| Taking Woodstock
A new movie by Ang Lee (Brokeback
Mountain)
Last summer I went to Golden Gate
Park in San Francisco for the 40th reunion of The Summer of Love.
It was quite a day.
People were dressed like Jimmy Hendricks and many of
the bands that played in the park in '68 came back to play again. The smell of
marijuana was heavy. You could get high by just taking a deep breath. It was a
peaceful crowd estimated at 100,000.
I don't usually like big crowds but
I was really curious about what happened at The Summer of Love in 1968, I was a
22-year old widow and a new mother at that time. I couldn't travel to the Haight
in San Francisco to become a flower child. My summer of love happened in 1970
when I went back to college after Howard's death and met my first hippie
boyfriend.
Drugs were easy to find. I never took acid. I couldn't imagine
being that out of control.
I expanded my consciousness the old-fashioned
way - with Encounter Groups at Esalen in Big Sur and years of personal growth
courses and seminars.
Twenty years later, at age 45, my
life fell apart and I began my spiritual development.
I'm grateful I've had the time, money, and courage to do all the personal growth and spiritual work that I've done. I wouldn't be alive today if I hadn't done the 12-Step work. I would not have written my story, Grief Denied A Vietnam Widow's Story if I wasn't trying to save my life.
Each of us awakens in our own time
and in our own way. Some of us use mind-expanding drugs, other with use
adversity as a wake-up call.
Anything can serve as a wake up call, a
divorce, a life-threatening illness, the untimely loss of a loved one, or the
loss of a career we thought we'd have forever. It's all grist for the mill.
There's no right or wrong way to grow.
Some of us don't change. Marion
Woodman said in one of her books, "If there is no suffering or heartache in your
life, there's little need to do anything but remain complacent." She said it
much more eloquently than I have.
When I go back to Illinois and visit
with my siblings, I see how very different their lives have been than mine. They
are all married to their original spouse, They stayed in the same career and the
same state where they were born. They have retired with a pension.
I
admit sometimes I envy their security. Maybe sometimes they envy the adventure
that my life has been. Who knows?
I'll be one of the first people at
the ticket counter when "Taking Woodstock" comes out. I want to see what I
missed, and I loved Ang Lee's movie, Brokeback
Mountain.
| 
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Homelessness
Planting Yourself in Fertile
Ground
