MOST Newsletters Table of Contents
iii

Autumn 1996 Volume IV #2

-------------- "Meanwhile, Back On The Ranch" --------------

-------- Table of Contents --------


Photo of the new pond
More from Lou's e-mail files
Sandi Stein - The Cycle Completes
Don & Sandra King
Lou on 'Career Structure for Avatars'
Stephen Fowler
Pam Read Hanna Morningstar, New Mexico
Miscellaneous Notes

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The new pond 7/28/96


The new pond created by the back driveway by Carlin Davis and Lion of Morningstar.
(Click on thumbnail for full picture)

Here are a few more items from Lou's e-mail to Ramon over the past few years:
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Lou, Feb '95: Glub, gurgle, gurgle. We're still afloat. Tuck and family including Lion came through Camp Fowler today (I wasn't here) on the way to San Francisco. They've evacuated their Guerneville place for the nonce. They are expecting a 42-foot crest on the Russian River tonight. That exceeds the record set in '86...
A lovely fir tree 90 feet tall lay down last night at Morningstar partially blocking my driveway. But Steve brought the trusty chain saw down and cut me out. Rain notwithstanding, I had two of my piano students showed up today. That's two out of five. Not too great, but shows some dedication...
I've started clearing away wild blackberry brambles at Morningstar. This may be one of the very first times in my life I've ever done what could be called agricultural labor. It has already affected my dreams. I seem to have an archetypal village in my DNA. Village life style makes up a large segment of whatever "Golden Age" vestiges are to be found -- or are stored -- in the DNA. It's part of the Jungian archetypal furniture. I am getting tired of this rain...
One of the kids who attended the birthday bash at Tuck's last night said the cops came in and stopped it. I asked if it was because the music was too loud. No, it was something else "Ya hadda been there."...
I went to Nancy Collins' 40th birthday party. She insisted everyone come in formal wear. I thought it was another goofy idea, but, really everyone looked beautiful, and a good time was had by all...
Thanks for the crash. I'm back home after five days in Berkeley rehearsing with the Limeliters -- mainly reassigning the instrumental fills that John David used to play to either Rick or Alex. The act sounds like it did during the mini-heyday.
It's been a weird five days. The night of the first rehearsal, I came back to Morningstar to sleep. During the night, two 100-ft Douglas Fir trees (20" in diameter at the base) fell across the Dupont Road driveway. Like God was telling me "Don't go to rehearsal." Anyway my neighbor, Dan, father of Jonathan, my youngest piano student, came over with a chain saw and cut away enough tree to let me out.
After the third rehearsal (Saturday), I was driving back to Morningstar and stopped at Dolly's in El Cerrito to pick up some family photos. While there, I decided to change sparkplugs in her carport, having bought a new set in Berkeley. When I got the new plugs in, I fired up, and the intake valve on the first cylinder quit working. So I stayed at Dolly's Saturday and Sunday nights until I could get the car fixed Monday morning. My adventures make compelling reading, n'est-ce pas? You don't love a car for what it does for you, you love a car for what you do for it. Some cars do everything and some need everything done. Mine falls under the first rubric.
I got back to Morningstar last night feeling down, but felt much better upon arising today and got a good practice session in. It's been raining all day today. and I'm suffering from sunlight deprivation. The folks here at Camp Fowler were without electricity from Wednesday night 'til Sunday night...
Lou, May '95: Back from Ithaca. It was delightful watching Bill graduate. My first day in NYC -- last Thursday -- I was driving a car in Manhattan for the first time in ages. I parked the car twice, once when I visited my friends the Raskins and then in the evening when I went to a concert at Alice Tully Auditorium. Parking fees came to $36. It's great to be back in the Redwood forest.
Lou to Ramon: Findley Hanna, Pam's husband, came by with his first wife Cathy this morning. We had coffee at the Union Hotel, took the Morningstar Ranch tour, then drove out to Bodega for fish and chips. They are simpatico people...
June 10 -- I just mailed off my first "opinion" in the forensic musicology bag. It wasn't really a "legal opinion" since there was no infringement involved nor any cross purposes really, it was just a difference of opinion as to whether the master record improved or emasculated the demo record of a tune.
It seemed to me to be a typical example of a misguided attempt in the recording studio to "upgrade" the material of the demo. Much cleaner sound, characteristic of the "desert of perfection" created by "A players" on multi-track. I told them to go with the demo. Apparently that was exactly what the guy that hired me wanted to hear...
I finished George Fowler's book, Dance of A Fallen Monk. I liked it. And I like him because he's a happy guy. I love all happy people. Unhappy people are usually very boring. George started out from a firm posture of self-loathing, imagined personal inadequacy with little or no self-confidence. He must have spent at least half his life in a hot tub of guilt and fear. I was never there. I have never felt like a sinner. Because Mommy and Dad loved me, I have always known I'm okay and you're okay. So a lot of the inner journey achievements that George recalls and recounts so well I have never had to work toward. God is a feeling. That's what he says and I couldn't agree more. Whether meditation or microgrammage helps you get that feeling or whether it is all accident or divine grace, I wouldn't know.
Lou to Ramon (somewhere around Xmas '95): I just heard last night that Cable Car John broke his collar bone for the third time, avoiding a deer on 101 near Ukiah. Years ago there was a hockey goalie named "Ching" Johnson. His picture appeared on quarter cards with a list of his injuries, and an impressive list it was, too. Only Cable Car comes within hailing distance of Ching's physical damage.
Ramon to Lou: Cable Car did indeed manage to damage the bod, and Jeanie as well, but remarkably little when you view the photo of the totalled car. They rolled it more than once. Of course the deer walked away snickering...
I've been faithfully scanning Wheeler Ranch photos and have about 300 on optical disk now, about two-thirds of the way through the project. It's tedious and nostalgic at the same time, sort of an odd combination. One of the contact sheets had some shots from what must have been the last big raid. By dint of enlargement and heightening contrast and various other goodies, I got a poor photo of a cop with shotgun holding -- well not holding -- but standing guard over a black hippie man. A few others also are in that sequence, none of which I ever saw as prints.
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The Cycle Completes by Sandi Stein
I, who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me. For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe. From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return. Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold--all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals. Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And you who seek to know Me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire. Have a nice circle.
-- A friend
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What is buried emerges... What is unearthed is stunning, the one we were seeking... is ourselves. We are flesh. We breathe... We speak. The time of our silence is over. We do not deny our voices.
-- Susan Griffin
We need to do much more than confront patriarchal thinking in its own terms and by its own rules. We also need to think in ways that deliberately break the rules, ways that deny to patriarchy the right to set a standard for feminist thinking. Why should we, in our resistance to patriarchy and our attempt to create something different from it, continue to echo some of its most fundamental presuppositions (that there is one truth, one reality, the good, etc.)? One of the most subversive things feminists can do is to think anarchically and then to speak and act from this thinking. Anarchic, unruled, thinking is atheoretical thinking; that is, it is thinking that does not work from, posit, or yield objective distance, suprahistorical truth, hierarchical orderings, or a unitary reality. It is thinking that has renounced the claim to a binding doctrine.
-- Heidegger, 1971
Accepting no one ultimate referent on which such a doctrine could be based. Thus it is open to a multiplicity of meanings interpretations, styles, and possibilities. In some ways the difference between theoretical thinking and anarchic thinking is analogous to the difference between monotheism and polytheism. Theoretical thinking and monotheism both tend toward the one. Monotheism, obviously, is oriented toward one god; historically, many monotheistic religions have also been very concerned with oneness in doctrine, with arriving at doctrine that can be taken to be the only true or correct one. One lord, one faith, one baptism. This sort of focus creates an in-group and an out-group, whether we like it or not. The out-group is all those whose truth or reality or values are different from those posited in the theory. As M. Adler has pointed out, polytheism has room to include a monotheistic perspective--though the reverse is not the case. A belief in many gods, or in many possibilities of sacred manifestation, can allow for an individual's preference for any one or more of those manifestations.
-- M. Adler
Likewise anarchic thinking does not abandon or exclude or negate the insights achieved by theoretical thinking, but rather demotes the theory to a situational analysis, useful and accurate within limits clearly demarcated in each case. Other, very different analyses, based on other women's situations and experiences, are not ruled out.
-- Women, Knowledge and Reality (1989)
The new space... has a kind of invisibility to those who have not entered it.
Mary Daly -- Beyond God the Father
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Don & Sandra King: Dear Louie [Lion - ed], Thank you for your welcome message. I have never been worried about how much God loves me, though I am glad that you recognize the fact of His great love for me. My concern and doubts have always been in the area of how much I love Him. I appreciate your being 'kind and gentle` with me; it is a manifestation of the fruits of the spirit of love. However, you need be only truthful in your communications with me. If I ever feel hurt behind it, I'll check your truth to see who's talking. Then, Mexican style; hurt me once, shame on you; hurt me twice, shame on me. To those not IN the truth, the Truth itself can often-times appear to be anything but kind and gentle...
The primary goal in this space of life is to become free. So long as you have ANY stumbling block before you, you are not free. Only the Truth can set you free. Men can only rob you of your liberty of movement. Religions are all secular arms of the State, and they all have their legitimate place. There is no freedom in the law. So long as there is a law, there will be an enforcer. Religions were designed by God to protect the innocent ignorant and to point to the direction of freedom. They (Religions) are a place where He wants you to go through. Only the Truth will break you through the space-barrier of the law, and that is begun by following the truth until you have fulfilled the law completely...
...You are right about the phase of "Morningstar" that you are relating to; it is over. If you are interested, I can guide you to the day, if not the hour, that it ended. But the Morning Star I have related to from the beginning will go on forever. Yes, Time is real. God seeks those who worship Him in Truth and in Spirit. "I AM the truth AND the life," saith the Lord. "No one cometh unto the Father except by me." Hang in, Louie. Love, in Christ,
MOST STAFF: Sincere condolences and much love to Don & Sandy King and their family, who lost beloved daughter Morning Star last year.
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Lou on 'Career Structure for Avatars': Avatars appear when they are needed... The people who knew Father before he "went public" had difficulty in recognizing the new persona. Chiranjiva alienated lots of old friends in West Bengal who could not believe he was what he said he was. Avatars need listeners -- people who enjoy and do not interrupt the revelations. The Morningstar Tribe is hardly the place to look for listeners. Super-rappers, yes, listeners, few and far-between...
An avatar inevitably creates a myth, some kind of new cast of characters for a new staging of the Messianic Myth. Acceptance of the myth makes you feel important. I've been there -- still am, if the truth be known. I still think I lived next door to the King of India in exile from 1976 to 1981. "WAKE UP MY SELF-OBLIVIOUS GODS AND GODDESSES!"
That call is what convinced me to hang out with Chiranjiva as much as possible. The road to supermanhood took five years from the time you first realized that Father was what he said he was, and began receiving the supraphysical communication. So there are a lotta people who have been popped up into an higher octave in the evolution of human consciousness. I was appointed King of the Semites (both Jews and Arabs) during an acid trip walking down through the Kaupo Gap from the crater of Mount Haleakala. Only a king can adequately display the world's boredom with their tedious five-and-one-half-thousand-year-long family hassle over the same real estate and perhaps get them to realize its essential pointlessness. However I abdicated the next day because the gig was bringing me down.
Anyone who sincerely longs for peace cannot neglect the fact that violence is great entertainment, especially for members of the death-worshipping warrior caste. When General Stonewall Jackson was told that an enlisted man he had been using as a courier had been killed, he said, "That's commendable." I watched Lenny Bruce die fighting to preserve freedom of speech. He put up a great fight and I am proud of him. It's just not for me. If you wanna go that way, be my guest. The most recent death worshippers, Jim Jones and David Koresh, believed they were fighting oppression. Maybe they were, but they were only extended reruns to me.
Heroin is the drug of choice for death-worshipers. I hate the stuff. I believe lasting progress in the evolution of human consciousness takes the water course way -- the Tao. Everything simultaneously is and is not. Nor do I worry about "religious power trips" -- they no longer work. It's not going to lower any child's IQ to recite the Lord's Prayer once a day, but watching hour upon hour of "Kid Ninja" movies will definitely do brain damage. I recite the Lord's Prayer frequently and it makes me feel real good. So does the 'Hail Mary, 'the Gayatri, the Maha Mantra (Hare Krishna), the 'Shema Y'isroel,' 'Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo' and a couple other mantras.
Father had no "No-No's" except for one that I can remember. He said "no" to the use of nuclear fuel to generate electricity, but I'm willing to bet he's changed his mind by now. In other words, I'm looking for practical omnipotence and conscious blissfulnes, or what Tim Leary calls "a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium."
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MOST: Stephen Fowler has been a magnificent friend, brother, hang-out buddy to Lou, board member of Friends of Morningstar, caretaker of the ranch and Keeper of the Faith lo all these many years. Currently he is collecting buckets of good soil from all over the nation to use in planting a peace garden at the Jefferson Pier in Washington, D.C. Bravo, Stephen! Here is something that he wrote last year:
Steve Fowler: One day I woke up discontented, in pain. It was Monday. I found a shit-flecked egg in the hen house and ate it with some half-desiccated mushrooms and stale bread. While I ate, I read Buckminster Fuller on the subject of how metals cartels had stirred up the Second World War to increase the demand for copper. My hip ached, so I popped a pain pill. It was a sunny October day, but I wanted to paint it black.
I went out back to my office, thinking to put in a couple of hours of desk work, hating the idea at the same time. There, on top of the bills, was a "MOST Newsletter". I felt the urge to read it fighting with the drill sergeant inside me who wanted to get busy and suffer. The urge to read won, so I stepped outside into the sunshine, leaned against the tailgate of the Chevvy so that the sun could bathe my sore hip, and started reading Vol. III, No. 1. Beekeeper John's requiem for a suicide, Pam Read Hanna's wry, horrific story of naked, pregnant midnight arrest -- these fitted my mood like a glove. But then came Dick Boak's two stories of hippie misadventure, and I found myself laughing until the tears ran down my aching cheeks. A blessing! There was so much healing in that laughter that my hip stopped hurting (or maybe the pain pill kicked in). It brought back memories of many similar quixotic capers in my own life.
With an opened heart, I read Chris Soderberg's account of what it was like to hit open land after six years in the nut house, and now I was really feeling good! I remembered the last time I had seen Chris, dressed in orange prisoners' overalls, like, say, a Viking astronaut, standing in a Sonoma County courtroom. He made a long statement to the judge, which held that worthy jurist speechless for some five minutes as his mind no doubt grasped for some metaphorical rope to pull itself out of the quicksand of Chris' lightning fast B.S. -- until, finally, he had the wits to bang his gavel and order that Chris be sent to Atascadero. Somehow I thought I would never see Chris again, but he walked into my house one recent morning with Cable Car John Nelson.
Anyway, now I was sitting there with Bucky, Dick, Pam and Chris simmering in my head like a rich stew, and it brought me right up to the point of wanting to write something about Morningstar myself.
In the mid-sixties, I was involved in something in Berkeley called "Open Theater" with Ben and Rain Jacopetti (now Roland and Alexandra), and they spent part of one summer at some property in Sonoma County, with a guy named Gottlieb, a filmmaker I knew named Bruce Baillie, and some other folks, taking group acid trips and seeing visions that -- well, you just had to have BEEN there. A couple of years later, Rene and I and our two little girls moved to Sebastopol from San Francisco. One day we were shopping at the old Co-op store on Guerneville Road when we saw a notice on the bulletin board that Michael and Joan Smith were looking for sympathetic folks to set up a play group/school for youngsters. We met with them at their house on Dupont Road. Along with a few other couples (I remember Tron and Michelle Hickman and maybe Jack and Diane Frost). We walked down a pleasant, tree-shaded lane to a piece of land called "Morningstar," where we sat talking about children on a sunny hillside above a barn and saw, as far as I can remember, not another soul.
Well, the "Playgroup" turned into "The Farm Home School," Rene and I bought the Smith's house on Dupont Road, and I finally realized where the Jacopetti's had spent that summer. And the guy named Gottlieb has been living with me for the last couple of years.
Although I have been a friend of Morningstar for 27 years, I never really became a participant. My stable middle-class background and the influence of my Scotch-Irish mother (now 90 and always a formidably respectable woman) kept my Bohemian impulses in check, I suppose. I have had to content myself with dancing slightly outside the circle of the inspired, the God-intoxicated, the ecstatic -- or the merely desperate -- people who populated Morningstar. However, even while circumstances and perhaps character, have prevented me from living as a communard, I have always resonated to the Morningstar wake-up bell. 'Yes' to voluntary simplicity, 'yes' to open land, 'yes' to homegrown religion, and 'yes' to all those voyagers who landed on that little island in time. I want to share a few of my memories. Please forgive me if I get some of it wrong -- my memory plays tricks -- but, don't forgive me if I get sentimental.
I remember the Graton Road parking lot full of tourists, RV's, microbuses and all manner of wheeled hippie homes; people tramping up and down the road, past a huge wooden cross. This was about the time of the TIME article, I think. I remember some young folks, mostly women, bringing a saffron-robed Buddhist monk to our house one late summer afternoon. "Did we have any vegetables to feed him?" they asked. So we boiled brown rice (Rene was working at "The Granary" down in Cotati about that time, so we probably had a 100 lb. bag), and I went out in the twilight to scour my very perfunctory vegetable garden. Luckily, there were a few new potatoes and an odd carrot or two and maybe some kohlrabi, so we passed our trial as hosts. No one smoked or drank alcohol around this rather severe man that evening, which struck me as very untypical of the Morningstarians.
How different an experience it was when, years later, Lou and Rena and Joanie (I don't remember who else) brought Chiranjiva, Lou's guru from India, to have breakfast one morning. This very brown man with a very white beard and merry, melting eyes filled the house with electricity. Joanie introduced me as "Plant Man", which was my professional name at that time, and Chiranjiva said something like, "Oh, you are my brother," and came around the table to hug me. I burst into tears. This man said "No" to nothing. He liked eggs and bacon, yes, thank you; he liked Coca-Cola and red wine and potatoes and marijuana and music and Rene and the children and the weather. Then, after breakfast, we all became quiet and went over to the fireplace, I suppose because it was the closest thing to a shrine in the house, and Chiranjiva said some words. Then he left, and I never saw him again in the flesh. I remember many people coming by over the years to use our shower. I remember once, in particular, Rena came down the driveway looking glum and asked for a shower. She said matter-of-factly that she had been raped walking up from Occidental. We all knew the guy, but I've forgotten who it was. I remember, too, that once a very tiny newborn baby was brought to the house from Morningstar. Its mother was too strung-out to take care of it. I had to leave for work, but when I came home the women had found someone to adopt the baby. As I recall, it was just done without papers or any fol-de-rol.
Everything bottomed out about 1970-71. That was a very wet winter when Ramon, Joanie and their new little baby, Sol Ray, and Katie-the-Dog lived with us. Katie had pups by our dog Sammy and some of them died of distemper. Sol Ray got pneumonia. I had no work. Morningstar was increasingly becoming unlivable. Finally, everyone was driven off the property in the name of property rights. The land began to eat its garbage. It became a post-modern time-warp international park.
Friends of Morningstar tried to stay on top of the orchard pruning and so on, but anarchists are not good at that sort of thing. Goals were vague at best. Once Lou even asked me to study the property with an eye toward preparing some plan for its use. I do that sort of thing for a living, so I agreed. I paced off the place and noted the various features: the knoll where the big house used to be, now covered with escaped garden plants, like hypericum, periwinkle and acacia; the concrete slabs marking the location of the ill-fated bath houses, where sturdy madrone trees now pushed through the concrete; Lou's bulldozed studio near the well standing at the head of the old garden area where the chicken houses had once stood and where now coyote bush, wild persimmon and brambles exploited the fertile soil; the ferny swale where the creek had once been dammed for a pond; the rutted impassable road; the redwood grove and the cottonwood grove; the orchard and the once teeming parking lot; the big creek at the bottom where I lingered for a while, attracted by the cool, smooth boulders, the alder roots covered with moss and the ever-refreshing sound of running water; the oak-dotted meadow where the old barn had once stood, still with a little magic clinging to it -- the place where we had met to discuss starting a school back in 1967.
Never before had I had the experience of being completely stumped by a piece of land; many improvements occurred to me, but I considered them without conviction. Should money be spent to restore an orchard that could never repay the cost? Should the road be regraded and culverted so that traffic could flow to... where? Should volunteers be marshaled so that the land could be made ready for some form of economic activity? Whose? Why?
Increasingly, I got the feeling that the land needed only to rest. In panic, I threw the I Ching with my friend and then-business-partner, Alan Kincaid (who knows the changes by heart). We threw a formal cycle of changes, one for each direction, season, etc. The oracle was quite clear: the best thing to do was nothing. Nothing furthered. The intention to give the land to the Divine had succeeded in the sense that the usual exploitative strategies had been deemed unsuitable. Nowadays, Lou has a little "Agricultural Equipment Storage Shed" on the property, albeit the tools of his trade take the form of two pianos. The garbage has been mostly eaten by the land or picked up. Neighbors look in and watch for abuses, like dirt bikes. WE are the Rangers for God's Park.
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The Change by Sandi Stein
Once in the middle of the cycle of things, Mother Goddess asked a handful of fledgling male deities to take care of a small portion of her universe for a moment while she created some new galaxies. The youngsters were eager to prove they were trustworthy and promised to take good care of their charge while she was gone.
Now these young Gods didn't have much experience at watching over things and before long they began to forget their promise and fight amongst themselves over who was the biggest and best of all. They invented strange games to compete with one another like linearizing time; creating bizarre rituals and rules that others had to follow, and of course their all time favorite game: who could get the most people to pray to him and him alone.
Because these foolish Gods paid more attention to their games and arguments than the Goddess's instructions, things became very bad and out-of-balance in their corner of the universe. Everything within reach became poisoned, and a lot of people, animals and other life forms died .
The male deities didn't notice how badly things were going because they were having the biggest and longest debate of all about who of them was the Holiest with the one true answer. It seemed they kept having to have this argument aeon after aeon because of a mistake they were completely blind to; no matter how they tried they could never seem to get past the idea of having "power over" someone or something. No amount of arguing, reasoning, rationalizing, hypothesizing or configuring did the least bit of good because not one of the young male deities could figure out any other way to do things besides making someone or something greater by making someone or something else less. Because they were so boggled by this idea -- and they used it all the time -- everything they tried eventually failed, and even good ideas and plans sooner or later turned bad and fell apart .
One unfortunate planet called Earth ended up right in the middle of this long-winded argument, and after a few millennium of all those deities experimenting in "power over," the inhabitants of Earth were in big trouble. In fact, things on Earth were so shaky that the goddess herself had to make a special trip back just to save the planet and its solar system from her wayward sentinels.
She got back just in time to do some very fast and complicated magic and get things back in balance again. The time of this work came to be known as the "Change," and it was a dangerous, tumultuous and unstable period for the most part, especially for anyone who happened to be on or close to the earth. But even though it was dangerous, every now and then pockets of time would come into being full of benevolent magic where the most wondrous things could and would happen. This is a tale from one of those times. Translated From The Chronicles of Mother Gravity's Grandchildren
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Morningstar New Mexico
by Pam Read Hanna
That clarion call from Cindy (mentioned in an earlier MOST issue) didn't take long to propel us to New Mexico. We went with a man named Abe who had been staying at Morningstar and was on his way East in his elderly car. He dropped us off in Ancones -- the town where the Morningstar contingent had landed after they had to leave the crazy Penitente town of Truchas -- a part of the true Wild West. Ancones was another strange little burg, a ghost town actually, in Tia Amarilla County, near La Madera. There were some well-kept houses and a Morada there (a church with the dead buried within it). The Morada was so well kept, in fact, that I said why didn't we just move into that? "Not if you still want to be alive in the morning," I was told. The localistas in the nearby towns were also relativos and they kept a close watch on Ancones.
We had ridden through expanses of canyon land under blue-white skies and landed at this one house that the local Spanish people allowed us to live in. The rest were either locked and/or boarded up or in total adobe ruin with no roofs. Indian summer stretched before us. I doubt if there is any place on earth where Indian summers are more beautiful than in Northern New Mexico.
That first day, David Pratt met us with some medicine -- Peyote. We asked where Cindy was and were told she was at the rock plateau up the road from us. So we got into somebody's truck and rocked along very old dirt and rock roads up to a place of piñon pines and cedar where there were immense igneous rock boulders and craggy piñones reaching up through the white and blue of clouds and sky with great rolling countryside below. We hadn't been able to see for so many miles since the last time we'd been to Bodega Bay.
Cindy was sitting on one of the boulders -- wearing -- clothes! A long skirt anyway -- no top -- and her signature beads & feathers. She was fabulously zonked on Peyote and floating through the archetypes before our very eyes. What a trip she was -- crone old and wildflower young -- healing woman and Coyote's daughter. There was her wild Irish ancestry and a Winnebago medicine woman. Her dark hair was even whiter around the edges than before and she smelled of woodsmoke. Wonderful! We were all ready to chew some medicine and Siddhartha was interested in everything from bottom to top, but we had to get settled first. Cindy came down through the realms long enough to tell us we could camp in Charlie's tent for the night. I don't know where Charlie was.
We ate Peyote and saw twilight images of Indians and ancient graffiti. Larry and I had had Peyote at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, but this was different somehow. More in-your-face real. Attached to earth and melded with sky. Throughout that night, a drumbeat was right at the edge of my eyelids.
We went back to the big house the next day but only stayed for a short time. This part about the house in Ancones is hazy -- I remember frying a lot of potatoes and people continually going on beer and ice cream runs. As soon as somebody would get some money, there would be beer and ice cream. The rest of the time, we lived on bean and potatoes and chiles.
As usual, Larry and I started to crave more solitude, so we actually moved out to one of the adobe ruins, set up a little tarp inside and had a cook fire in one of the old corner. Near us lived a young couple in one of the intact houses. They were the only ones among us who had been permitted to live in one of these houses, no doubt because the beautiful young woman was pregnant. Her bridegroom was long-haired (black ringlets -- matter of fact, they both reminded me of characters from "Fiddler on the Roof," but I can't remember either of their names.
The girl walked over to our camp one morning. Word had gotten out that I'd had both my babies outside a hospital, so maybe I knew something about it. Her water had broken and she was only eight months along. I didn't have any lobelia (which can stop a labor), so there was nothing I could do except keep her quiet with legs elevated. She started bleeding toward sundown and was bundled up and taken to the hospital in Española where she delivered two dead female babies (named Una and Ulna) that night. The bridegroom had wangled permission from the local powers-that-be to bury his babies himself. He went to a Spanish cemetery nearby (by a boarded-up church, not the morada) but got some grief from a local Piña or Medina until he angrily waved the paper that said he was free to bury his babies on his own land.
"Ah, but this is not your own land, Señor," he was told.
I know he did eventually bury the babies, but don't remember where.
The weather was still warm because there was so much sun during the day. The stars at night blazed brilliant and lovely. I learned to find the Pleides and then rediscovered Cassiopeia. We were throwing the I Ching a lot and I was reading the Bible -- mostly Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah and Solomon's Song. What were we going to do? I don't remember. Isn't that weird? I don't even remember what our tentative plans were -- if we had any. There was talk of land, and then of more land, there was talk of the Indians and the Spanish. The Spanish people around here were not Mexicans at all. Their ancestors came directly from Spain and some were Jews who had come here during the Inquisition -- the Sefardim. They had been forced to accept Christianity but they kept names like Rael, and Moises. And they still had their drindels and refused to eat pork.
Cindy and David told stories of living in Truchas (the town where The Milagro Beanfield War was later filmed. "Chamisaville" was Taos.) Cindy said that during Easter week, the Pachucos would come through the town firing rifles randomly from side to side into the houses. That was supposed to humble you and remind you of your mortality -- that you were granted the gift of life by God and that that life could be randomly taken away at any time. People would lie on their kitchen floors until the gunmen had passed -- sort of a 'Pachuco Passover.'
Larry and Siddhartha and Psyche and I lived on the periphery of Ancones until we got a lead on a house in another semi-ghost town -- Servilletta Plaza. There we met an old man named Enrique Jaramillo (pronounced 'hara me yo'). At the time, I thought that the most improbable sounding name I had ever heard. We needed a place to winter and a local hippie named Dennis Smith had lived there the winter before. The house was a 200-year-old adobe with walls two feet thick. Big rooms were laid out lengthwise like a railroad car. We were delighted with adobe. It's cool and pleasant in the summer and with a fire in the wood stove it is toasty warm in the winter. But these Indian summer days were long and warm and dry.
Coyote or Chris Soderberg or Ramon -- somebody -- had sent us a paper Morningstar window plaque with instructions about putting it in the window and asking a blessing on the house. We did that.
One day after we were settled in, Beatrice showed up with Andre and with Diev at the breast. Siddhartha was overjoyed to see Andre , and they trotted around together in and out of the house and down to the río -- the Tusas. In New Mexico, a río is any body of water that keeps running all year, even if it's only a trickle. The Tusas was a fairly substantial creek, and Bea got the bright idea of building a sauna beside it. Instead of bay laurel to inhale and fan ourselves with (as we had at the old Morningstar) we had sage -- just as aromatic and all-pervasive. After a couple abortive tries, we managed to get a righteous steam bath going and then went splashing out into the cold río -- very invigorating.
Bea always had to do something with her hands (as you may remember), so she found some white bones lying around (probably cow bones, possibly deer) and filed them off and strung beads and feathers on a leather cord to tie on the bone making some kind of mojo. Just as she got one all carved and tied, it fell apart. She laughed and started over again.
I don't remember how long Bea and Andre and Diev stayed, but a couple weeks after they left, Ramon and Shoshanna (Betty Schwimmer) showed up. We were delighted to see them. Life had gotten awfully quiet all of a sudden and they brought news of the old Morningstar and Lou's continuing problems with the constabulary. We explored the countryside a bit and talked a lot and ate cornbread and beans and chile and read about David and Solomon by lantern light. They only stayed for three days, I remember, because Ramon said that after three days both fish and houseguests start to stink. We didn't think so.
Morningstar people from Ancones came for Thanksgiving, but that Christmas was even more memorable for us because our little family was all alone and snowed in with no electricity -- just kerosene lanterns. We had the wood cookstove for heat and water from the Tusas down the hill. Larry cut off the top of a big piñon for our Christmas tree and we made home decorations for it, carefully attaching birthday candles, which we lit on Christmas Eve. Larry played carols on his guitar and I still had my strange brass flute and we sang and played until the kids were asleep.
Psyche was still a nursing baby, but Siddhartha was almost three years old (birthday December 30), so we had concentrated on a Christmas for him. Larry had found a horse skull for a model and made a magical hobby horse complete with yarn hair and leather reins. I wrote two books for him -- one was an ABC book that rhymed ('A' is for apple, and awkward and acre; 'B' is for baby and bubbles and baker - in that vein -- with colored pictures -- and the number book put numbers together up to ten with five, six, seven-pointed stars -- and of course, the eight-pointed morningstar. I had a lot of fun with these). Larry also made some creative blocks, different sizes and shapes, and painted them bright red and yellow (we had found little cans of paint in the back room) and we received food stamps just before Ramon and Shoshanna came, so there was turkey and other goodies. When Siddhartha's birthday came around five days later, I made candles from paraffin I (also found in the back room) for a little birthday cake.
Our contact with the localistas was somewhat whimsical. They had an exotic idea of hippies, but with Larry's full beard and long hair, and my long skirts, they knew we had to be IT. One of the good old Chicano boys came by one day and asked if he could have some of our "smoke." Larry had a can of Bugler on the table and said, "Have at it man," whereupon the guy furiously (and inexpertly) rolled several, thanked us, and bowed himself out the door. Later we learned that he thought it was marijuana. We were told that he was the butt of town jokes for a long time to come after he lit up and proudly passed around tobacco from the "hippie house."
Midwinter brought a strange happening. One night Siddhartha and Psyche and I were all asleep -- Psyche on my side so I could nurse her. Siddhartha may have been off in one of his little space capsules. (He made himself his own personal little spaces from early on). I was awakened by Larry, dressed and pacing by the window in the moonlight.
"What?" I said. "What's going on?"
He sat down and rolled a cigarette. He had just seen a deep green light -- like a green lantern -- and then he'd heard footsteps in the next room -- the middle room. In winter we lived in the room closest to the river because the wood cookstove was there and that provided our heat. It was enough. We stayed up and watched and listened, but saw no green light and heard no footsteps. We would have forgotten the whole incident if not for a visit from Señor Jaramillo around February or so during a warm dry spell. He very politely asked us if he could show his friend the middle room. He was speaking Spanish, but I made out the word, "pisadas -- footsteps", and asked him about it. He told us that when he was a boy and lived in the house, they used to hear footsteps in the middle room. The house is 300 years old.
I delivered my first baby when we were living in Servilleta Plaza. Some friends in El Rito had asked me to be there when the baby was born, so since we didn't have a car, our whole family went to El Rito just before Dorothy's due date. When the baby's head came out, his cord was wrapped around his neck three times. I just rotated him quickly and danced him out of his noose. He was fine and squalling from the very first breath. I've been privileged to attend 43 births since that one, and never saw a cord wrapped so tightly since. They named him 'Wizard' and we made up songs about him the next day and the next. They renamed him Ishmael or Isaac or something, but for the first year or so of his life, he was Wizard Wylie.
When spring finally started to come in April, I was looking forward to summer in the ancient house, but Larry had other ideas. He had a wild hair about making it in the Pecos wilderness and would not be dissuaded. So we packed up our gear and our kids and Dennis Smith drove us to a likely and beautiful spot beside the bubbling tributary of the Pecos River. We set up our tent, dug a trench around it and cooked our rice and beans. That was on April 30th.
As long as I live on this earth, I will never forget the morning of May Day, 1968. When we emerged, staggering a little, from the tent, snow covered the ground as far as the eye could see. There we were way the hell off from any visible sign of civilization -- but it was too far out and beautiful to be scary.
Of course the snow melted by nightfall -- most of it -- and we set up an outdoor fireplace and cooked our rice and put beans to soak and explored the río. New green was everywhere -- the río water cold and bubbling and clear. Siddhartha was all over it in a heartbeat and Larry took him in his backpack to scope out the land round about. We were in a flowered meadow with cows. Always the cows. Ranchers took as big a bite of the government grass as the land would allow -- sometimes a little more. I remember one sunny day when a ranger drove up the meadow in his white truck, parked it a few hundred yards from our camp, and came to us with politeness and non-harm in his walk. (Come to think of it, it's hard to put out hostile/aggressive vibes while skirting cow pucky.) The ranger smiled at the little boy dancing around his father, then spotted Psyche sitting in the tent. The tent flap was open on a crate of our books with a hooka pipe on top of it.
The ranger rubbed his face. "Did you -- ah -- pack in?" he wanted to know.
Psyche was a year old now and still thriving on breast milk, but she had been eating rice cream increasingly since Ancones. (Rice cream: roasted brown rice ground up to cornmeal consistency.) We didn't bring our grinder with us to the Pecos, so I used a flat stone for a metate and a heavy chunky one for a grinder. It worked.
I tried planting some radishes and mustard greens and peas by the little río, but only the mustard greens amounted to anything.
As the summer wore on and the río diminished and the cows (and estiercol de vacas) multiplied, Larry began to get restless for unknown country. He thought we should move on to the main river -- the Pecos.
We couldn't take all our stuff, so we stashed books and clothes and other non-essentials under a tarp with some brush over it and started up. The shortest distance to the Pecos according to Larry's topographical map was over the mountain away from the little río. We had enough food left for two or three days, and by that time it would be July and Larry could hitch into town from our new camp for food stamps and supplies.
We started early with Psyche, water, and food in my back pack and with Larry unbelievably loaded down with tent, bedrolls, and tools. Siddhartha walked uncomplaining all the way. He knew it was an adventure and he loved it. It took most of the day to climb the mountain -- not a steep one as mountains go -- but steep enough. I will also never forget the moment we got to what we supposed was the top and laid down our gear. Trees surrounded us on all sides and there was no indication that I could see that we were on a ridge or a summit or what. All three of us carried canteens and all three were alarmingly low by now -- like maybe a swallow apiece. Not enough to get my milk up to nurse and Psyche was beginning to fret and fuss. It was when Larry took out map and compass and muttered something about "triangulating our position" that I got semi-hysterical. The sun was beginning to set, for god's sake! We had an hour -- tops! I frantically devoured some dandelion greens growing on the non-path. What added to the general desperation was that Larry was obviously worried. We didn't look at each other. We both knew that we mustn't communicate fear to the kids.
So we started out -- and down. I fervently prayed that our direction was not a random choice. We trudged down in silence as the sun was sinking -- sinking -- our progress slow.
Suddenly Larry stopped, finger up. "Hear that?"
"What?" I whined.
"Water. I do believe that's water."
Smiles all around. Then whoops. Larry started singing, "All day I faced the barren waste without a taste of water, coooool water. Water!" We were almost sliding now and Siddhartha delightedly took up the chant, "Water, water!" "Old Dan and I, with throat burned dry, you'll hear our cry -- for water. WATER!"
Now it was unmistakable -- the blessed rushing, burbling, crashing sound of the río! We made it to the Pecos river bank just as the sun was setting goldy-red and we set up our tent by moonlight. I can't think of another incident in my whole life so far that was that much of a cliff hanger. We all slept like stones that night with the río rumble for a lullaby. (Now, years later, Larry claims it was nothing -- piece a cake. He wasn't worried a bit he says.)
The Pecos is a beautiful river. We found a camp upstream the next day. It was in a little woodland meadow across the river where there were no cows. To get to it, we had to cross a huge log. I remember edging gingerly across it at first, but Siddhartha just walked across, erect and chirping happily as though he were on the boardwalk in Atlantic City! He's still like that by the way -- rock climbing, rafting, caving. I just wonder if he's like that because of his childhood or whether it's in his DNA or something.
Anyway, we stayed there for a couple months, I think. When Larry went to town again for food stamps, he ran into his brother Fred who'd been looking for him. I'm a little hazy on this part, but the story as Larry remembers it was that he had put a note on a tree as we were climbing the mountain that said, "Going Higher," and Lou and Fred found the note and followed us. He brought Lou to visit us in our little Arcadia. Lou brought some "sacrament" too and we smoked it while he told us about the new Morningstar. David and Penny and Jeffrey and Laura and Byron and Charlie and Jane and Al and Barbara and Reggie were building an adobe pueblo for a new commune and all hands were needed. A man named Michael Duncan had allowed Morningstar to build on his 400-some acres.
"This little Shangri-la is fine, dear hearts. Divine, in fact," said Lou between inhalations. "But don't you want to be where the action is? It would be good for the kids, too. Why don't you come to Morningstar?" [Next issue: Morningstar Pueblo]
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Joe Dolce has composed a piece for chorus and orchestra titled "Joan on Fire." It has been performed by the Melbourne (Australia) Chamber Orchestra. He calls it an oratorio-song cycle. Way to go, Joe!
NOTICE: I am looking for a relative, William 'Buck' Henry, M Star '67. Also known as 'Billy Buck' and plain 'Buck.' Please e-mail me at HQAN27A@prodigy.com if you know his whereabouts, or contact the MOST newsletter staff.
NOTICE: The following names had their last newsletters come back for various reasons. If anyone has current addresses for them, please let us know! Larry Reed, Ann & Joe Cregg, Dick Boak, Bobby Cherry, Richard Downing, Donna Waldner, Sunshine Semm, Cliff Langlois, Joanne Ray, Louise Douville, Heather Granahan Linslet, Leslie Lorenzo, Jim Kimmel, Karyn O'Hearn, Anne Metcalf, Gay Chapman, Sophie Lancaster, Margy Robbins.
MOST: So, Dear Hearts, here's wishing you all the best. As the sign said at Lou's Celebration at Morning Star, "May All Roads Lead You Home!" Future Projects
(If y'all can help fatten up the bank account! Please do send some $ along if you can.)
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A Second Edition of The Morning Star Scrapbook, on better paper and with more photos and more information!
The Wheeler/Ahimsa Ranch Photo Album -- let's get this one really happening! We just need $ and energy!
Home Free Home, a history of Morning Star and Wheeler/Ahimsa ranches, told through many viewpoints and voices. A first edition that will hopefully continue to be added to! In the words of the Mighty Avengers' totem woodpecker, "Badaba!"
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