We wanted intimacy--
not a neighborhood where you didn't know anyone on the block,
or you competed, kept up with the Joneses.
A hunter-gatherer or early agricultural community
meant that people lived,
worked and sought deeper contact with the holy spirit as a group,
and they all knew one another, from cradle to grave.
I used to call my hippie friendships "a horizontal extended family,"
as opposed to the ancient tribal extended family,
which was multi-generational, and therefore, vertical.
We wanted a culture which acknowledged the human
body,
not just for sex, but to hug each other, to be naked without shame,
to revere the body with natural foods, beneficial exercise,
herbs, baths, massage, deep understanding.
This was not part of the culture from which we came.
We wanted a culture that thrived on gift-giving.
We hitchhiked, shared our food and drugs, gave away our possessions.
People who could afford to buy land invited others who could not to
live there.
We opened free stores, free clinics, free kitchens,
not just in the Haight, but everywhere we went.
We wanted be living proof that God(dess) was taking care of us
and therefore there was no need to hoard.
We wanted to live without the constraints of time.
We wanted to wake up each day and decide
what would be the most fun to do that day--
or just find out as it went along.
We wanted to go with the flow, follow our bliss, be here now.
This was in complete opposition to the culture from which we came.
We wanted new ways to value one another,
rather than by wealth, status, looks, achievements, machismo,
as our culture of origin had taught us, and continues to teach us
through the media.
We wanted to value one another for being lovable and real.
We valued spiritual depth, which we referred to as "heavy."
We admired one another for being happy.
We admired those who offered selfless service or peaceful resolution
of conflict.
We wanted a spirituality that actually caused you to grow as a person,
not one in which people attended religious gatherings for social status.
We wanted to be guided by our own Inner Spirits, rather than by priests.
We thirsted for the spiritual awareness and grace
we experienced on psychedelics, without psychedelics, or in addition
to them.
Many hippies would spend their last cent on a weekend workshop
that promised to "change your life forever."
That was how so many gurus found followers in those days.
We wanted to live in harmony with the earth,
the plants and animals,
the indigenous peoples of the earth, with each other, with ourselves.
We were the fuel behind the rapid expansion of the environmental movement.
We experimented with living arrangements that we thought
would harmonize with nature. We sought out indigenous tribal elders
as our teachers.
We wanted to make the things we wore and used
with our hands,
grow our food and medicine, feel all kinds of weather--
all the experiences our modern urban lives had excluded
in the name of convenience and comfort.
We wanted to live on the road, have adventures,
build things that hadn't been built before, and live in them.
We wanted to live our mythic selves,
give ourselves names that resonated with our souls,
dress in costumes that expressed our dreams,
do daring deeds, dance as if no one was looking,
decorate our homes with magical things,
listen to music that took us out of ordinary reality
into altered states of awareness.
We wanted to see life without violence.
We wanted media that contained truth.
Some of us risked our lives
to find out what the government was doing
and let the underground press know.
We wanted to talk about things in print
that we were not allowed to discuss in our culture of origin.
We wanted to live without stupid, arbitrary
rules,
either for ourselves or for our children.
Some of our children, as adults today,
say they wish we had been more protective of them,
or offered more structure.
We only knew what we endured,
being as culturally different from our culture of origin as
Chinese are from Italians, and punished for it,
and wished to spare our children these experiences.
However, some portion of kids raised by hippie parents
grew up to be hippies themselves.
At that point,
one can say, a new culture was born and continues.
"Hippie"
Where did the word come from?
Hip:
The History is the story of an American obsession.
Derived from the Wolof
word hepi or hipi
("to see," or "to open one's eyes"),
which came to America with West African Slaves,
hip is the dance between black and white
-- or insider and outsider --
that gives America its unique flavor and rhythm.
It has created fortunes, destroyed lives
and shaped the way millions of us talk,
dress, dance, make love or see ourselves in the mirror.
Everyone knows what hip is.
Wolof history probably dates to about the 12th or 13th century.
Wolof forefathers migrated west to the coast from Mali
following the defeat of the Empire of the Ghana in the 11th century.
Oral family histories indicate that at least some of the first settlers
in the area were of Fulbe origin.
Much Wolof history has been preserved
in oral praise songs which are recited
by griots ("professional praise singers").
Portuguese traveler accounts from the 15th century
indicate an organized Wolof presence in what is still their homelands.
Europeans established a fort on Gorée Island
off the coast of modern day Dakar,
which served as one of the primary points of departure
for slaving vessels bound for the Americas.
Since European contact Wolof history has undergone
numerous conquests and revolts as competing rulers
challenged one another for kingship.
Hippie
Origins
A
1967 article in Time Magazine asserts that the foundation of the hippie
movement
finds historical precedent as far back as the counterculture of the
Ancient Greeks,
espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope
and the Cynics.
The article also claims that the Hippies were influenced by the ideas
of Jesus Christ,
Hillel the Elder, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau,
Gandhi, and others.
In fin de siècle Europe, from 1896-1908,
a German youth movement known as Der Wandervogel
began to grow as a countercultural reaction to the organized
social and cultural clubs that centered around German folk music.
In contrast to these formal clubs,
Wandervogel emphasized amateur music and singing,
creative dress, and communal outings involving hiking and camping.
Inspired by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche,
Goethe,
Hermann Hesse, and Eduard Baltzer,
Wandervogel attracted thousands of young Germans
who rejected the rapid trend toward urbanization
and yearned fore the pagan,
back-to-nature spiritual life of their ancestors.
During the first several decades of the twentieth century,
these beliefs were introduced to the United States
as Germans settled around the country,
some opening the first health food stores.
Many moved to Southern California where they could practice
an alternative lifestyle in a warm climate.
In turn, young Americans adopted the beliefs and practices
of the new immigrants.
One group, called
the "Nature Boys",
took to the California desert and raised organic food,
espousing a back-to-nature lifestyle like the Wandervogel.
Songwriter Eden Ahbez wrote a hit song called Nature Boy
inspired by Robert Bootzin (Gypsy Boots),
who helped popularize health consciousness,
yoga, and organic food in the United States.
Like Wandervogel, the hippie movement
in the United States began as a youth movement.
Composed mostly of white teenagers and young adults
between the ages of 15 and 25 years old,
hippies inherited a tradition of cultural dissent
from bohemians and beatniks of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s.
Beats like Allen Ginsberg crossed-over
from the beat movement
and became fixtures of the burgeoning hippie and anti-war movements.
By 1965, hippies had become an established social group in the U.S.,
and the movement eventually expanded to other countries,
extending as far as the United Kingdom and Europe,
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil.
|
The hippie ethos influenced The Beatles
and others
in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe,
and they in turn influenced their American counterparts.
Hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of rock music,
folk, blues, and psychedelic rock;
it also found expression in literature, the dramatic arts,
fashion, and the visual arts, including film,
posters advertising rock concerts, and album covers.
Self-described
hippies had become a significant minority by 1968,
representing just under 0.2% of the U.S. population
before declining in the mid-1970s
A Hippie Bedtime
Story
From the
Party Supply HUT
(I'm not putting
you on!!!)
HIPPIE
HISTORY
Hippies
are often associated with Woodstock, 60s,
Summer of Love, Rainbow Gatherings, Grateful Dead,
tie-dyed cloths, bell bottoms, peace signs and loving to party.
The term hippie actually came from the word hipster
and was often used to refer to the younger bohemian crowd.
The hippies were best known as being involved in the 1960s
counterculture movement and for protesting the Vietnam War.
Sixties gatherings such as Woodstock and the Summer of Love
are often thought of when hippies are mentioned.
The Summer of Love was the summer of 1967 in San Francisco
where thousands of young people flocked to the
Haight-Ashbury district of the city to join the hippie experience.
The Woodstock Music Festival brought over 400,000 people
to a 600 acre dairy farm in Bethel, NY
to hear music from musicians like the Grateful Dead,
Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Hippies often chose to live either a nomadic
or communal lifestyle
freeing themselves from possessions.
Hippies join in Rainbow Gatherings every year which are held in
various locations in public lands such as national forests.
They gather and spread peace and love,
celebrate nature and then when they leave,
they respectfully clean up anything and everything
a group of over 20,000 people could have left behind.
Hippies would embrace certain aspects of other religions such as
Buddhism, Hinduism, or Native American religions to separate themselves
from traditional middle class Western values.
Share the Hippies History
with your kids as a bedtime story.
