What the Hell is wrong with the Hippies?
some thoughts about the community I've loved and been a part of for almost twenty years...
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker
- Leonard Cohen, You Want it Darker
CW: genocide, murder of innocent babies, domestic violence, misogyny
Dear Reader-
I’ve started and stopping writing about hippies more times than I can count now. From my brief stint in Northern California, my decade in the San Juan Islands, living in a tipi and a bus and a tent, my anti-vaccine and raw milk journey to vaccinating mom and pasteurized dairy, the thousands I’ve spent on things like herbal medicine and homeopathy ahem sugar pills, healing modalities, life coaching, classes and more…. sigh….there are probably at least half a dozen posts to write on the subject.
For whatever reason though I really went off on a Facebook comment (that I share later on) that took me an hour or more to write; in I tried to weave together some of these observations I’ve been formulating and chewing on for years now about about hippies. All the while juggling a long Memorial Day weekend with no childcare and a baby who cries nearly every single time I put him down.
Here’s the back story…
An acquaintance recently posted some thoughtful shares on his Facebook wall about grappling with his personal and community responsibility on how to respond to, in particular, global horrors like the Palestinian genocide. In case you somehow missed it- where recently, Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician, while at work, had her home attacked by an Israeli air strike and 9 of her 10 children were burned to death in their own home- one was a baby only seven months old. About 70% of Israel’s military budget comes from the United States- which is paid for by our tax dollars. Thus, we are complicit in genocide. Meanwhile Trump and his cronies just presented their “Big Beautiful Bill” yes that is what they are actually fucking calling it which has one of the largest poor to wealth transfers and cuts funding for MEDICAID and SNAP while surprise surprise increasing funding for WAR. I highly recommend watching/listening to this report and analysis by historian Heather Cox Richardson.
When you type in "Palestine” to the Substack Stock image options here’s what you mostly get - image above- some flags or landscape scenes.
But when you type in "Genocide” you get images of concentration camps, mention of the Uyghurs in China or this image below which you’ll notice signs of Palestinian love via flags and the keffiyeh, so that’s something at least for these images to be here in Substack- a platform that is also just fine with platforming Nazis because “free speech.”
But now back to the hippies…..
So this guy I kinda sorta know…. he runs and organizes community gatherings and festivals. We are loosely connected to a variety of, for lack of a better term- "hippie and hippie adjacent communities” (sub in "conscious” or "spiritual” or even "new age” and that can work too). Some examples of these: the now-shuttered Orphan Wisdom School, Imagine Fest (held on Orcas Island WA now called Imagine Convergence or something like that), Global Earth Repair Summit held in Port Townsend, Okanogan Barter Faire, local things in Whatcom County like Rising Moon Festival, community grief tending, song circles, drum circles, many herbal gatherings here in the PNW, Dance Church or Ecstatic Dance, and by extension larger gatherings in other states that I would guess by a few degrees of separation we’d be connected to like Spirit Weavers Gathering in Oregon (started in California), that Spirit Man/Spirit/Sacred??? Sons or whatever the hell they call that man’s gathering, of course, Burning Man, Rabbit Stick and other primitive skills gathering, the Matriarch Rising Festival (Free Birth Society) gathering in western NC (the equivalent of Bellingham, WA/San Juans/Port Townsend region), Midwives/teachers and doula trainings like Innate Traditions with Rachelle Seliga, Whapio Bartlett’s school The Matrona and her “Quantum Birth and Wisdomkeeping” training; Yoga festivals held all around the world and related things like kirtan gatherings…. oh and let’s not forget Permaculture classes/"PDC’s” as they are known, as well as online spaces like ancestral song circles, goddess pyramid schemes, "ancestral” nutrition skills and so many more!!!
HOLY GODDESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel exhausted already just typing out all those gatherings that are mostly attended by WHITE PEOPLE!!!!
Because if there’s one thing about white hippies I do know is that we LOVE to gather in the woods together with like minded folks. Ideally in a space that is clothing optional where we can practice our EARTHING SKILLS by walking barefoot after sunning our yoni or lingam or anus and then drinking our vortex charged non-fluoridated spring water out of a non-plastic bottle, followed by a delicious meal of a raw T-bone grass fed steak that we eat while crawling around on all fours wearing. brain-tanned buck skin since sitting in chairs is soooo bad for you and b/c that’s what our "ANCESTORS trademark” WOULD HAVE DONE!!!!!! which we then livestream to our followers on Instagram with an affiliate code for 20% off our raw meat diet masterclass. We LOVE to gather together to witness and be witnessed in our inherent divinity, by entering into conscious sacred relationship (or at least until we flow out of this one six months later to greener pastures; but then we call it “conscious uncoupling”; a term made famous by Gwyneth Paltrow when she and Chris Martin of Coldplay fame, divorced. HOWEVER! This phrase "conscious uncoupling” term was first used in the book Calling in the One by Katherine Thomas Woodward, and why do I know this? b/c I held a book group in 2013/2014 about this book b/c I wanted to call in THE ONE soooooo badly!!!!!!! Spoiler- I did not call in the one- I called in an marijuana addicted alcoholic 20 years my senior b/c I was SOOO LONELY and b/c I had gaslit myself so badly and was on a tiny island where every action I did was supposed to have some bigger meaning to my life about my soul’s journey i.e. "I manifested this relationship b/c I wasn’t doing the "right” things” - not ever rooted in systemic oppression or institution like PATRIARCHY or the fact that this was a total trauma bond where he reminded me of my ex in South Carolina- another much older alcohol who once left me with finger print bruises up and down my arm, threw me down a flight of stairs and loved to show up outside my apartment and holler “You cunt you fucking cunt you cunt you fucking cunt!!! Open the door!!!! c’mon baby open the door!!!!!!” I was 22 years old. Yet already my worth was shaped by misogyny to the point that I took him back time and time again until after 14 months I stopped being able to orgasm with him and that broke the spell, as well as my friend’s Mother - Fran, who saw me- and knew something was up and told me about SisterCare- the support circle for victims of domestic violence- it took me six months of regular groups before I even considered leaving for good. Shortly after I fled for the West Coast… for a hippie man who now says Trump "isn’t so bad.”
BUT back to us THE HIPPIES!!!!!! By gathering in the woods together we affirm for one another that we are indeed living our BEST MOST SPIRITUALLY ALIGNED LIFE; we are not sure how we achieved such a state of being, but the Universe works in mysterious ways and we trust that all will come in good timing and truly it is the result of being in FLOW STATE and letting go all RESISTANCE that which does not serve us!!! BLESSED BE!!! ALL PRAISE TO GAIA!!! AHO!!!
Copied and pasted as is from my FB comment…. I’ve put it in quotes so you can distinguish it from my commentary after.
All images here are from the public domain. They are what you get when you type in "Hippy” or "Hippies,” into Substacks stock photos.
"Slightly messy ramblings here of an ADHD mom brain...
It's hard to be in a world where I can KNOW so much suffering and horror is happening and then turn back to my cozy corner of the world and feel pretty powerless and not well organized. Beyond calling and emailing and donating I am not doing much in what I call political action. I want to take place in work strikes, divestment strategies and take a play book from the very serious and strategic organizing that SNCC and MLK Jr. did and what many indigenous people around the globe have been participating in. There are ways to do this. And they sustained momentum.
Frankly after 20 some years on the west coast I do not see white "conscious" people making any headway with this. To not politicize work when you have a platform is strange to me as everything is political. It's like not caring about healthcare when you have it until it goes missing. We take for granted things like the ability to vote, publicly funded schools and roads and EMS services upon which our society functions well. I think this is why I've never been back to Imagine fest since the only one I attended in 2017 or any other other gatherings that feel adjacent to it here in the PNW or beyond in CA beyond community grief rituals. It just feels very for lack of a better word "tone deaf" to see a bunch of fairly able bodied white folks frolicking in the woods together who then don't speak up to the murders of indigenous women, the criminalization of abortion, the targeting of trans people who literally make up less than 2% of our population, the gutting of social services in favor of privatization or critiquing the billion dollar supplement industry that has not surpassed "big pharma" etc etc. to acknowledge and critique consumer capitalism that's upholding all of this would be a good start...
there's something so uneasy to me as so many adjacent to these festival/gathering worlds/overlapping PNW circles are self-employed... myself included... and that's interesting to me in how it fits under the most problematic ethos that governs dominant north American society- that of bootstrapping...except with west coast new age language of calling it "manifestation" or "spirit led" or "calling" - I do believe in soul work AND yet I am so weary of language like this b/c it is starting to cause very real effing harm.
I spoke to some of my misgivings to a FB "friend" who was in Stephen Jenkinson's school as well about articles he was sharing about RFK jr (that I read in a village minded attempt and quickly pointed out the very apparent holes and flaws in logic, rooting it back in a feminist minded ontology) and instead of hearing me -he told me I was too angry and unfriended me. I continue to be unimpressed with most white men and women associated with, for lack of a better word- new wave new age spirituality. I go to local gatherings of adjacent friends b/c I need community but I am often left continuing to feel lonely b/c political discourse and white supremacy rarely make the table at the potluck. b/c greater organizing to enact political action is not happening.... And I don't know what to do about it b/c I fear being ostracized right? I see how folks continue to charge for their yoga, charge large sums for their healing practices from non-white cultures but refuse to grapple with the inherent racism that allows them to profit off these traditions or even say donate a portion of their causes to these cultures who continue to BEAR the brunt of our country's historical and current political policies of which many of us I would guess have benefited from even if we don't know how to name that. .... and it's all shoved under a rug. To me this is plain old white fragility and it's getting really boring and tiresome. There's always some cop out. There is a lot of disdain for research and science and for intellectual life in general that really bothers me while deification of "energy" and "spirit" and the nature fallacy. Throw a stone or two of many people who attend these gatherings and you are taken to some pretty egregious wellness influencers and characters who are doing more harm than good as they seem unable to understand what systemic issues means or how things like social determinants of health afford you your life to begin with - all the while building their businesses and "best life" on the backs of brown and black people. Now there's a new line that's becoming popular- "well whiteness is made up. who were we before we were white?" as a way to erase the very true history of this country. While yes I have and continue to learn and re-connect to my own Scottish and Irish ancestry to better understand my own inherited cultural impoverishment- I see too how even the ability to study and find teachers and resources is a consequence of my unearned privileges... I took a singing class about this earlier this year that I paid a very significant amount of money too and they platformed a teacher who said some really problematic shit and when I emailed them my feedback they did the version of new age gaslighting that makes me want to kick someone's teeth in "Eleanor we have taken your feedback to heart. We ask you to sit with this, feel it in your heart and reflect on what upset you." Not- "thank you for calling us in to the very real fact that gendered violence is a true global phenomenon and to platform teachers who are spouting off dated binaries and new age word salad is not the wisest or kindest example we could set and we will make efforts to be more inclusive and thoughtful in the future."
Thus- where is the mention of the very real hippie to alt-right pipeline that folks like Derek Beres, Julian Walker and Matthew Remski have thankfully been tracking since 2020?? I met my oldest kids dad at a Peacemakers Training Institute sponsored by one of the oldest peace organizations in the US over 20 years ago- now he is a full blown Trumper and everyone in his community acts like they don't know and still supports his business and gatherings all that thrive b/c of unearned white privilege, environmental factors etc etc etc but is that ever named or grappled with or seen as then a responsibility to help others????? ... I dunno but I think that is very off- why are there no consequences to our actions? There is a lot of doubling down from what I can see. I can speak to countless other examples here and in the San Juan islands where I lived for a decade but I am not just going to throw people under. I see each of us as symptoms of bigger issues but we are all connected to these systemic issues- but when I have tried to advance or make suggestions or offer mild critique of things- all I get is push back. So then I wonder if a BIPOC person pushed back on them how even more so would they double down? ok I'll stop for now.... but I still have a whole lot more to say on this.... hhahah!
Signed- a very tired Mom of three whose next door MIL is slowly losing her mind and faculties to parkinson's and doesn't have near enough support..... and (among other things) masters level of education in anti-racist teaching who is waking up to all the inherent regressive nostalgia, misogyny, racism and monotheism I see in white hippie spaces that I thought I was escaping when i fled the DEEP SOUTH lol!!!!!!!!! thank you to anyone who made it this far.
Here’s the first comment I got back
I turned off the notifications after that one as once again I was reminded of how deep misogyny runs. Any time I’ve gone off or pushed back to these men they call me "crazy” or "too angry” aka “hysterical” which hopefully you know some of the history around the word “hysteria” and "hysterectomies.” It’s not worth it to me right now to engage.
That’s all for now.
I’ve debated hitting publish on this for a few days and pre-school pick up is looming. Feel free to email me your thoughts on hippies!!!
Thanks to Matthew Remski, Derek Beres and Julian Walker at the Conspirituality Podcast, Katya Weiss-Anderson of Love and Light Confessionals and the Instagram accounts Healing from Healing and Mallory of This is Mallory. Many many more writers and researchers have informed my thinking but those are the few that I see really diving deep into the hippie to alt-right pipeline and have helped me connect a lot of threads.