Can love be earned or is it always a gift?
Higher Thought Game question
I was having dinner with my god-nephew Dresden and telling him about some big generosity I’d recently received from my dear friend Erica. I said I wasn’t sure I felt worthy of it.
Dresden chewed his food thoughtfully and looked up and away into some inner space for several seconds. Then he looked at me and said, “Isn’t it sad how we’re conditioned by our culture to think we have to be worthy of love?”
Hippies
For over 50 years now there has been this incessant propaganda from the mass media, telling us that hippies are an anachronism, that the only “real” hippies were a phenomenon of the 1960s, and that everyone who’s ever looked or dressed or vibed “hippie-ish” since then is just some kind of throwback. But that’s insane. Hippies never left us, thank God. (And by the way, yes, I think I am one. At least I hope so.)
So what is a hippie? I was pondering that question the other day with a radiant stranger and we were both appreciating how beautiful today’s young hippies are – how wise, gentle, soft, and kind these “kids” are, and how brilliantly and authentically they embody hippie tradition, and are evolving it.
Lots of definitions are out there, but to me, the word “hippie” really just signifies a certain attitude.
For example:
I attended a little song circle in someone’s tiny house a few months ago. There were only seven of us but we were scrunched together kind of tight.
At one point, the young woman on my right handed me a little gift – a chocolate flavored chap stick. I had to peel a little piece of plastic off its tip to open it.
The scruffy young man on my left was sitting adjacent to the kitchen sink and cabinets. Holding forth the scrap of plastic in my hand, I asked him if he had any access, from where he sat, to a garbage receptacle.
He shrugged and said humbly, “Not that I know of. I have a pocket though.”
That melted my heart!
I replied, “Oh that’s all right. I have a pocket too.”
He had offered so easily, so naturally, so unselfconsciously, to take away the little bit of trash I wanted to be rid of. He didn’t even have to think about it.
It clearly didn’t occur to him to say anything like, “Sorry, dude, that’s your garbage now; deal with it,” which, I venture, would be the reflexive mainstream attitude in such a situation.
And maybe, as another friend pointed out later when I told her the story (Hi Lulu!), he was also demonstrating to me (though not deliberately) that it’s okay to temporarily house a random piece of plastic in your pocket; it wouldn’t hurt me to keep it, and he himself wasn’t “above” carrying it a little while to “share my burden” and avoid litter. It was just a little debris on the hiking trail of life.
In any case, I was blown away by how kindly and egolessly he had offered his pocket in lieu of a trash receptacle. I don’t know if he would even deem himself a “hippie” per se but I felt that was an iconic hippie moment.
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