Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you’d asked me in a pub my opinion on going naked I would have probably praised it as a natural human right. But face to face with the wrinkled asses, sagging tits and swinging scrotums on display, there was altogether too much skin and hair and fat for me to look at anything else.
This seemed wrong on many levels, musical and factual. And what was this obsession with getting healed? Who said we were all sick? Everyone else seemed to just accept this drivel without question and the mindless conformity left me feeling like the only sane person in the asylum.
You had to hand it to him - he may have been delusional but at least he was ambitious with it. The spread of Christianity in the British Isles and the demise of Avalon were laid squarely on his shoulders. Little had I expected to meet in such humble settings an individual responsible for shaping the course of history!
I looked down on the transparent spirituality of the dreadhead residents, I was vaguely aware that I didn’t have anything better to offer and that, secretly, I might have liked to belong. If only the songs could be jazzed up a bit and people would start making a little more sense.
we thought we heard the sound of the collective Om before food circle and came running with food bowls but saw instead military helicopters landing in the main field to airlift the stricken to hospital.
The Rainbow always waits for you though. I got lost on the road for a few years before I ran out of places to go, chasing my own tail so hard that I fell quite to pieces. It took a painful 6 months to put myself back together again with the help of a skilled therapist and in the process I learned that my tendency to complain was mostly a projection of my own pain. My criticisms and judgements were just a way of downloading my angst as the world consistently failed to meet my expectations of it.
'Anything that you say to someone that doesn’t come from a place of love isn’t about them, it’s about you.'
But while the Rainbow won my heart, my mind still refused to join in the fun. How could I belong to a class of space cadets who believed cancer could be cured with a few hours of reiki? Or that all their problems would go away if they only smoked hashish in praise of Shiva?
A place where people gather in nature for a month, leaving behind alcohol and electronics, getting high only on a cup of tea. A place where there's no one in charge as people of all nations, ages and backgrounds come together as a Family to cook, work and celebrate in a makeshift village. A society as ephemeral as a cycle of the moon.
Despite the cries of welcome home! when they arrive, many feel distinctly unwelcome and complain of the hypocrisy they see: hippie cliques, judgemental attitudes and a lack of respect for the locals.
Judged and deprecated, the newcomer then winces when they hear all the songs about unity, family and celebration and feel that everyone’s full of shit, that the Gathering is anything but sacred. The whole thing feels like a private club for those who talk about healing the planet while doing nothing to achieve it, partying it up in nature far from the society in which they were probably unable to function in the first place.
Of course the majority of people who turn up at a Rainbow Gathering know little about the prophecies and could care even less. It's enough of a miracle that the Gatherings work at all; people from different countries and backgrounds getting along for a month in nature, cooking together, making music and new friendships, enjoying the simple pleasures of hanging out in nature. A way of life that requires no belief or adherence to any law.
'The police caught me and asked my nationality. I just held up my palm and told them 'Gaia'.' He was a world citizen of Mother Earth. What need did he have of papers? 'They put me in jail and beat me up a bit. I’m vegan so I almost couldn’t eat any of the food they gave me. After two days I showed them my Swedish driver’s license and they took me back across the border to Poland.'
'Eddie,' I asked him one day, 'who came before the Hippies?' 'Well, the Beatniks.' 'Right, Jack Kerouac and all that. And before the Beatniks?' 'Hipsters!' he told me, his eyes lighting up at recollections of the old days. 'And before Hipsters, who was there?' He paused for a moment before giving a shrug and replied: 'Black people.'
Yet it doesn't take an anthropologist to notice that the Gatherings are mostly comprised of middle class white people.
It's only when a society achieves a certain economic stability and the evils of consumerism make themselves felt that counter-cultures spring up.
why have all these white people left Paradise to come and rough it out in the sticks?
It tends to only be those who come from relatively affluent backgrounds who see the romance in living on next to nothing.
In any case I certainly subscribe to the hippie wisdom of having so much fun with so little. We may have only a few coins in our pocket, our clothes may be torn, we may have to all squeeze in the same leaky tent when it rains, but in general we have more fun that anyone else. We have more free time, we live in more beautiful places, we party almost every night and we get laid quite a lot, too.
'Because then there would be no one left to pick you up! Besides, you need them to be in the factories to make your ballpoint pens.'
This proprietary attitude towards land completely confused the indigenous peoples of the world when the white colonialists showed up. Sure, they had territorial boundaries, hunting grounds and nomadic trails that they would defend with their lives but never did they feel that the land belonged to them. They were as much part of Creation as the grass and the buffalo. Why would anyone ever need to put up a fence?
the third morning we managed to get everyone awake before the police arrived. When they climbed the hill to shake us down they found us in a circle chanting Om. After that the police starting giving people lifts into the Gathering!'
It did raise some interesting existential questions. Who the fuck did we think we were? Were we humble guests of the Ukranian people or spiritual warriors exercising our rights to assemble on a Free Planet? We maintained the right to preserve the traditions of the Rainbow but if our own brothers and sisters wanted to get wrecked maybe we didn't know our tribe as well as we thought.
I realised then that the way of the Rainbow was like water, never opposing or blocking but always going with the flow.
Alone, we're just disaffected refugees from Babylon; together we're beautiful.
They had only survived until that point by the extraordinary kindness of the locals.
