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.)

Living On God's Land part one

 [Continuing from previous posts]

Summer, 1968: My children and I had spent several months in the LA area. Todd was five-and-a-half now, still wild, bright, and inquisitive. Gentle was ten months old, a beautiful and mellow baby. We were on the road – just the three of us and Morning Glory, our heavenly blue van, now painted to look like a telephone truck– heading for a piece of “open land.”

At this point I was dedicated to group living. It was obvious that people needed to get together and learn to share and look out for each other, and I really wanted to raise my children in a situation where that was happening, a situation where the implications of our Oneness were being lived on a daily basis. I believed it would be good for Todd and Gentle to grow up in an environment of very high consciousness. To me that was way more important that providing them with material goodies and the competitive, fear-based, dog-eat-dog, brain-washed consciousness of square America. But the concept of “open land” was new to me.

It made immediate sense—land that belonged to no one and to everyone – land where anyone who wanted to could go and live—for free and to be free—a material manifestation of the spiritual truth that no one can really own a piece of the Earth – that we all have to learn to share it, to live on it together, in peace and harmony.

Josh and Ellie, part of our Haight Street extended family, had sent directions to Wheeler’s Ranch and had told me that everything we needed would be there, thus reinforcing another of my spiritual beliefs: if your heart is pure and you are trying to live your life for the good of the All, your needs will be covered.

Flashback Download: Giving Birth on LSD (1967)

 Disclaimer: These blogs are simply a sharing of my personal experiences and are not meant as recommendations for anyone else to follow. Please do not use me as a role model. Consult your own Teacher Within.

[Continuing from previous posts] It was the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, September 3, my due date, and I was awakened about 9 a.m. by a contraction. Labor was starting, right on schedule! I waited for a couple more contractions to be sure this was for real. When I was convinced that I was really in labor, I ate the purple wedge with a simple prayer for a holy delivery.

Then Richard-the-drummer stopped by, knowing it was my due date. When I told him I was in labor, he offered to take Todd to the park for a while. I told him to give it to bring him back home in a couple of hours so he could watch his sister be born.

Yes, his sister. I knew the baby was a girl. These were the days before ultrasound. How did I know? I just knew she was a girl, and I had already picked out her name. It would be “Gentle” – eldest daughter of the I Ching family of trigrams. The eldest son in that family was “Chen” – Thunder – and I figured I had already done that one with Todd, who could be very thunderous at times.

Richard and Todd left for the park. Josh and Ellie, the two family members I felt closest to, sat with me in my bedroom, smoking joints, as my labor progressed. Things were moving along fine. The contractions were pretty regular and getting stronger and more frequent, and Ellie had gone to the laundromat across the street and done laundry the night before, so we had plenty of clean sheets and towels.

Pat, the landlord upstairs who had bailed me out of jail, had been a medic in the army and had once delivered a baby. A few days before the birth he had told me how to tie off and cut the umbilical cord. I felt ready. The acid was coming on, and I was starting to feel loose and groovy.
The contractions were getting stronger, however, and my style of baby-having is to make a lot of noise in the process. It just feels good to yell. So I yelled with a couple of contractions, and this freaked Josh out. He was nervous about this unattended home birth anyhow, and after my second hearty yell, he rushed off to the Haight Street Free Clinic to get a doctor.

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.

Flashback Download: The Human Be-In and Arrival of the Flower Children

It was Christmas season in Haight-Ashbury. I was still in my new multi-dimensional consciousness much of the time, Peace, Love, and Joy filled the air and filled my heart as Todd and I strolled along Haight Street on Christmas Eve, giving away pairs of filigree-and-bead earrings I had made, in hopes of teaching Todd that the joy of Christmas is in giving – even to total strangers. People on Haight Street received the earrings much more graciously than the New Yorkers had. One guy even said he was on his way to his girlfriend’s and didn’t have a gift for her, or money to buy one, so he really appreciated the help.

Later that evening, after Todd was asleep and I was sitting alone in my darkened living room, I heard a group of carolers singing on the street corner beneath my window. The song they sang was not a traditional Christmas carol. It was the Negro spiritual, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand. My consciousness expanded with this reminder that an infinite Creative Intelligence held the Earth and Earth Mother Sylvia (really just one Being) within Its eternal mantle of protection. And part of that protection is that we are eternal. Our souls – the God sparks within us – live forever. This God-stuff of which everything is made is always changing as it passes through its cycles from non-material to material and back to non-material again, but the grand, reliable rhythm of those cycles is, itself, our protection. To my mind, those carolers beneath my window, and the transcendent consciousness they triggered, were my Christmas gift from the Great Allness of the All.

Early in the new year (1967), I realized that since I was sexually active again, I’d better get down to the Planned Parenthood clinic and get some birth control. This was before “the pill” was common, and I thought I’d try an I.U.D., in those days commonly called a “coil.” I got out my calendar to get my dates straight because I knew that at the clinic they would ask me when I had my last period. “Let’s see – there was the mark – my last period was one, two, three, four, five, six! Six weeks ago?!? Whoops!!! Too late for birth control now – I’m pregnant! I had been celibate for almost five years now – since Todd’s conception – but there was that one night with Steve while I was still very much glowing and transcendent from my Earth-Mother awakening. Now Steve had left the city for parts unknown, and I had no idea how to find him.

This information merged into my new consciousness, and I was humbled by the honor of growing within me yet another child of the new Age. I had already received inner knowledge that Todd had come to assist in Earth’s new beginning, and now I would get to bear yet another Aquarian Age child to help bring in the budding era of the Brotherhood of Man.

Flashback Downloads- Haight-Ashbury 1966

If we had to live in a city again, I wanted a big apartment, close to a park. I found one through a rental agency. It was a five-room flat on the corner of Shrader and Waller streets, a block from Golden Gate Park and within my budget. Great! The fact that it was also a block from Haight Street didn’t mean a thing to me. I was still in my New-Yorker head of thinking that nothing really important could be happening anywhere west of the Hudson, and I had never even heard of Haight-Ashbury. It was Fall, 1966, Little did I know that all Heaven was about to break loose in our new neighborhood, in our apartment, and in my own consciousness.

So Todd, Yogi and I moved into our new digs in the Haight. The apartment was one flight up, over a tool rental store. I actually felt somewhat relieved living in a city again. At least I could walk to the laundromat and grocery store if the van wasn’t running. And living just a block from Golden Gate Park was wonderful. It was a huge park, extending ten miles west to the ocean, with many meadows, forested areas, museums, and a great playground for kids of all ages. Todd especially enjoyed the spiral slide, the petting zoo, and the merry-go-round.

Of course we had to walk Yogi a couple of times a day, so Todd and I checked out the neighborhood. We discovered that a St. Bernard puppy is a great conversation piece, and folks often stopped to exchange a few words with us about him.

One morning our travels took us across Haight Street and a couple of blocks north to the Panhandle. There were tall eucalyptus trees there (exotic to us Easterners), good flat space for Todd and Yogi to run around, and a bench for me to sit on. It was there that I met a woman in her mid-twenties named Mary. She had a son, Christopher, who was a year younger than Todd, and while the boys played together with Yogi, Mary and I sat on the bench and got to know each other.

Mary was slender, with red hair, bright green eyes, and a very metaphysical consciousness. She was also a single mother, and we became friends. Sometimes she and Christopher would come to our apartment, where Mary and I would smoke some grass I had scored from the folks who had grown it. Ten ounces for $100. That sounded good to me. I was used to paying $20 and ounce back east. They said it was “cured in LSD” – whatever that meant. (I had been smoking pot for about three years and had eaten some peyote, some sugar-cube acid, and even some morning glory seeds New York, but grass “cured in LSD” was a new concept for me.)

It was excellent smoke, and I could feel my mind expanding as I stretched to integrate Mary’s spiritual perspective. She talked about God a lot, and the coming of the Aquarian Age. She was truly excited about the changes that were beginning to happen in many minds, and the new spiritual age that was budding.