Perhaps the Most Beautiful Ideal in Human History.
I can’t find the video now, but YouTuber Parkrose Permaculture recently mentioned visiting a historic hippie commune and expressed how transformative the experience was.
You bet it was. The Counterculture was perhaps the most beautiful ideal, vision, and dream ever conceived by humanity. When John Lennon’s song Imagine can bring the audience of a VFW post to tears — and it did — you get an idea of just how powerfully a truly beautiful idea can seize your soul and never let go.
I cannot even look at photos of Woodstock without being sent into a week-long, wistful yearning to see such beauty again someday. It is that beautiful.
I can testify firsthand, because I was radically transformed by the same wondrous vision nearly twenty years later. It caused me to face my “mid-life crisis” at 28 years of age.
It completely revolutionized, dare I say replaced my entire value system. And I never went back.
What lit the fuse in my soul
Upon stumbling across the movie Atoll Life in Kiribati on PBS in my 20s, I had to record it on my Sony Betamax. And I watched it. Again, and again. I couldn’t stop dreaming of how badly I wanted that way of life.
The simple, some would say primitive, way of life is something that I longed for even as a child: a closer-to-nature world with a more intimate community and a way of life that depended only on one’s own hands rather than requiring money as if money were a fourth basic biological need.
And then I found the Counterculture
Driven by the now inextinguishable yearning for a Kiribati life, a place much more attainable began catching my eye.
I and two coworkers who lived in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley began carpooling to work in Torrance. Every now and then, we would take Topanga Canyon rather than the stressful, crawling 405 freeway.
Each time that I passed an inconspicuous sign that read Elysium Fields, the curiosity about the nudist resort began to mount until the inevitable happened.
My first visit
When I finally entered and took their membership orientation, I realized that I had wandered into a full 1960s hippie counterculture environment. Even the music in the orientation video sent happy tears pouring down my cheeks.
My devotion to Elysium was instantaneous. I was now possessed by the unending compulsion to begin changing my way of life so that I could spend as much time there as possible.
It became me — and transformed me
Almost immediately I went from short-tempered to calm, from intense to gentle, able to inject an air of calm into almost any situation and defuse it.
In an instant, I recognized the value of time in our lives. I realized that time is irreplaceable; the timespan of our lives is finite, and lost or wasted time is gone forever. It was then that I coined my personal motto: “You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.”
A permanent part of me
The world has changed. Elysium, sadly, has been gone for 25 years, and nude recreation today is a shadow of its Counterculture heyday. The political Left since 1992 has been in a race with the political Right to see who can be the most Puritanical, and today nearly every square inch of uncovered human skin has been sexualized.
But nothing can undo the transformation of my soul and my values. Only the yearning and dissatisfaction resulting from American culture’s drift further and further from that idea has returned.
Today my purpose in life is 1) to prevent and resist further erosion of our culture’s valuation of freedom of choice, and 2) by so doing, preserve and enhance the possibility that a renaissance of the Counterculture’s love of freedom and tension-free intimacy and self-expression can return someday.
I have a feeling in my soul that I may see that someday arrive, in the years that I have left. Our soil is fertile.