When people come searching for the mythological communes of the hippies they find remnants of the hey-days. It verifies that the ideals of the counter- culture-make-your-own-reality did not work. But what seekers don’t realize is that those ideals did work, they just got more refined, changed their look and shifted their locations. Nothing ever stays the same not even ideals.

Some communes did fall away, but some have transformed into collective living situations. More like a cooperative neighborhood than a commune. People have a hard time sharing. We found that out the hard way but we didn’t fail, we made inroads to new ways of sharing. Sharing can happen, we just realized there needed to be clear agreements and contracts.

Many hipsters are not hiding in the woods. We go to college, we live in towns and cities, we have jobs. We don’t need to drop out anymore. We have gained enough understanding of what we are about and need to do, to do it anywhere.

Many of us don’t even identify as hippy. But if you ask a person if they believe in the hippy values of connection instead of money, organic food instead of processed food, being culturally creative instead of doing the norm, and nature rather than development, you’d find many people in that paradigm.

But there are still relics, and many writers from LA or GQ are trying to find us and write about the way it was. But they don’t seek out the new version of Hipster. They try to find us stuck in time. It is like trying to find Native Americans in teepees. Just because you can’t find teepees doesn’t mean that there are no Native Americans. They have just moved on in their culture.

Here is a fun article in GQ about an old hippie commune in Humboldt County. But next time they want to find some hippies they should come looking for me. I’d blow their socks off cause I ain’t nothin’ like they’ve seen before.