Back to the Sixties: COVID and the Flower Child

                                      

No bra, hairy legs and pits, same tie-dyed T-shirt and gypsy skirt for days.  The guitar on my lap, writing poetry in a spiral-bound notebook with a green-barreled pen with a plastic daisy at the top.  This was me in the early seventies (which is when The Sixties fully, so to speak, flowered). This is me, now.

The Sixties were a time of rebellion—against capitalist over-consumption, bureaucrazies, gender restrictions, prudish sexuality.  Birth control pills and the Baby Boom, Marches for Civil Rights and against the Viet Nam War, Women’s Liberation, Black Power, Flower Power, Equal Rights, Earth Day, Give Peace a Chance. While Woodstock rocked the music scene, the Hong Kong Flu killed a million people worldwide, a hundred thousand in the United States.  Only the faces change. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are marching, still; still protesting to save our planet.

With COVID sending us to our rooms, we have time and the need to review, again, all that the Sixties brought to consciousness.  Technology might have revolutionized our lives, but we are still all, as we used to sing, children of the universe.  Nature has reasserted itself.  As Chip and Joanna would call it, it’s “demo day.”

In the five months since we’ve been sheltering in place with only online deliveries for resources and strictly necessary health care visits, I have reclaimed many of the Hippie habits that sustained and comforted me back then.

I wear comfortable tee-shirts that function equally for yoga, gardening, sleeping, and hanging-out.  Speaking of which, I no longer sling myself up with bras.  Remember bra burnings? Those underwires, padding, pointy cups, and straps are meant to push our breasts up and out as sexual come-ons, like the trays cigarette girls used to carry.  Tight bras are one of the most pervasive causes of breast cancer—read Dressed to Kill.

I’m letting down my hair—head to toes.  For the first time in my life, I notice how much longer my knee hair is than the rest of my legs.  Is this too gross?  A reminder that we are, after all, creatures, like the animals, of nature.  I’ll focus another post on hair during sanctuary. Oh, and let’s admit it, much fewer showers.

And for fresh greens, I grow alfalfa sprouts and those very crazy mung beans that grow so fast that they push off the lid of the sprouting tray.  I ferment our own yogurt, and distribute them into portions in reusable glass ball jars.  We have a tray of microgreens growing by the kitchen window, and the fall crop of kale seedlings sprouting under a grow bulb.  For fresh salad, we have a hydroponic garden inside.

Yoga, meditation, drumming.  Bare feet. Bare face. Ravi Shankar on the turntable. Who knows?  Shall I tie-dye some sheets.  How about melting all the beeswax candle stubs I’ve been saving to make sand candles?

Old and New Hippies, how are you accessing your Inner Flower Child these days?

Works Cited:

Grismaijer, Soma, and Sydney Ross Singer.  Dressed to Kill. Garden City: Square One, 2017.