking at me weirdly. Nobody came up to me and said, “Hey, you can’t dance like that! You’re too ugly to dance at all!” Nobody did that. No one seemed to notice me at all. Everyone else was just dancing and grooving and doing their own thing, and allowing me to do mine. What a release! What freedom! What bliss!

By now the media was giving its usual twisted coverage to the Haight-Ashbury scene. Square tourists were coming to Haight-Ashbury to see the sights. They drove down Haight Street in their sleek new cars, quickly rolling up their windows if anyone approached their car, actually being in fear of us gentle, peace-loving hippies. We loved them in our universal way, but we also felt pity for them, in their drab business suits, suffocating ties, irrational fears, and conditioned minds. We wanted them all to find the peace and joy and freedom that we were discovering. But they rolled their windows up and looked at us like we were freaks.

Actually, we accepted the label of “freaks” with great honor. We were happy to be considered freaks by a society that we considered unprincipled and degenerate. We wore the Freak badge proudly.

I made a big, colorful poster saying, “Rejoice! The Kingdom of God is at Hand!” and put it up on the wall of the stairway, at the landing, so folks coming in the front door would see it. To me it meant that the “Kingdom of God” – that is, Higher Consciousness – is “at hand” – right here and right now. Not something that’s going to happen sometime in the near future – but here and now. All we have to do is tune in to it!

Sometime early that summer one of my crasher family – I think it was Richard – brought in a young man called “Blues.” He was tall and thin, about 19, beardless and with short dark hair and trapped-looking eyes. He was newly arrived from Chicago, where his father was a judge. My Earth-Mother heart was immediately compassionate. With a judge for a father, what conditioning he must have to overcome before he can know the God within! I saw him as someone new to hippie-dom – still in the early stages of the changes, and needing lots of love.

Blues needed a place to stay, too, and wanted to rent my back room That was a very strange concept to an Earth Mother. “No,” I told him, “you can’t rent a room. But you can just stay here and be part of the family.” But he insisted on paying, and I think I eventually accepted some money from him, which I spent on food for everybody.

The weeks passed and Blues went through his changes. He smoked pot, he took acid, he went to concerts, he became part of the family and felt our Love. He relaxed, his hair grew, he learned to share, his eyes were sometimes big and almost peaceful. Then one day Blues came in and asked if he could see me alone. That day his eyes were big but sad. He was tripping. We went into my jewelry workroom and closed the door. Blues burst into tears.

“I’ve been lying to you, Sylvia,” he sobbed. “All this time, I’ve been lying to you. You’ve been nicer to me than anyone else in my whole life, and I’ve been lying to you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look,” he said, pulling an I.D. card out of his wallet and handing it to me. “I’m a narc,” he explained as I looked at the card. “My father got me the job. I moved in here to bust you, but you and the other people here have been so good to me I just can’t do that. And I can’t lie to you anymore.” Tears streamed down Blues’ face.

I read the I.D. and yes, he was a narc. There was his picture and everything. I didn’t know what to say.

“I know that I have to move out now that I’ve told you, but I promise I’ll never bust you, Sylvia,” he continued between sobs. “And if you’re ever someplace else when I’m busting that place, I’ll tell you to leave before we arrest anyone. You’ve been so good to me – I promise I’ll never bust you.”

Todd came in just then, needing lunch. Blues packed up his stuff and moved out.

So much else happened that summer I can’t possibly relate it all. There was a constant flow of people through the apartment – fifteen or twenty of them “living” there at any one time. Todd got lots of attention; I made and sold my jewelry and shared expanded headspace with those seekers who passed through the scene. We were all experimenting, being sure only that the old, square way of thinking didn’t fit us anymore, and that we were creating a new culture based on new values, new levels of understanding. Although we didn’t have the details all figured out, we did know that something new was forming, something that would be better for everyone than the current system, warped as it was by greed, materialism and fear.

Later in the summer the Beatles new album, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, came out. It was great! There was even a song about a girl who was running away from home because she had never felt any real love from her parents. “She’s leaving home. Bye, bye.”

My sister, Elma, from Connecticut came to San Francisco for a visit. She crashed on the living room floor with the other crashers/family members. She went out to Haight Street panhandling with them, too, but she kept a ten dollar bill tucked in her pocket in case she wanted to buy something. Actually, she did buy a pair of sneakers for one of our crasher family who didn’t have any shoes.

That summer I became aware of the tyranny of time – of always looking at the clock, of always needing to know what time it was. I finally put my clock in the freezer. It stayed there for the rest of the summer, and I was glad to be rid of it.

Marion and her daughter Tanya, old friends from New York, showed up and joined the family. Crashers came and went. Josh and Ellie had become long-term family members. I kept on cooking and cleaning up after everyone and making jewelry to pay the rent and buy the food. Todd was free and healthy, with lots of big sisters and brothers to play with. Life was wild and crazy, but high and holy, too.

Through all this I was, of course, pregnant – again with no partner on the scene. Although I didn’t intend to have this baby in a hospital, I did want confirmation of my pregnancy and a due date for the baby, so I went to a pre-natal clinic once, to get that information. They gave me a due date of September 3rd.

When I was pregnant with Todd in NYC in 1962, before I started turning on, I got fired from my midtown Manhattan secretarial job for being pregnant and not married, and unwilling to wear a fake wedding ring and lie about my marital status. I was told that I was “bad for the image of the organization.” Then I wanted natural childbirth but had to fight off the anesthetist and doctor (both women), who kept trying to slap a gas mask on my face or jab me with a long needle while my arms and legs were strapped down, even though I had told them I wanted to do it naturally. I had to turn my head away and hold my breath for a couple of contractions, but I did manage to squirt the baby out before they could put me under, even though I tore a little in the process. They had never seen a natural birth before, and both had to admit afterward that it was beautiful. Then they thought I was nuts because I wanted to breastfeed him, and I didn’t want him circumcised. And to see him, I had to take the elevator to another floor of the hospital and watch through big glass windows as he cried and cried in his basket, and no one even tried to comfort him. I couldn’t hack it. I signed myself out of the hospital early and took baby Todd home to my basement apartment on E. 2nd Street. That experience had left me feeling like I would have been better off giving birth at home alone, so that’s the way I decided to do this next one.

What could be more natural than giving birth? It’s what my body was made to do. I had heard stories of Eskimo women who delivered their own babies and bit the cord off with their teeth, and Russian peasant women who stopped plowing the field long enough to squat in the bushes and give birth, then return to pulling the plow with their newborns strapped to their body.

If they could do it, so could I! Maybe when the time came, I’d just go for a walk in Golden Gate Park and have the baby there somewhere – in some green, shady place, maybe beside a little creek. Then the blood and afterbirth could sink into the ground, and I could wash the baby in the flowing water.

I mentioned this to a couple of friends. They were absolutely horrified at the idea and strongly urged me to abandon it. I reluctantly agreed -–I guess I could just have the baby at home in the apartment – but I certainly didn’t want any doctors interfering with the process.

By now my mind had expanded enough to understand that there is a Great Perfection underlying (or overlaying?) all other realities. From the highest perspective, everything is always Perfect. It is just in our lower, mundane consciousness that we fail to see that Perfection and think we have problems – or create them for ourselves. It seemed to me that the best way to bring a baby into the world would be with a consciousness expanded into that Great Perfection, and the way I knew to do that was by eating some LSD.

I still considered acid one of my sacraments - specifically because it always got me to that headspace of Oneness and the Great Perfection - but I hadn’t taken any acid during the last trimester of my pregnancy because I had heard that if taken at that time it might bring on premature labor. I decided that I would take some once labor had started naturally and in that way I would give my new baby the highest, holiest start I possibly could. One of the things I had discovered about this new consciousness was that when I was in it, I could manifest things just by “sending” for them with my mind. And what I “sent” for would show up – usually from some entirely unexpected source – within an hour or two in time/space reality. I pondered on how that could possibly happen. Although I didn’t address my request to “God” or anyone else, it was like praying because from that level of awareness, I was integrated with whatever Beingness answers prayer, and the stipulation was always there that it be for the highest good of all life. I had but to state mentally my desire or intention, in words or images, and what I asked for would appear – not out of thin air but as part of the daily flow of my life, and that something must have already been on its way to me before I even asked for it! What a Universe! What a Creator! My soul bowed inwardly to this Divine Intelligence.

I combined this theory with what I called the “vacuum theory”, which was based on the principle we all learned in school that “nature abhors a vacuum.” So then, the way to bring in more of something is to create a vacuum, and then nature would fill it. I often applied this theory to our family stash of marijuana. If we were almost out, we would smoke up the last of it to “create a vacuum”, and from that heightened consciousness, I’d “send out” a thought-request for more. And believe it or not, it worked every time. One of the family would be walking down the street and a stranger would come up and ask him if he knew of a place where he could smoke some of this grass he had just scored, and he would be brought home to “meet the family.” Or an old friend would drop in wanting to bag up his new kilo in the back bedroom. It would be something we couldn’t possibly have planned – but Somebody or Something had planned it – down to the most minute detail. How could that be? What was this Mind that coordinated all of this, that knew what I was going to ask for way before I even knew I wanted it? I realized what “omniscient” meant in regards to the Divine Totality of All Beingness. Sometime in my third trimester I used this means of manifestation to “send out” for some LSD for the birth, and about three weeks before my due date Skip, a former crasher and still a member of my extended family, came over and gave me a lovely little purple wedge. I put it away in a container on my bedroom altar until labor began.

Then Diane, a young woman who had stayed with us for a week or two in the spring, stopped by for a visit, and when she saw the extent of my pregnancy and the workload I was carrying, she invited me to spend a week or so at her place in Marin county. It sounded good to me. I had been realizing that I was doing most of the work that was getting done around the place, and that in order for others to step in and do some of it, I had to create a vacuum – a space for them to fill.

I packed up a few clothes for Todd and me, told the crashers they were on their own for a couple of weeks, and split. A vacation in the country was just what I needed. Diane and her old man lived in a large, Spanish-style house, with a swimming pool and a view of rolling hills. I just sat in a lawn chair for hours on end, soaking up the natural surroundings and unwinding from my self-appointed role of Crash Pad Mama.

Todd played happily with the young girl who lived there. The folks in that scene swam and sunbathed nude. That was fine with me. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and it was good to get naked, outdoors in the water and sun. (I had done nude modeling in various art schools in New York and spend several days at a nudist colony, Eden West, on a previous visit to California. People who have never taken their clothes off in public seem to think that if mixed-gender groups are together naked, they must be having orgies or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly being naked and seeing other people naked is a pleasant experience—the human body is truly beautiful—but for people of high consciousness, nudity is neither sexual nor embarrassing.

One day during my stay at Diane’s the members of Quick Silver Messenger Service came to visit. My friend’s partner was their roadie. We all enjoyed the pool together that afternoon. They were just regular folks – some of Mother Earth’s talented children, going through their changes.

Two weeks later, when I returned home, the “kids” had totally taken over the scene. They had been buying and cooking their own meals, cleaning up after themselves, and even had some money set aside toward rent. “Vacuum theory” strikes again!

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