Cultivating Innocence

We see it all. Nothing is hidden or glossed over. If anything, it’s all in excess. What used to be the silly songs of Barney or art-for-children of Sesame Street is now extreme emotions of Sponge Bob or raw sarcasm of South Park. Children play war games as soon as they can touch a button. Teenagers are propelled into a world of kinky sex before they even have kissed a real person. There seems to be no stoppers on what is allowed now a days.

This is where active participation in your own culture making power comes into play. We can edit ourselves and try to edit our children. We make our choices to not go down the rabbit hole by turning off our device and looking at the people and nature around us. To preserve our sanity, we must actively seek innocence because innocence is where joy is.

It’s no wonder that cute animal and kid reels are the most popular content. We just want to laugh and wonder again. It’s a relief to undo the inner corruption. When I concentrate on being innocent, letting my heart thump along happily without concern, it’s amazing how sweet the air smells, and the colors of the leaves glow. I noticed what is right about the world, what is good. My neighborhood feels like a happy place with children riding bikes and dogs barking. I appreciated the trees, gardens, and people on my street. I am transported out of a nasty world of unhappiness into a sweet world of playfulness, just by shifting my concentration from information overload to blithefully loving innocence.

It's not an ignorant innocence but a knowing innocence, an innocence by choice. A rebellion against the seriousness of it all by seeking playfulness, loving relationships, and nature. There is only so much any one of us can do or be responsible for. Information overload can paralyze us, so, like booze or drugs, it is important to know what you can handle. As soon as the horrors of the world start to weigh on me, it’s time for a healthy dose of nonsense. Sometimes I just babble out crazy words, shake my head, turn upside down, make fart sounds, anything to break the madness. And if people stare at me, all the better!

We cannot fix how other people choose to be, but we can create our own inner world. No one is in charge of that except ourselves. The hippy movement started during the horrors of the Vietnam war, struggles of the Black movement and the corruption of Nixon. It is the root of hippy wisdom to choose innocence of flower power when humanity is at its worst.

Bus of the month

For the day of the dead.

profiles of the hip

People living the solution

Rhythm

My whole vibe is that you matter. It's tattooed on my body. I think it's my sense of direction,  making people feel like they matter. It’s my superpower. I'm really good at connecting with people, looking deep into their eyes, and being a safe, soft place for them to land. That's like my favorite thing to do.

We are human beings not human doers. So, I try to remember to just be more.

who

I'm Who, and I have four kids - that's my passion.

Angel

I'm Angel and that's my birth given name. I'd say I've been on the road for a while and journeying in all sorts of ways – cars, bike, walking with E, my cat, and just letting God and the universe guide me.  I'd say I bring a lot of energy, work, positivity, and medicine to the world by just trying to be the best version of myself that I can. I think the best thing we can do is try to be the best version of ourselves because that emits a higher frequency. It helps others be comfortable with being their best version of themselves. So, bringing wholeness and my real, true self, my raw self, to the table allows others to feel comfortable with being themselves.

jonny 5

“My main name is Jonny 5, other known as Wheat-Thin. I've got a bunch of different nicknames – Triscuit-Chicken-in-a-Biscuit, whatever. In fashion, I think the most important thing is connecting durability wear with aesthetic style. Kind of like farm couture with psychedelic grandiose contour mixed together.

As for my style, one day I realized, as I looked down that all I could see were my pants where they met up with my shoes. I'm like, this is so boring. So, I found a really fun pair of socks and rolled my pants up and ever since then I've always have either stripes or argyles or something weird as a sock. It’s for my own aesthetic value, so when I look down at myself, I’m able to see my fun socks!”

“I only have purple shirts that are all different hues, from plum to dark purple. This is my light purple one.

I just got this new hat. It's got a life of its own. It makes me feel like I'm the new sheriff in town. I just found these heart glasses which I've never been able to really wear glasses before because I like to be able to see people's eyes. But the heart and the rose color are light and fun. I always wear a tie. It covers up the most ostentatious thing I own. It's my favorite little judiciary sacred skull. I'm not trying to be too flashy; ya know.”

The women I tried to interview snubbed me. What? I guess it's kinda weird for a person to walk up to you and ask to take your picture and talk about your clothes. So I just snapped this picture of a really cool idea. The Lady made her own pant legs from jeans to go with her skirt. I loved the innovation.

And then there is your standard Deadhead. I just like to see the old original Deadheads out there still dancing.

Calico Lasean Anthony Williams

“My name is Calico LaSean Anthony Williams. Mr. Claus was short. I worked on the Jefferson project (a remodel of an old school into a thriving community center). I was a was nominated the chairman of fundraising back in like 2012, 2013. When it came to getting Recology on board and getting Billy Williams to get the asphalt up. I worked on that. It was my articles of incorporation that were used to move the Inc People out of the old Carson building to downtown. I did that with Chin Night and a couple others that participated.   

My mission is to empower young people with the skills to achieve their goals. I helped secure a grant for an anthropologist at Cal Poly Humboldt. That's what I do. Allocation of resources and trying to hound them out is one of my credits or specialties.

I also work on the politics of marijuana here in Humboldt. I talked on panels here at Cannafest to encourage growers to create S corps to alleviate the liabilities that are coming down the pipeline with cannabis. In fact, using an S corp. instead of an LLC means two names out of three have to agree on any one thing before it goes to court. So, if your dog is one of the signees, you can literally keep yourself out of a whole lot of the DEA exposure. So I’m working on straightening out the licensing process of growers, distributors, and manufacturers of the marijuana industry.”

Dragon Rider

“I’d like to call myself Dragon Rider because I’m into the Tao. The Chinese believe the chi of the world moves through the clouds, and the clouds symbolize the dragon. In Chinese mythology, the dragon and the clouds are inseparable. The clouds are the energy of the cosmos moving from place to place. It's the dynamic form of the dragon that they see as beneficial. It’s the bringer of life. So, when you ride the dragon, you're riding the chi of the cosmos. That's the goal - being in harmony with the chi. When you ride it, you ride the flow of the river of life and time; not fighting, not trying to control it, just flowing with it.

I studied the Tao. It’s what I have come to be guided by and understand. It's a very simple philosophy; basically, live in harmony with nature. that's all it says. And you will find peace. There's a cycle of life, but it's not death; it's life just recycling in constant transformation, and when we can move in the flow of the natural rhythm, in harmony, then we can live in peace.

The goal is to move in harmony with nature. It's that simple. It's being grounded. It's being connected, which means taking off the shoes and socks and standing on the earth itself. All is interconnected. All is interdependent. It's the obvious thing that people have known for millennia, but we've lost it, educated out of understanding that we come from the Earth and we return to the Earth. The Earth is home.”

Quelling the Nightmare of reality through understanding

So, I’m at a truck stop. The booth next to me is spewing Fox axioms. I feel a volcano start to sputter inside. I close my eyes and try to turn repulsion into compassion. They are defending their worldview just as I am. I stand up, and they scan me. I become awkwardly aware of my purple stretch pants, hand-knitted, ratty sweater, and my hemp necklace.  I want to say my truth without putting them down, because I know as soon as I demean them, they won’t listen and maybe start a fight. But my mind goes blank. I just smile and go to pay my bill. Who wants to start something in a truck stop? Not me.  

As I pay my bill, of course I come up with something good to say. Something snappy and harsh. But then I remembered something Jane Goodall said.  “We can only change people through the heart and not through the head with information. When people feel how their viewpoint hurts the Earth or other people, they may consider a change.”

 Next time I’ll come up with a good quip.

 At night, the overheard conversation keeps me from sleeping. I know I’m just deepening the division by condemning their glittered misogyny and circus politics as sheer ignorance.  Lying in bed, staring into the dark, not sleeping, I wondered if there was a way to heal my mindset instead of adding to the feeling of division. Can I understand or see this mayhem in a different way that will make it more tolerable? Can I choose not to hate? Because hating the haters is doing nothing besides keeping me up.

It’s the plethora of injustice that really gets to me. I’m so tired of disappointment in humanity. Hating the haters is burning me out. I’m sure you've all found some kind of coping mechanism. We all are seeking one - ignoring, ranting, moving, or isolating. Late that night, an idea came to me. Not an easy or convenient idea, but it’s... something.

This word came to me - Integration. I blinked into the darkness. I couldn’t even visualize what this would look like.

Not the hippie integration with different cultures, skin color, sexual orientation, and able-bodied, but integration of the far right with the far left.  Electric art cars and Ford trucks? Drumming to country music?  Guatemala shorts and Old Navy Shirts? Quinoa with ribs at a BBQ? Can it be done?  

I just don’t think cheap beer and LSD are a good mix.

The uptight, clean-shaven, gun-loving, wholesomely fake profile gives me the heebie-jeebies; I wonder if I could relax and be more accepting. Is it possible to not react to things that tick me off, like prisons, rape, collapsing social services, greed, and war? I wonder if the people supporting the right think about these things, or if they're overlooking them for a greater cause.

I let myself drift off into the minds of those who are backing this regime.

I think they see a return to a more wholesome time. (Stay with me here). The religious white suburbanite sees diversity as a threat to their way of life. They live in white communities, their children are straight, they go to church, and everything is amiable and wholesome with baseball caps, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, and church. There are no complications, no questioning of the systems. Life is simple. The husband heads a nuclear family; mom takes care of the kids, and parents go to work while the kids go to school. Challenging situations like interracial or women-led government, equality for all, or transgender bathrooms make them go ballistic. They fear it viscerally, because it challenges all their assumptions of normalcy. Men are men, boys will be boys, women know their place, and dogs sleep in the doghouse.

As their children are exposed to things that are not “American Values” (not referring to democracy or equality but that sense of white Christian normalcy), they feel the need to wave the American flag frantically. That is why they have attached the American Flag to their mission, overlooking that it means separation of church and state and democracy. To them, it means white, straight, Christian, blue-collar working families.  It is their America, and all these people wanting to be seen and heard who are not in line with this white Christian image are destroying the American Value System.

Jobs are for white people. White men rule the government. A blond, blue-eyed Jesus is our savior and keeps us in the moral lane, else people get crazy ideas like dyeing their hair rainbow, piercing their face, changing the norm of sexuality or supporting minorities and women as leaders in the white house.  This is unacceptable to a large part of rural, suburban white America. They do not want to see weird Americans on TV, so they are fighting it. Yet they can’t stop their children from straying. This takes the fun out of fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism arises when people see society reject their belief systems, so they clamp down harder. Christian majority is slowly dribbling away in the Western nations, overtaken by a secular pop culture. This is painful for people who live and breathe a religious worldview.

As a spiritual person, I don’t take kindly to shallow secular pop culture either, feeling like it lacks real perspective, deeper wisdom and does not address the spiritual needs of humanity. Ironically, the very thing the right adheres to is a segment of pop culture dominated by capitalist. McDonalds and Ford is all American and so is the Dollar Store. (Oh, ahh maybe that’s Chinese? But you know… it’s mostly American).  Like the founder of McDonalds said, “God, work, family and McDonalds.” Can’t be said any better than that.

Jesus is now the CEO of capitalism. It’s the – don’t tell me what to do- mind set of the Top 500 used against the government but also by the religious right about prayer in schools.

I’m working here to see the 30% not as haters or ignorant but as people trying to hold on to their values. I want to see them as intelligent and passionate people who have a right to be, or else we will always be fighting, and I won’t sleep for the rest of my life. Even if I ram my liberal values down their throats (which I really want to do), they will be resentful. I’m guessing this is where the violence is coming from.  

There will always be people we don’t agree with we cant rid the world of others. This is the basis of the Armageddon fantasy- everyone gone but the Christians.

Many of us have just written off our right-wing friends and relatives, but I’m seeing now that this is not a wise move. Even in the hippy world, there are right-leaning racists and sexists. Just look at Harley-Davidson clubs and rural white hippies. They might wear leather or tie-dye and give the middle finger to the establishment, but they don’t have minority and women’s rights on their mind.

And just as much as I want to leave this America of racist, sexist bigotry - the religious right feels the same way when we have black or female leaders, or a whole generation changing their gender orientation, or social programs that have been deemed terrible by the Coca-Cola capitalist.  Except Midwestern working people don’t fly to Europe or drive to Mexico, but instead, hole up in their self-reflecting rural communities.

How can we integrate? Well, for one, I don’t think we will - completely.

Things are changing fast, and there is little patience for slow integration. People want to be seen, heard, and accepted now. Not like the women’s or black movement that took over a 100 years. The media, however, makes change happen fast because the media loves shock value, so they give the mic to anyone who is going to do something shocking – both left and right. Hence, we have a president who is a master of this on the conservative side. He thinks up shocking stuff all the time, overshadowing transgender entertainers, ethnic spokespeople, and liberal waves of color and diversity.

It is moving too fast for real integration because integration requires a slower time frame, one that has people changing their minds over multiple exposures. In some ways, we are having the clumsy shift not through understanding and time but through shame and desperate need, because the egomaniac leader of our country is creating so much strife and economic strain that people are dropping away out of desperation.

So as people fall into the fray with doubt, their connections with their ideology crack. They become socially fake, pretending to adhere to ideologies that they internally question. These are the people that might consider opening to change, only if they are accepted as they are. Not converted to liberal values but accepted with their simple conservative values.

To make the America we want to live in, it’s going to take effort to touch the hearts of people, to stop othering each other.  Every person has a place where we can relate. We both like our worlds to be friendly and comprehensible. We both want our country to reflect our values. We both want safe communities. So here is the commonality and the divide.

Can we hear people with compassion while not getting caught up in the rhetoric and emotionally triggered? I’ve tried. It’s hard. Almost traumatizing. I hold back the impulse to retch out a long tirade. Instead, I ask questions and stay interested in what they have to say. Sometimes I offer another perspective and hope they can hear something different, for a magic exchange and a subconscious shift. Trying to break down the othering of anybody, even with people who don’t want integration, is a messy paradox.

The least I can do is try. This vision of integration, patience, and tolerance becomes my beacon of light in these dark times and through the long dark nights. Even if it doesn’t heal this nation, it reduces my anxiety and allows me to snuggle my pillow, close my eyes, and dream of hippies dancing in an equitable world.

History-

the Great Revealer

I’ve been watching Oliver Stone’s History of the United States, and man, it's a wild ride, almost too much. It makes what is happening today look like a cartoon, a farce, a comedy.

Mr. T getting up in front of Congress and saying the age ol’ -you’re with us or against us. Hand that man a cowboy hat! Aren’t we over that cliché dysfunctional persuasion? People are smarter than that, or let’s say a majority.  

Looking back at history, it’s been such a pandemonium of derangement, a chipping away of the decency America mistakenly thinks it has. You just have to watch Ollie’s History, the whole 10-part series, and then not sleep for a week from the horror of it all.

But the whole sorted past, playing before your eyes, also creates a lightness about today’s debacle, like hey, miracles of miracles, humanity is still alive.  

Here is the link. It’s been taken off Netflix because it’s too dangerous to know your history. But you can’t hide anything today. That’s one of the reasons that this T-hitler isn’t going to last. Somebody somewhere will have the truth posted. You just have to find it. And kids are curious, so I have hope that the next generation is not going for any more of this scam. I’m counting on savvy but spaced-out next gen. If they could only learn history.

Here it is – preserved by a site in Canada-

Hippy Slop Philosophy

We use the best organic, wholesome foods, but when we put them all together, it’s a goopy, soupy slop. And if you haven’t cultivated a taste for healthy wholesome slop, it is unpalatable. But for those who have expanded their palate to include a little dirt mixed with greens and bone broth, it is quite good. Better yet, we feel good after consuming it.

Here is the hippy slop philosophy - if we learn to appreciate the wholeness of bad and good mixed together, we feel healthier for it.

Americans are strivers for perfection in ourselves, our relationships, our lives, our country, and the world. Yet, if you haven’t noticed, we always fall short. It is a law of nature. Let’s call it the life slop. Nothing is ever completely right. There may be times it feels close to right, but there are always strings of funk that trip us up. Damn it.

If we can relax and accept that no matter what, the world, our lives, and ourselves will always have an element of badness, then we can explore the wealth of complexity that is life. Look at the forest, it’s beautiful with down trees, clogged streams, mud, and mold. That’s life. That’s also being human.

In ourselves, we have an outer self in which we show to the world, a mask of our values, but under that is a grumpy and disheveled feeling of inadequacy and frustration. Believe it or not, this is our true selves - an ethereal spirit coming into a physical body that is confined by this demanding reality grows layers of grumpy frustration like decomposing leaves.

The irony is that we continue to fight the slop. We want a clean and pristine self, life, family, and world where everything is as we wish it to be. We want to fix it. But even when we get it all perfect, it becomes sterile and unsatisfying. That’s why most rich people are unhappy -because they have everything and yet they still feel empty. Repressing our dark side makes us flat, shallow, and dull.

It’s when we let the chaos of our misery, sadness, and frustration break apart our mask that we begin to color our lives with creativity, wholeness, and tears or sorrow and joy.

My point about America is that we are so bummed out about how it is right now, and there is a lot to be worried about, however the pendulum will swing, and then straight people will be irate about the Liberals.

As one conservative talk show host said, “There will be no real elections, you won’t be able to tell a girl from a boy, and the dogs and cats will be fighting in the streets.” (I’m not sure how he forecasted the dog and cat thing, but whatever.)

So, we will never be totally happy, unified people. If our well-being is contingent on whether our values are manifest in our world, we will always be adrift in disappointment and sorrow because it’s going to be a clash of values in the life slop.

Giving ourselves permission to be messy, let our living rooms be messy, accept our imperfect family and our f*ked country and this world of crap and beauty is how we will find freedom right now. If we get used to life slop, even embrace the slop, we will fare much better as we move forward into an even messier and more complicated future.

Bus of the Month

simple yet fun