Last Journey

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7. Rites of Passion

       This chapter is going to be about “freelove”, so if that is one of the subjects that gets your shorts in a bind it might be a good idea to skip it. Freelove is not an easy subject to write about, but I will give it my best. This chapter will also be about psychedelic experience. It has been twenty years since I have done Peyote or mushrooms or any of the other similar medicines. I haven't even smoked pot in nearly that long. There is a season for everything. That was part of my youth, something I am beyond now... These days I am quite content to just stay at home with Ellie and drink lots of orange juice, which is all I need to get high. But 12 years ago when the events of this book took place I was still flying wild and free -- and those times and ways deserve some elaboration...

***

       It seems to me that those of us who believe in freelove are like the proverbial angel who has his feet in two different places at the same time, often pictured as having one foot in the water and one foot on the land. This is because we, most of us, were raised with the beautiful Christian wisdom of having one spouse, and loving that person with all our heart, forever. --And not having eyes or intentions towards any other person. This was the path of our grandparents, and our parents. Even if some of them fell from that perfection into divorce we still feel the perfection is the true course. We will never entirely abandon that vision of perfection. One of our feet will always be set firmly there.

       Then there is the matter of the other foot – the one that is in the different place. That foot is set in a different world, at least for some of us psychedelic hippies of the sixties. We did drugs that transformed us in spiritual ways that are almost impossible to describe. Basically these "drugs" are very similar to the drugs done by holy men and women since the dawn of time -- at least a hundred thousand years. But it could just as easily have been a million years for all anyone knows. The ingredients of the LSD that we took were kindred to the chemical compounds found in mushrooms which grow profusely in nature all around the world, and always have. The human race, came upon these mushrooms time and time again over the ages in their search for edible food. The human race has always realized the profound experiences of these chemicals upon the mind and spirit and soul. You don’t have to read a book to know this is true. John Allegro wrote THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS. If you need a book to believe what I am saying, start with that one. It is one of the best. But you don’t need a book. Common sense will tell you it is true.

       The thing about the psychedelic experience is that it opens long-locked doors in the heart and soul of a person. Some of the doors have been locked since before we were born. Some of the doors have been locked for generations. Some of the doors have been locked for millenniums. The ancient mushroom chemicals open them.

       And when the doors have been opened you are no longer the same person you were before the doors were opened. Because the doors are open now. And the world is a different place.

       One of the doors that are opened is the door of love. Most people in our age have a hard time feeling total love. If they were to suddenly experience total love it would knock them off their feet. They would become so overwhelmed with emotion that they could no longer stand upright. They would fall to the ground with their eyes huge, and their mouths gaping. They would be speechless. They would try to talk, to tell people about the realization happening in their mind – but there would barely be any words they would know that would convey the meaning of what they wanted to say. They would stammer and gasp. What I have said here barely scratches the surface of describing the experience of having the ancient locked door of love opened up. And yes, it can be opened without Peyote, and without magic mushrooms, and without any drugs at all. The door can be opened through prayer. The door can be opened through meditation. But whatever way it opens, afterwards, the world is a different place.

       And that is just one of the locked doors that may be opened up. Some people only open the long-locked door of love. And some people become frightened by it and shut it tight afterwards and never go near it again. Because it is impossible to be prejudiced afterwards for instance. And if you come from a family that believes prejudism is normal, you may be very frightened to go among them with your new controversial vision. A great many people actually look through the keyhole of the door and decide it is not for them, and afterwards become the enemy of that love, preferring the power they get from their ancient prejudism.

       I don’t feel ready to describe any of the other ancient-locked doors of the mind at this time, however I do want to continue writing about how the new-found feeling of love does affect some people. It raises them to a plateau where they are easily able to identify other people who have also experienced this mind-opening awareness. They stand out in crowds. A few words exchanged with a stranger will assure them that they have perceived correctly, or incorrectly. The type of words and phrases chosen, the look in their eyes, all have meaning. All the people who have experienced this opening of the mind are perceived as kindred of the eternal universe. As the newly-initiated person goes among his new kindred on this love-plateau he or she discovers new things constantly. Love is eternal. We know from science that in the Universe everything is composed of Light. But after the experience we also know that everything is composed of Love. And it is clear that between Love and Light, Love is the more ancient, that it is eternal. And that it is even more powerful than Light.

       Once a person is experienced they are on the “Rainbow Trail”, one might say. They are off to see what they shall see, to learn what they will learn, to meet who they shall meet. Because the people of the Rainbow are so beautiful. They glow with an aura. The people of Love. There are many different paths. A person might end up working with Mother Teressa in India or doing loving work helping people anywhere in the world. A great power comes with this opening of the door of love. The person realizes they may create their world to manifest love in whatever way they wish. Most people simply raise families and show their love in that way. My own manifestation was the Creation of the wandering Bicycle Bus. And also my art in all its forms. And also my love for Ellie. We wanted to raise children too. It's the natural way.

       For some of us there is also the awareness of the ancient Beltane rites, the celebration of the planting season, which lasted for days, where all the people engaged in wild and passionate lovemaking to evoke the regeneration of the soul after a winter of forgetfulness. To remember again. To know one another again for what we are. This consciousness was never meant to be anti-thetical to the consciousness of loving a spouse and raising children. We saw it. We knew it. The door was open. We didn't want to close it again simply because the people of our era on earth consider such sacred lovemaking celebration sinful. The people of Salem danced nude in the forests together in great circles and made love. The Puritans burned them for it. The descendants of those Puritans today haven't really changed much. And neither have we, the eternal ones, who gather and dance together and love together in the forests.

        But there is a disease called Aids now. In the late sixties and early seventies there was no such thing as the Aids virus. When we did LSD or magic mushrooms we often met some new highly conscious person and shared sexual love with them. This was not a bad thing to us. We knew it was like an ancient ceremony, ancient fertility rites, something the human race shared millenniums ago in the spring when crops were planted, a festivity that opened the heart of  the human race to freedom and beauty. So, freelove seemed to be a wonderful thing to us, and we loved to share our love whenever we felt the mutual attraction. Which was quite often back then.

       So that is where our other foot was: in a totally different place, in a different world, so to speak – in a place where we could -- and should – share magical sweet sexual love with a new friend if Providence brought us together.

       Many problems came our way, for those of us who tried to love one spouse with all out hearts, and also share love with other people we met along our paths.

        There's ancient Hindu religions that practice the fertility rite religion. There is a whole city in India where every temple is covered with tantric carvings.

        So it is possible in our time for a spiritual person to have one foot planted solidly in Christian family love and the other foot in sacred passion.

        And if you feel this way about it,.the only kind of person who is really really going to understand you is going to be another person like yourself. Fortunately among us there are many.

 

***

 

        I love Ellie and more than anything, I want her to be happy. We have been together now for going on three decades. I do not consider it "cheating" on Ellie, if I make love with another woman on occasion. It rarely occurs anyway. I go years without being with another woman. Then I meet someone, and in a flash, I have a passionate experience, --and afterwards, I always rush home to Ellie. Ellie is the best. She has my heart forever. She has always known me and how I am. So it doesn't phase her normally like it would the average housewife who would quickly get a divorce if their husband did such a thing. Sometimes though I have hurt Ellie's feelings or made her feel inadequate. I hurt then too. Because I love her so much. I would rather not have a sacred tantric experience with another woman if it meant I would hurt Ellie. Which is why it happens so rarely with me. But when it does happen, it is pretty nice. Like a rare feast.

        I should also add that I am fortunate that Ellie does not have the same drive I have towards such experiences. I mean, she does not want to be with any one else. Marriages usually fall to pieces when the intense personalities of various men, striving in different directions, afflict themselves upon a woman with husband and children. It is like a tornado hitting a house. The shoe that fits the husband does not always fit the wife, and vice versa. Some things don't work both ways. Marriages just explode usually when people try to enable total sexual freedom in their home. This is the voice of experience talking. So if your marriage matters to you, try to keep within the boundaries and worry a lot whether you are hurting your spouse with what you do. My marriage is a sacred commitment between myself and the God/Goddess of the Universe. I have no  right to hurt Ellie. So I am careful. And, as I said, I am only very rarely with anyone else, sexually. And even then, it is of short duration, and never with any person who Ellie does not accept as a friend. That is my standards.

        One thing I have learned is not to try and explain all this to the average snippety person who is just trying to argue their Christian philosophy with me. I am not writing this for their benefit. I am writing this for the benefit of people who may be my peers in understanding these rites of passion. It's sort of like doing the fire walk across the whitehot stones. Dancing naked in the forests with friends and making love with wild abandon is not for everyone.

        Strangely enough, most of the participants of Rainbow Gatherings do not get naked, nor do they make love with wild abandon with every sexually charged person who comes up to them. Stranger yet, most of them are much closer to the Christian persuasions of their immediate ancestors than they are to any sacred fertility ceremonies of seven thousand years ago, despite what they would have you believe. A great many simply wish they could be that free, but they can't. And whenever they have tried, they got burned. So they just dance and beat on drums and frolic in the rain and sun.

 

***

 

        Me, myself, I was thinking that if a sexual avatar goddess presented herself I was going to enjoy a small festival of love and smile widely the remainder of the gathering. Ellie had taken to sleeping in the tent which we’d set up in the trees behind the Bike Bus. She was having a great time and I often didn't see her all day long. So I had the luxuries of my pad pretty much to myself. I had my expensive Sansui stereo system and my well-stocked kitchen complete with a propane refrigerator that made ice cubes and I had my soft, warm bed and I had my twelve volt color tv and twelve volt VCR and plenty of tapes I’d taken with my camcorder over the years... So the potentials were marvelous.

      But such high hopes are often just wasted energy, even at Rainbow Gatherings. Beautiful nude Rainbow sisters were everywhere and some even strutted their stuff before my camera lenses but I didn't meet anyone who sparked the magic fires.

       Then I met Amanda. She was a mellow young New York woman, a bartender! She was quite used to dealing with men, but liquored-up men make lousy masseuses. She loved getting massaged but from what she told me it had been quite some time since she’d had one that amounted to anything. One thing I do very well is massage. And I’m not a tee-totaller but I drink very little. I like my senses awake.

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       Amanda lay upon my bed and soon was purring beneath my hands; so nude, so beautiful. She was very pretty in an ancient sort of way I thought. Her large breasts were like lakes. I could compress them and reform them into other shapes. I could hide my face in them. Her lips were warm and soft and anxious -- and she kissed wonderfully. Man, I haven’t kissed like that in years.

       We didn’t make love the first day. We just cherished our friendship and tenderly lay together the whole hot summer afternoon, conversing, whispering, touching. The next day she came to my bed again and we were hot. We came together wet and sticky and sweet. When I was about to pull out she stopped me; she said she was on the pill so I didn’t have to worry.  So I filled her with the fountain of life and we melted into the bed, a tangle of kisses and orgasms.

       I needed that.

       She needed that too...

 

***

 

       Weeks passed. The end of the gathering was drawing nigh. I was sitting around John’s Coffee Kichen when I noticed the most pixilated little vixen I have ever laid eyes upon. Her name was Theena and she was thin, like less than a hundred pounds, and twenty-one years old, and very wild. She laughed at everyone, bopped around like a kitten on grass: a fitting image. She stripped in bars in Portland Oregon and she loved her art. She made eyes at men and got them so hot they all were soon tongue-tied and starry-eyed and she loved it. She bubbled over with sexy inuendos and her body language spelled out one thing: she was one super-horny little chic... And she was on her own, no boyfriend. She was a walking, talking clitoris. She smelled like an orgasm in progress. She danced and danced and laughed and laughed and we all stood around looking at our bare feet and watching her out of the corner of our eyes, our hearts soaring. She was so beautiful. Athena. Aphrodite...

       I don’t know how I ever got so lucky. I’m such a scraggly hippy... Maybe she found that sort of thing attractive. It’s possible. But she was hanging on me almost from the first moment we met. The Bike Bus parked beside John’s Coffee Kitchen impressed her and got her talking excitedly with me. She wanted to see the inside. Great. Because I just really happened to want to see the inside of her.

       Boing.

       She mewed like a kitten. She wanted a massage. We rushed aboard the bus. She threw off her clothes and laid on her stomach as I massaged her from the top of her head to her toes and her finger tips. She was all whews and wows. She turned over and looked at me passionately.

       She moved with me like leaves on the wind. I thought she was going to fly around the room. She arched like a bucking bronco and clawed my back and afterwards she giggled a lot. We slept together hot and sticky all night long, waking up several times to shake the bus again, and in the morning too... She awoke me by sitting on me. She said she wanted to show me something. She straddled me slightly sideways.

       “Do you feel that?” she asked.

       I assured her I did. I looked up at her. She was like a tall sunflower dancing in the wind and sun.

       I asked her where she learned to do that? She answered that she wasn’t sure... She asked me if I liked it? I told her I sure did. She smiled and from there on the morning just got better and better and better.  And better.

      We didn’t leave the Bike Bus all day. When anyone came to the door to ask me about anything I got rid of them fast and returned to the bed. We fixed something to eat on the stove and ate hungrily. I made her a tan bikini and videoed her a little. I wanted to remember her face, her voice, her laugh.      

      The next day she wore her new bikini all over Bus Village. She was all over me like a kitten on a ball of yarn. She found a fox stole that I’d bought in the Goodwill to cut up and use to make foxy bikinis. She arranged it on her shoulders and wore it with the bikini. The stole had a fox head and all four feet. She played like it was a living little animal on her shoulders and she slunk around Bus Village making it bite people. During a recent excursion into town I’d picked up a bottle of Licorice Schnapps and some twelve ounce bottles of Mountain Dew. I poured Schnapps into the Mountain Dew and created a masterpiece concoction. As we wandered around Bus Village Theena offered sips to everyone. I carried my camcorder and videoed reactions.

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        Then we returned to the bus and made love again. She told me no one had ever made love to her like me.

 

***

 

        I had a lot of practice back in the old hippy free love days. The kids nowadays don’t have opportunities like we had. Free love is not what it used to be, if it exists at all, especially with the AIDS epidemic going beserk on the planet. Sex happens infrequently for them and they don’t react instantly to their passions like we were so fond of doing. We made love spontaneously: in the nearest bushes, in clothes closets, in sleeping bags under porches, on windy mountain tops, in icy cold mountain streams, in the back of pick-up trucks going sixty miles an hour down back roads, on altars in churches by candlelight in the middle of the night...

        Ah! The sixties! We did not hold back our passions. We did not love blindly or blandly. We were not confused about our purpose. We were not unsure of our love. We loved with total abandon or we didn’t want to do it at all. We tried to give as much if not more than we received. We cared for each other’s pleasure. Giving love was an even greater sacrament than receiving love. We thanked each other afterwards. We were kind to each other before and after. We didn’t play games with hearts; we made things simple -- we communicated. We believed these human elements were as fundamental as the stars and the sea and we believed we were reclaiming our rights to know each other so perfectly. We believed those rights had been ripped-off from us by society’s apathetic systemic desensitizing and devaluing of human spirit. The human race had been stripped of feelings, stripped of the ability to love -- in order to propagate greed and power... With the ancient doors of our souls unlocked we had awoken and were using love to break free from those ancient chains -- and we were reclaiming our hearts powerfully, deliberately, and beautifully.

       Sometimes we didn’t even know the name of the person with whom we were loving and it didn’t matter to us a bit -- because we knew the person was eternal golden spacedust just as we were and names were just more words that separate the experience of being One with the Creation into stereotypical differences; differences that establish insideous walls between us; walls that make us numb to each other and dumb to ourselves. That useless world was dying all around us and we were being born anew; our love-making was our sacrament; We were giving birth to each other.

       Names, words: arbitrary labyrinths, quagmires of self-deception. We weren’t coming together in starlight and thunder to practice mere words on each other, not the words of dead slaves, nor their names, and certainly not their hypocracies, their guilt, their delusions. We were the angels of liberation arriving poor and meek and glorious and we were coming together to smash the walls of lies that stood between us -- to plunge the sword of love deep into the pretentious apathy of miserable civilizations. As those corroded carcasses toppled an entirely new dimension of reality was manifesting in the eternal garden of their ruins; an ancient eternal realm was reemerging amidst human consciousness, and we were the children of the Garden Universe, and making love was our great commission and our finest art and our deepest warmest dream. We were giving Love to the sea of Love. We were melting into the stars.

       When the kids today come of age they think drugs and sex are just party toys. They bang around frivilously and get confused. They don’t have what we had.

       Our generation was unique: a human being walked upon the moon and our culture sent its sons to kill short yellow-skinned human beings. And our weapon of choice was a helicopter that dropped a honey-thick gasoline upon thatched jungle huts that burned fiercely and the stuff could not be scraped off a child’s skin by the mother’s frantic hands and so the child burned and died and the mother’s hands burned off at the wrists; all before her eyes and before the eyes of God. We heard her screams ten thousand miles away in America and we prayed for wisdom and power to help her and to heal that insanity which our government called sanity. And God/Goddess opened the door and gave us wisdom and power. And the name of the wisdom was liberation and the name of the power was love. And our passion was an audacious thing to the world and we rocked the world.

       Twenty years had passed since Godspirit made us rise in that righteous cause, and the new generation of the 1990s has no similar experience from which to draw. But to become free of ageist stereotypes is a welcome liberation. And I have become aware that many brothers and sisters of my generation have lovers half their age. Personally I think that if young people are wise enough and passionate enough to make love with partners without thought as to differences in age they are likely to share some of the magic of our experience, and that could possilby be a wonderful thing for them.

 

***

 

        One night Theena told me she was going to cook me supper. I laid upon the bed like a limp dishrag. I was too totally worn out to move. I sank in and out of sleep while she cooked. She found a double can of chow-mein, which she had never in her young life cooked before, and she didn’t read the directions. She didn’t even drain the noodles. While I slept she located my stash of McNaughton whisky and added half of the quart bottle to the chow-mein. When I awoke she told me she was preparing me the wildest chow-mein I had ever tasted. As she spoke she poured a little more whisky into the sauce. I told her all she had done was boiled away all that good alcohol. She still believed it would taste stupendous and she dished me up a big plate full. I tried to eat it -- but it was revolting.

       Still, I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed for creating that culinary mess. Actually it was pretty funny: as a lover she was vitally exciting and her youthful beauty was both elegant and cute but when it came to being a woman in the kitchen she had no expertise.

       Her feelings were hurt though because I laughed and made some caustic remarks I thought were appropriate to adding half a quart of whisky to a can of chow mein. What I should have done was: I should have told her I liked the chow-mein and that her idea was simply wonderful. But I was too laid-back for such stratagy. Theena's feelings were hurt.

       She told me she would be soon be leaving with some guys in a VW bug for parts unknown. Later that afternoon, after she left, the world seemed somewhat duller for awhile... I’ll sure be remembering Theena for a long time to cum.

 

***

 

       After the seventh of July the gravel road swarmed with Rainbows packing out and going home. I walked along the road with my camcorder to collect their feelings. They were elated but tired. By the twelfth the exodus of exiting Rainbows was really thinning out the site. Most of the kitchens were gone. Where 20,000 brothers and sisters had once made music together less than a thousand remained.

       Those that weren’t packing out were engaged in clean-up. The world tends to perceive hippies as being dirty and irresponsible. But Rainbow Gatherings occur on National Forest land and they’ve been going on every July since 1972 without complaints from the Forest Service -- because it’s a matter of public record that we always leave a site cleaner than it was when we arrived. Our clean-up crews pick up every bit of litter that exists -- including all the stuff that careless hunters left over past decades.

       The debris is gathered together for recycling. Teams spend days sorting through every garbage bag separating glass and plastic and metal and burning the paper. The huge collecting area looks like a landfill in itself -- but by the time they are finished it too is gone.

       The entire area is rejuvinated. The eighty kitchens spread over five miles of forest show no lasting sign of human habitation. Crews rake and replant grasses and trees. The forest will swiftly reclaim the site.

      As I prepared the Bike Bus to leave I was approached by a tall Indian-looking sister. I had noticed her before. Her beauty was very noticeable. A child with Japanese features toddled beside her.

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    She asked me if I wanted another canoe. She had brought her cedar canoe to the gathering and now she didn’t have room to carry it back. I traded her my classical Rosewood guitar and put the canoe on top of the BikeBus beside my other one.

        Steps asked me if he could have a ride to Oregon. There was enough room in the bus, but I knew that other Rainbows had refused him and I knew why. If Steps got near liquor he got crazy. No one needed that kind of energy along on a cross-country journey. But I liked Steps. I said he could come but no booze. He agreed.

        So we packed up and pulled out. I felt pretty good. I had many rolls of film to develop and I had nearly four hours of video tape. Those memories would last me for years. The exotic month long party was over. I hugged Ellie close and thanked her for always being there for me, for tolerating me and loving me. It was really nice to get back to basics and just be ourselves.

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