Peaceful souls

 If you ever lie in a summer valley looking up towards the heavens and find yourself lost in the stars or make a paper boat and set it free with the current, then you've known peace.

If you've camped in the forests or mountains and smelled campfires burning and music playing to a beat of its own, then you've known joy.

If you grew your hair, wore tie-dyed shirts, cut off jeans, smoked a little weed, and dropped some purple haze or brown barrel, you've experienced the joy of finding places in your mind you never knew existed.

We were a generation of exploration, with the freedom to do as we pleased and the desire to let the system know we had a voice that would be heard. We gathered by the thousands to absorb the music others saw as the devil's work, but to us, it was a part of who we would become, and we welcomed it with a loudness that shook the ground beneath our bare feet.

Love was shared, and casual sex was another part of our culture. Babies were born and loved riding shotgun in vans painted with flowers and incense billowing out of the windows. We were gypsies who always got a funny look from people who looked down at us as being a bunch of freaks hell-bent on destroying the comfortable life they lived, pretending to have all the answers, and all the while jealous of our happiness.

We condoned war and saw it as an action of the war machines who answered disagreements with missiles and bombs, killing women and children for reasons only the old war dogs knew. Some refused to go and escaped to Canada to live in peace and our way of life.

But only a few continued living in the forests or traveling the countryside, finding refuge among the cedar trees and lush valleys we fell in love with as our children grew.

Eventually, the groups began to disband and go their separate ways, some choosing to live among those who hated us while others held on to their beliefs and traveled to what we called relocations to small towns, where we opened bakery shops and record stores. We wore our tie-dye shirts and had long hair. We burned a joint when we wanted to and turned once boring towns into tourist traps and income sources. Decades later, the towns remain a part of our culture we loved so much with our kids, sometimes keeping our chosen life alive and following in our footsteps.

As for this old writer, I will always have that period of my life to remember what I fell in love with. I burn incense and have long hair, and when I need a reminder, I put on a tie-dyed shirt, roll a fat one, spin Zeplin on the record player, and send a paper boat down the river of my youth.

Mike 2025