Category: hippies

Be Here Now

Karen

A couple weeks ago I ended up at a tiny online store (to find a shirt I wanted) and clicked around a little before I left. In their “Books” section was Be Here Now by Ram Dass and the illustrations they sampled were astonishing.

I dug a little to find out more. You can read the whole thing online; I haven’t (yet) but I was just taken with the art.  Was that type hand lettered? Rubber stamped?! Turns out it was rubber stamped–I found this article about the making of the book on Fonts In Use:

Ram Daas explained the production process in a 1970 lecture at the Menninger Foundation that was later published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology:

They start with these four-foot pieces of cardboard and this book is 108 pages and each day they meditate from five to eight in the morning – there’s a group of five of them – and then all in silence … they hand rubber-stamp each page, all the letters of the page, and then the artists do all the sketching around the thing. Then the whole thing is photo-reduced and shipped to Japan where it’s printed on rice paper and hand stitched because it’s an experiential-type document.

As the Fonts In Use article says, “The book is a feat of non-mechanical text arrangement” and pretty amazing to dip in to–both for medium and for message (for this hippie, at least).

(That “Surfing” one made it up to my office wall.)

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. Have a happy Halloween/Samhain over the weekend. Remember, the gore and the death and the partying come right from the Celts and the old agrarian way of life, when the weather was cold enough to freeze the meat of any animals slaughtered, the world was dying for the winter, and the harvest was in and it was time to celebrate.

2. The beginning of November also marks the halfway point between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. Just six more weeks of darkness–get your hippie on and mark the occasion.

3. I am going to rock the weekend like this panda:

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Equinox

Karen

The fall equinox is tonight at about 2:00 a.m., a few days later this year from the Earth wobbling on her axis. Here’s your heads up if you want to learn about the science or see what neo-pagan ritual to plan for it.  As a wanna-be Druid myself, I like this quote about it:

[It] marks the middle of harvest, it is a time of equal day and equal night, and for the moment nature is in balance. It is a time to reap what you have sown, of giving thanks for the harvest and the bounty the Earth provides. For finishing up old projects and plans and planting the seeds for new enterprises or a change in lifestyle.

Also, remember that fall can be hard on people so go easy on yourself this month and next. As a yoga teacher said once, “Our bodies still think we’re cavemen. The weather and the seasons affect us, as civilized as we think we are.”

 

Wednesday Poem

Karen
This was on The Writer’s Almanac earlier this week and if they had prayers like this in schools, I would be a lot less concerned about future generations. (Alternate titles that would also be good: “Hippie Prayer” and “Vegan’s Oath.”)

School Prayer

by Diane Ackerman

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

 

(All joking aside, “healer of misery” is pretty powerful. Who wouldn’t want to be that?)

The Messages That Reach Us

Karen

Since the yoga studio I like closed last year, I’ve been (kinda sorta) practicing with the Yoga Download site at home, which means I’m on their email list.

This past week I’ve felt anywhere from indecisive to stuck to thwarted on a lot of things–bathroom remodel plans, what new car to get and when, what my life is going to look like in 2, 5, or 10 years. So when I got the Yoga Download weekly email that started like this, it was pretty perfect:

All too often in yoga and in life, we become attached to our desired outcome…We become so focused on the end goal, that we lose our presence in the process. Instead, transformation becomes a mental concept; yet another thing that we overthink or project into the future, yet another item on a never-ending list of to-dos.

What if instead, we were to simply be present, trust the process, and detach from outcome? It may be deceptively simple, but putting this little mantra into action can be profoundly helpful. It allows us to notice the subtle fruits of our labor that may otherwise go unrecognized. Along the way, we may see that sometimes, it’s one step forward and two steps back, but that’s okay because we trust that we are on a general upward trend.

Sure, you could say that it’s no surprise I got a hippie thought in a yoga email. But I got it when I needed to see it most. There are messages for us everywhere, even in marketing emails.

Equinox Information

Karen

1. It’s the Vernal Equinox today, with a perigee (“super”) new moon and a solar eclipse over northern Europe. (Pretty sure that if we were in an adventure movie, we’d have 14 hours to find the key to the ancient treasure before the eclipse passed.)

2.The hippies are saying the astronomical goings on indicate power shifts, transformation, and resets–which, really, I’m all for. It’s spring; it’s time to come out of our chrysalis, hatch, and leaf out. And mix metaphors.

 

DIY Tuesdays: How To Hippie

Karen

About a year ago I finally caved to my inner hippie and stopped using traditional deodorant/perspirant, because: chemicals! They are bad, right? (Actually, my skin was pretty irritated.) I traded commercial chemical-laden stuff with commercial stuff from Whole Foods, which had fewer irritating ingredients–and was about 1000% less effective. I tried brand after brand and they all made me feel like this after about an hour:

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On a whim last week, I decided to try making a recipe for DIY deodorant I had seen on Pinterest and dismissed as a step too far into hippie-dom. But holy cow, is it effective. It beats all the Whole Foods brands, is about as effective as traditional stuff,  AND I had all the ingredients on hand (I subbed cornstarch for arrowroot powder), so it cost zero dollars. Hippie DIY win.

Today’s Thought

Karen

It’s been a while since we’ve had a hippie thought, so here’s something good to keep in mind from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo:

“In order to be whole, suspend your criticism. For life is not a matter of taste, but of awakening; not a matter of finding things pleasing or disturbing, but of finding things completing; not a matter of liking or disliking, but of opening the geography of one’s soul.”

 

Happy Solstice

Karen

Sunday is the Winter Solstice in this hemisphere–the shortest day and longest night of the year. This last week I’ve just wanted to hibernate, so I’m going to use this hippie thought to justfiy it:

The Holiday of the Winter Solstice celebrates the presence of Spirit and the power of faith and hope that our visions of the future will come into manifestation…Winter Soltice is not about having the light. It is about carrying hope and moving toward a vision that we will work to make a reality.

We must wait in the darkness of Midwinter, and this is not easy for most of us who are not comfortable with the dark, silence, resting and dreaming. Under the ground the earth silently sleeps. Seeds rest in suspended animation, and the animals hibernate. In contrast, we humans rush frantically to the malls, stressing ourselves with activity when we really need to rest, dream and gather strength in our bodies for the coming season of renewal.