“What does ‘hippie’ mean anyway?...

These kids aren’t hippies – they’re seekers.”  -- Allen Ginsberg, January 1967 San Francisco Human Be-In

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the 1960s: anniversaries, drug-flashbacks and  revolutionary memories from those who were there and aware. At the same time, a running analysis waxes on: what went right, wrong and sideways. Those who were too old, too young, too stoned or too square still wonder. Each has a different story or theory, but one thing is clear: the sixties were rife with tumult, love and angst, all fed by passion.

In my story, the lessons and legends of the riotous sixties spirited through my childhood and sent me seeking into the seventies…

While the decade began painfully, murder at Kent State and drug-abuse deaths of Jimi, Janis and Jim, it also ushered in Sesame Street, Earth Day and the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was a time of change and resolve. A national debate over Civil and Women’s Rights and the Vietnam War led the American people to disgust or defense. The Cultural Revolution threatened the status quo and few citizens were apathetic. Draft-dodgers, drug-dealers, artists, activists and flower children, the visible and verbose youth of the seventies were rattling American values, sometimes with violent consequences. Eventually, hope and unrest brought us a new government, an end to the war, a dramatically new country, and changed my life forever. 

For me it was a time of immense growth, as I ran away from the comforts of home and into the arms and rhythms of a generation on fire. Not panhandlers or vagrants, we were pioneers, curious and inspired. We worked hard, liberating mining cabins in the Colorado Rockies, turning soil in British Columbia or raising tipis on the western plains. We lived simply, minimally, building communities, passionately bound by hearts and minds.

In this blog, with photos, music and other stimuli, I want to remember the early 1970s, the essence of those charming and turbulent years. From the urban or rural communes, farms and campuses of the seventies, stories beg to be told. Not drug-fazed rants, these are tales of inspiration and joy, of hardship and triumph, of living with the Mother Nature and all her children in harmony, of seekers.

Help me tell it as it was.