The general store on Lasqueti Island. Lasqueti Island is a small island in the Straight of Georgia there were no people living there until the 60's when draft dodging hippies from the US settled there. Cheers and happy weekend!
Very easy to make fun of the externals if you weren't there. But for us was not about any of that stuff but we were just trying to live the best life we could in the only ways we knew how.
Yea, There was a lot of poser and wannabees back then too (of course without the word we could not call them wannabees then)
This post was edited by JakobA the unAmerican. at May 6, 2018 6:52 PM MDT
Once a year at Stonehenge Druids Historic Stone site on 1st of June 1985 ....until that is the uk police decided that they didn't want them there ....A thousand police in full body armour baton charged the harmless passive hippies...Young heavily pregnant girls and girls carrying new born babies were viciously clubbed clubbed around their heads and trampled on by out wonderful brave cowardly hero Police force.....
Its called The battle of the Beanfield , June 1st 1985.....To this day not one police officer has got any prison sentence ...... A public Review of the police was promised ,but nothing never happened....it never will until all that participated in this unawarented evil cowardly act are dead and buried .....
My dads cameraman friend friend was there and witnessed it all first hand.... You can watch it all ...just type in the date and The battle of the bean field....
The hippy movement used to be a blend of many different movements, with most of the people congregating via music and lifestyles. The movement contained blend of spiritual, health, green, and hedonistic elements.
The spiritual included an incredible range of approaches; Born Again, Anthroposophy and other versions of Christianity; a wide range of Vsaishnavite, Shivaite, and Rigvedic revivalist forms of Hinduism, and Hindu variants such as the esoteric Upanishads or Westernised interpretations like Theosophy; variants on Sufism from Moderate Islam to extreme alternatives like Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; variants on Buddhism including Thai, Burmese or Vietnamese Vippassana, Tibetan, Zen, Pureland, and Westernised adaptations into psychology; variants on pantheism - rivivals of Egyptian, Greek, Druidic, Nordic, and indigenous systems of belief and ritual; and New Age Westernised personal development groups. Taoism also attracted many followers. Some were mixtures of any or all of these. Alongside these beliefs, all kinds of other thought systems also proliferated, such as astrology, numerology, Tarot, I Ching, and alchemy. Atheist hippies usually embraced psychology and personal development, sometimes Theravadin Buddhist practice, or all of these.
Health movements included a bonanza of variations on diet. Wholefoods, organic and slow foods were almost mandatory. Vegetarianism was popular, and veganism also attracted many adherents. Alongside these, Macrobiotics, Ayurvedic cooking and many other movements flourished. Naturopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, and massage became popular, along with Reiki, faith healing, and homeopathy, and crystal, color and aroma "therapies." Conventional medicine and vaccinations were rarely used. Physical exercise embraced hatha yoga (now with hundreds of variations in style), martial arts, dance in multi-cultural classical and folk styles, cycling, canoeing, wilderness hiking and camping, and even "natural" horsemanship.
The Green movement included the Rainbow Warrior, Friends of the Earth, animal hospitals and sanctuaries, the Wilderness Society, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the formation of Greens parties around the world, people like David Suzuki travelling and lecturing on the science of global warming, and Rachel Carson alerting us to DDT and the lethal and other effects of pollution. People began to buy their own farms, or buy into shared intentional communities where they built their own solar passive and active houses with lower carbon-footprint materials and unusual and way-out designs. They turned to growing their own organic (pesticide and chemical free) foods, making their own furniture and clothing, cleaning by hand with simple substitutes and no commercial chemicals, reusing old items, and recycling. They used fewer cars, and more walking, cycling, car-pooling and public transport. The co-ops adopted consensus self-government, methods of listening, communication and conflict resolution developed by psychologists at the Esalen Institute. They developed internal alternative economies based on LETS and barter. They also left the banks and turned to Credit Unions. Most of them are still doing all of these. If you live in a hippie community, it seems like your whole world. The "straights" out there seem far away. And yet in some pockets around the world, some countries and some big businesses are starting to go green, because not to do so is far too expensive.
For those hippies who were hedonists or experimenters, recreational and/or hallucinogenic drugs were a big deal. Personality determined the way the drugs took effect. A few became life-long grass lovers. Many grew bored with their experiments and gave up all or most drugs. A small percentage graduated to addictions to hard drugs; the ones who survived ten years usually gave it up and became conventional. For the 1% of them who had a genetic predisposition to schizoid or schizophrenic conditions, hallucinogens triggered paranoia and psychotic breakdowns.
Hippies also practiced all the stages of life in alternative ways. Despite the feminist movement, which included a subculture among hippie women, sexism was rife. The Pill made the "sexual revolution" possible, but in reality, sexism and use and abuse of women were still rife. Most of the young men had no knowledge of women's physiological and neurological sexual functioning and didn't care as long as they got their own way. Most of them had no clue how the women felt, although the women talked about it among themselves endlessly. Sex was often based on Tantra or Taoism and most of the teachings favored men's needs over women's. Most of the older religions required that the women obey. In court cases around the world, all but three Hare Krishna communes around the world were found guilty of child abuse and rape; the children were taken from there mothers and housed and schooled in creches by men. Across almost all faiths, gurus and spiritual leaders abused their positions of power with gullible young female devotees. While hippies in traditional religions married and had children while young, may others never married, often had children, and often moved through a series of monogamous relationships. Some experimented with poly-amoury. Relationship dysfunction was common in almost all relationships, irrespective of beliefs. Hippy women favored natural home births, water births, and lotus births. They used only cloth nappies. They breastfed until their children reached two to five years old. Children usually slept in the same bed or room with the mother until the child asked for a room of his or her own. The Continuum Concept was the most popular model of parenting (except in traditionally religious communities.) Hippies do everything differently. Nowadays they do their own coffin-making workshops and are developing senior cohousing, Buddhism in palliative care, dying-by-choice, and alternatives for burials and funerals. Hippies have also traditionally placed a very high value on arts, crafts, music, and ethnic designs. Almost all embraced at least one of these as a hobby. Many earned their livelihoods via creativity or teaching any of the above.
Maybe 10-155 of hippies were only following a fashion or going through phases of rebellion; they returned to mainstream society.
Over the years, hippies drew together like-to-like, so that the strands of the movements separated into different streams. Some found themselves incompatible with others, e.g., feminists and Hare Krishnas loathed one another. Many hippies still live the lifestyle with profound commitment, but only a small percentage show this via their outward appearances. The tendency has become to "blend in" or camouflage with the mainstream. Nowadays a "straight" person may dress hip but have not a single notion of what it means to be a hippie. When it comes to hippie, the only certainty is that you can no longer tell the book by the cover.
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at May 7, 2018 1:18 PM MDT
Art Lover 