Living On God's Land part two

[continuing from God’s Land Part 1]

Gentle learned to walk at Wheeler’s Ranch. I remember her taking her first tentative steps on our uneven, grassy, floor of our tent home, and how frustrating it was for her. But she had a god sense of humor, and we laughed a lot.

Todd was thriving on the freedom at Wheeler’s. He loved back with his pals Josh and Ellie again, and in the country, where he could roam the land to his heart’s content.

These were the early days at Wheeler’s Ranch, and other than tolerating each others’ trips, and individual acts of sharing, there wasn’t much community happening there. There was a community garden. Only a few people worked in it, but many wanted to eat out of it, including people who just came to visit and didn’t even live there. There were no agreements about who could harvest the veggies – everyone just took what they wanted. Often those who had worked hardest in the garden all season didn’t get much of the produce. (I later learned that making strong agreements as a group is a real necessity for community living. But none of us knew that then. We were the pioneers, blazing the trail and making plenty of mistakes along the way.)

We never had any community meetings or get-togethers that I recall. Sometimes a bunch of us would hang out together and make music around an evening campfire, but it would be a spontaneous gathering, not everyone would be there, and we never talked about any community business or anything.

It was great to be in the country, great to be living close to the Earth. And slowly, over the weeks, in this new atmosphere of freedom and tolerance, I began peeling off more layers of cultural conditioning. Everything was so much more direct. It seemed so wonderfully direct to gather some wood and build a fire in the stove to cook a meal—so much nicer than working for someone else to get money to pay a utility company for the energy to cook with. (No one was aware of environmental, wood-burning issues at that time.) Although physically challenging, this was a very satisfying way of life.

The mainstream culture had conditioned me to believe that there might not be enough to go around, so I should grab what we could for ourselves and to hell with anybody else. Here, living in community on open land, I could practice my new belief in Oneness and share with an open heart, without being misunderstood or hassled by those fearful of change.

The mainstream culture had conditioned me to believe that I had to conform, to try to fit in, to distort my outward expression  into some grotesque caricature of my true self. Here I could be myself without fear of judgment. We were all seeing the world and each other through new, non-judgmental eyes, and it was beautiful. I saw each of us as a soul-in-progress, a beautiful flower, opening to the Light. Here I could be myself, let my light shine, and it would not only be accepted but even be appreciated by those around me.

The mainstream culture had conditioned me to believe that nudity was shameful. I had made some strides in overcoming that lie by doing nude modeling in art schools in New York, and by visiting a nudist colony, Eden West, on my prior visit to California a few years previous. But living at Wheeler’s Ranch gave me my first real opportunity to live naked for an extended period of time .The summer was hot and most of us went naked most of the time. Sometimes I would go for many days in a row without ever putting clothes on. It was wonderful.

Our nudity expressed a level of consciousness with no hang-ups about body parts or sex, but at the same time, a consciousness with great respect for each other. Living naked is a great, liberating experience. To be able to do your daily work and socializing nude, overcoming your fears and self-consciousness regarding such complete exposure, is a definite step on the spiritual path. Even Jesus said so in  The Gospel According to Thomas  from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls: “His disciples said: When wilt Thou be revealed to us and when will we see Thee? Jesus said: When you take off your clothing without being ashamed, and take your clothes and put them under the feet as the little children [do] and tread on them, then shall you behold the Son of the Living One and you shall not fear.”

Our nudity also reflected our openness with each other – our ability to “let it all hang out” on all planes – to be comfortable with who we were – to have no secrets from each other, no pretenses, no masks, no disguises. “This is who I am, and I’m okay with it.” On all planes.

The summer days blended into one another timelessly, without name or number. No reason to know what time it was. No reason to know what day it was. No reason to know what date it was. No reason to know what month it was. It was always NOW. I found that living in the present moment relieved me of two major sources of stress – worrying about the past or worrying about the future. Here and now it was always okay.

I learned to tell by the sun when it was time to start cooking dinner. I learned to scan the sky for signs of rain in time to cover the wood pile. I learned to dig a hole and shit in it. (Hand-washing was not part of the ritual, however, and Josh got hepatitis.) I learned to take a shower, out in the open, there beside the main ranch  road, in the cold water of the garden hose—and to somehow get my kids clean once in a while in the process. Another wonderful thing about Wheeler’s was that I never looked in a mirror. I don’t think there was even a mirror on the land except maybe at Bill and Gay’s studio. Physical appearance was not a big deal there. We were much more focused on physical survival  and personal freedom to be whoever we were. No mirrors necessary. How liberating!

I learned to carry a five-gallon jug full of water up the dusty road to my tent with Gentle in a baby-carrier on my back. I learned to push a wheelbarrow full of cedar rounds through the bushes and over the hillocks from the fallen tree to my tent-home with Gentle in the carrier on my back. I learned to split the rounds with an ax into pieces that would fit my stove, with Gentle playing nearby.

I learned to cook simple, basic foods – beans and whole grains. I was a “new” vegetarian and had never really cooked this simple, natural way before. Carol bought the food and Ellie taught me how to cook it on a wood heating stove. The kids and I often had diner with Josh and Ellie, at their tent or ours. I liked to make a big pot of hearty soup—lentils, barley, vegetables and spices, with dumplings on the top—a complete meal in one pot (which was all I had room for on the stove). Another favorite was pinto beans and chapatis. Chapatis are the Indian version of what Mexicans call tortillas—flour, salt and water mixed into a soft dough, rolled into thin circles, and cooked lightly on both sides. We rolled out the chapatis with a clean quart-sized soda bottle and cooked them directly on the lid of the wood stove. Then each person would fill a chapati with beans and add his or her favorite condiment and some tomatoes, lettuce, sprouts, or whatever veggies were available. I discovered that if I put mustard and relish on mine, it would almost taste like the hot dogs I loved in my youth. After a while someone willed me their sheet-metal box oven, which I sometimes placed on top of the wood stove for baking bread. It worked okay but, of course, required keeping a fire going for several hours on a hot sunny day.

I learned to maintain kerosene lamps – fill them, clean the globes and trim the wicks every afternoon, before it got dark.

I learned to live without money – eating through the generosity of saintly friends and the power of community, and living simply and creatively, close to the earth, making what we needed out of whatever materials were available, valuing every scrap of usable material and making something we could use out of it or carefully saving it for a time when it would be needed.

The shadows were getting longer now. Fall was approaching and I was beginning to wonder how it was going to be, living on the ground, in a tent, for the winter, with two young kids. Just then Joe Rosenthal, who had lived with us on Shrader Street, arrived at Wheeler’s. He crashed with Todd and Gentle and me, and in return for “room and board”—or just out of the goodness of his heart—he built a wooden platform for our tent down at the bottom of the meadow, under a big old cedar tree.

Perfect! Now we would be up off the bare ground for the winter, and Gentle could walk on an even, wooden floor for the first time in her life! Joe left shortly after finishing the platform, and Todd, Gentle and I settled into our cozy new, improved digs for the rainy season.

New people were arriving at Wheeler’s all the time – many with no means of providing food for themselves. There was soon a group gathering at my tent every morning and every evening, knowing that if they were there at meal time, I would feed them. Sometimes they split a little firewood for me. Sometimes they did a few dishes. Sometimes they brought a little marijuana to share.

A fairly frequent visitor to Wheeler’s was an elderly gentleman named Carl. I had met Carl in San Francisco when he came to the Shrader Street pad with drummer Richard, after hearing him play a drum solo at a Love-In in the panhandle.

Carl was in his late sixties, a short man who had had polio in his youth, which had stunted the growth of his legs. He had long white hair and beard, and an elfish grin in his intelligent bespectacled eyes. He drove a cab-over camper and whenever he came to visit many of us would cram into it and get high with Carl.

Carl, who had always had an interest in metaphysics, took LSD for the first time when he was 65 years old and had a trip that changed his life. He saw the light and started hanging out with hippies, helping them however he could. He and I had lots in common and we became good friends, having long theological discussions after the others had their fill of smoke and left the camper.

Gentle and I went to San Francisco to visit Carl once in a while. Todd usually opted to stay at Wheeler’s with Josh and Ellie.

In the city we would live in Carl’s camper, often with several other young friends of Carl’s. Carl was married and had an apartment on Divisadero Street. His wife, Elka, was a certified schizophrenic, who had been institutionalized at times but was then living at home with Carl. And Elka didn’t like hippies. So Carl’s hippie friends lived in his camper, parked somewhere on the street – hopefully near a gas station with unlocked restrooms (for bathing and hair-washing purposes, as well as for that early morning poop).

Sometimes Carl would drive me to Jamestown, where I would visit a man named Gridley Wright, a SoCal hippie guru who had gotten busted for pot in LA. I had written to him in jail and asked if there was any  help he needed on the outside, and we had become friends and “penn-pals.” I wrote and visited him as often as I could.

During those days, as I walked around the city streets, I became aware of how my life at Wheeler’s had changed me. Now, as I walked along, I would often bend down and pick something up off the sidewalk or gutter and put it in my pocket, thrilled by the find. What were these treasures? A safety pin, a rubber band, a plastic bag – all very valuable to those of us living on the land with no money. One of the finest things about living without money is that you learn to appreciate very simple things that others take for granted and even throw away. The challenge of life becomes not how to get and keep a job and buy lots of stuff, but rather how to create your survival, comfort and pleasure from whatever is around you that is free. And I brought my goodies back to Wheeler’s, where they were gratefully used.

After several months, some folks of questionable values moved onto Wheeler’s Ranch. When I returned to the land from one of these excursions to San Francisco and Jamestown, I discovered that my not-running van, Morning Glory had been stolen by some folks I had let stay in our tent while I was gone. They had had Morning Glory towed her off the land to a garage in town, where she was repaired. Then the “grateful” crashers had split the area in my van. They also took some of my spiritual books with them. They were dope-smoking, born-again Mormons, heading for the geographical center of the United States to start a new Mormon civilization. This is the first time I had experienced “spiritual” people who felt they themselves and their calling were so high and holy that they had the right to rip other people off. (I’ve learned since that this headspace is not really uncommon. In fact, I see it now as major trap on the spiritual path. I’ve observed many guru-types fall into it since then.) A few days earlier I had stopped one of their group from taking off with Jason’s twelve-string. (Ellie’s sister, Mary, was part of this small group—that’s why I let them stay in our tent.)

Before that time there had been no theft at Wheeler’s that I ever heard about except by these would-be founders of a new Mormon civilization. Contrary to media propaganda, most “flower children” were developing strong values and were highly ethical. We didn’t steal. We didn’t even lie. The only law we broke was regarding psychedelic substances that we felt were mistakenly classified with truly hard drugs like heroin or meth. We were not “junkies” or “dope fiends.” Taking psychedelics did not lead us into taking hard drugs. This may have happened to a few who people who, like the government, lumped all illegal substances into the same category. They had decided that if the government was lying about marijuana and other psychedelics, it was probably lying about all the other illegal substances, too. But the problem was with the misclassification marijuana and other psychedelics in the first place. And there were those who smoked marijuana and grew their hair and beards long and copied hippie dress and hippie jargon, but who hadn’t had their own awakenings—and  they were likely to have different values than the truly awakened flower children. Squares considered anyone with long hair to be a “hippie”, so all hippies eventually got a bad rap due to the behavior of a few who hadn’t really caught the wave of new consciousness. True understanding of the Oneness of All eliminates the need to lie, cheat, steal, or harm anyone. What I do to another, I am really doing to myself.

Whenever someone at Wheeler’s realized it was Monday, a bunch of us would pile into the back of a pickup truck and head for San Francisco to attend Monday Night Class, taught by Stephen Gaskin, at the Family Dog, a rock hall across the street from the ocean. (Riding in the back of a pickup was not illegal at that time, and it was a favorite form of hippie transportation.)

As I understand the story, Stephen had been teaching English at San Francisco State when he began to notice that his brightest, most interesting students were all growing their hair long and starting to drop out of school. He asked what was up with them, and in response they turned him on to psychedelics. After a while he dropped out of teaching and began exploring psychedelics more deeply. At one point he had a trip in which he saw “how everything works.” A while after that he went back to SF State and asked if he could teach a course in the new “experimental college” there. The administration agreed. He taught courses with titles like, “North American White Witchcraft” and “Einstein, Energy and God.” His classes got too large for the college so he started holding them at Glide Memorial Church, then at the Strait Theater on Haight Street. That’s where I actually attended my first Monday Night Class, back when I was living in San Francisco. By the time I was at Wheeler’s, Stephen was drawing about 1,500 to 2,000 psychedelicized seekers to the Family Dog every Monday Night to hear him speak.

On these Monday nights, I didn’t always hear everything that Stephen said since our Wheeler’s wheels usually arrived late, and the kids and I would be out on the fringes of the huge crowd, with the crying babies and barking dogs. But I heard enough to know that he, too, had experienced this New Consciousness and—miracle of miracles!—he could actually talk about it! Many of us were having these experiences, with the help of psychedelics, but were unable to express what we were experiencing in words. There were no words yet for these experiences—at least not in the English language. Maybe in Sanskrit, but not in English. The books that talked about consciousness were mostly ancient texts from the eastern religions and were just beginning to be published in paperback English translations. And they were not always helpful to twentieth-century westerners.

But here was this guy—this  Stephen Gaskin—who could talk about all this stuff in down-home, colloquial American hippie jargon. Like the rest of us, he was eagerly reading spiritual texts from around the world, and he had this way of explaining them in terms of recent discoveries in modern physics. He talked about Einstein, and the Holy Spirit, and the subconscious, and Christ Consciousness, and the Vow of the Bodhisattva, and truth, and telepathy, and energy fields, and sex, and attention, and satori, and the astral plane, and considered marijuana and psychedelics the sacraments of his religion.

Stephen’s teachings had a lot to do with attention, and when he arrived for class, he would just silently sit cross-legged on a low platform until everyone in the whole hall noticed that he was ready to start class and would stop rapping with each other and give Stephen their full attention. Stephen wouldn’t begin to speak until he had the everyone’s  attention, and then he would speak to the group without a microphone. Everyone’s attention on Stephen amplified his voice, but it was hard to hear everything he said out there on the fringes where I was. Eventually some of his students talked him into using a microphone so they could record what he was saying. These recordings were later transcribed and published in a book called Monday Night Class.

I was certainly not one of the “in-group” of students who copied Stephen’s dress, speech, and lifestyle – I only made it to a few classes, and was very eclectic in my spiritual studies. I read or listened to the teachings of many spiritual teachers and learned from them all, but didn’t consider any of them “my guru.” My  most important teacher was within – my own Higher Self. But when Stephen said one night, “Someday we’ll put all our money together and buy a piece of land and do a community on it,” I thought, Now, that’s the community I’d like to live in!

One Monday Night Class that I attended was also attended by a bunch of Methodist ministers. They were from all over the country, in SF for a national convention of Methodist ministers, and had heard about this guy who  drew huge crowds every Monday night when he talked about Spirit. The ministers were curious. They sat in the balcony at the Family Dog and listened intently. Some of them asked Stephen questions, which he answered with great sensitivity and awareness. By the end of class some of the ministers were so impressed that they invited Stephen to come speak in their churches. He agreed to do that and started setting up an itinerary. This was the beginning of what came to be known as “The Caravan”, in which Stephen, his four-marriage family, and many converted schoolbuses full of his hippies caravanned across the US and back, stopping in cities and college towns, where Stephen shared his teachings with the locals as well as his travelling students.

Meanwhile, life at Wheeler’s was physically difficult but worth it for the freedom, closeness to nature, and like-minded friends. I felt safe there. I went to town as seldom as possible and liked it that way. But as the colder weather set in, I began to really look forward to my trips to San Francisco and Jamestown with Carl—and not just because I wanted to see Gridley. I also enjoyed the respite from chopping wood and carrying water. It seemed amazing to me that in the city I could just turn on a faucet and out would come hot running water! Oh, my! What a luxury! What a miracle! I even loved to do dishes wherever I crashed in the city – just to get to play with the plumbing..

After a while word about open land at Wheeler’s spread, and a few more of those not-yet-awakened folks moved in. And it was “open land” so we let them. We thought that our love and the freedom would help them de-condition and see the light.

All hippies had long or growing-out hair in those days. The men didn’t shave and the women didn’t wear make-up. It wasn’t a style; it was a statement. It said, “I’m okay with the way God made me. I’m not willing to distort my natural self any longer just to fit into a society based on distorted values.” And when you saw someone with long hair, you knew you had a kinshp with them, even if you had never met them before. Eventually, however, folks started growing their hair long so they could look “hip” without the requisite consciousness. And people in the dominant culture, not being attuned to reading vibes, couldn’t tell the difference. They lumped all longhairs into the same category—outlaws, political dissidents, and drug addicts. In 2010, long hair seems to have become popular again, but now it’s a style that you have done in a hair salon. The Morstuffians have usurped many traditional hippie concepts and customs and figured out how to make money off of the superficial, materialistic aspects of them, while distorting their original essence. But back in 1968, growing your hair long meant something.

One day a short-haired father and teenage son moved into a big army tent on one end of the land, near the gate. They didn’t hang out much with the rest of us. Then one day the police did arrive and found their tent full of chain saws, canned hams, and other items that had been stolen from the local stores. Father and son got busted, and the police now knew about Wheeler’s.

A while later a group of “Hell’s Angels” began stopping by some evenings and invaded our campfire. They brought wine, knives, guns, and harsh vibes. But we felt we had to let them stay—it was open land, and they had as much right to be there as any of the rest of us did. But it was becoming land that I didn’t enjoy being on so much anymore. Gentle and I took more frequent trips to the city and stayed longer. Todd always preferred to stay on the land with Josh and Ellie.

At Christmas time Carl, who had received a small windfall, wanted to do something for the folks at Wheeler’s, who were living so frugally for the sake of their ideals. So he took me around to various thrift stores in San Francisco, and I picked out winter coats and rubber boots and warm blankets and sleeping bags and pots and pans and other items I knew would be useful to folks there. Then we went to a food co-op in Berkeley and bought fifty-pound bags of brown rice, pinto beans, lentils, split peas, whole wheat flour, sixty pounds of honey,  some dates and raisins and other dried fruit. Carl paid for it all. The next day we drove to Wheeler’s and spread the stuff out on blankets on the ground. Folks who lived there came and took what they could use. With his long white hair and beard and his short stature, Carl did looked like the “jolly old elf” himself! And the folks at Wheeler’s had a warm, happy holiday season.

Happy Holy Days,

Sylvia