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Something about being spiritual—detachment from worldly identity—haunted me: I’d

never felt less detached in my whole life.... What about Jim Morrison singing,

“desperately in need of a stranger’s hand?” 

“You have to save yourself,” someone preached. But even so, I didn’t have the tools

to help myself. “They’re all inside of you, just look within,” the rap had been. But

within was only pain. I wished fervently then that I could be someone’s spiritual

cause, while thinking, “The light is here.... Why isn’t that enough?” 

In July, Dale said I wasn’t serious enough, and asked me to leave and not come back

until I was ready. It sounded more condemning to “Grow Up,” anything, or me than

like that, which my parents had ever admonished. 

The flashing white light at the commune

Spiritual Boot Camp

Coffee

I had been accepted to the one college I applied to, Goddard but after the multi-

media conference there, I decided I didn’t need to go to college to get drugs sex and

rock and roll.  I returned with reticence to the commune.

I was awoken early by the sound of the cowbell.  “Meeting!” a male voice called. 

“Meeting!”   The voice was driven but controlled, like my horniness this morning. I

preferred the kiss of sunlight on my cheeks.  “Spiritual boot camp.” I noted.  Where is

my notebook?  I wanted to jot the term down in my journal.  But instead I rolled over

onto my side and saw Denise’s fat face and tight curls.  She was noisily snoring,

mouth open.  My horniness faded.

Someone militantly rapped the thin, ill-fitted, blue door.  Entered, one gaunt young

man, with the hollow look of an aesthetic or a macrobiotic.   The white of the eyes are

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very white and the iris fills the frame of the eyelids snugly, no saggy, tired lower lid or

bloodshot look of the druggie or drinker.  The Chinese call the saggy eyelids,

“sanpanku,” the look indicates a person who is dying.  I preferred the natural easy

diffused light of the early morning sun blanketing gently on my face, rather than this

maleness, this totality of something rather foreign that stood invasively in my path of

escape, sleep.  I wondered if he didn’t need to sleep. 

I pulled on my cold blue jeans, crumpled at my feet and wished I had a warm wool

sweater instead of the thin ripped Salvation Army sweatshirt.  It was cold in these

mountains in the morning, even in July.  

I creaked down the rickety stairs to stand in line again.  Coffee, where’s the coffee? 

On the counter there was a big pot of mint tea, with leaves floating in it.  A sunburned

woman with braids and overalls came in. .hands full of red clovers and raspberry

leaves in her thin veined hands.  The image of a squaw woman who spent all of her

time kneeling on the earth flashed through my mind, her knees dirty and boney but

her countenance satisfied and proud, as if she had a secret love affair with the earth.

She cleared her throat and importantly announced to people in the hallway that,

“There’s mint tea to wake you up and I’m going to make some clover if anyone has a

sore throat and some raspberry leaf if anyone has their period .  “This is good for

you,” I recalled my mother urging me to try some green vegetable. I was willing to try

globby oatmeal with some government margarine and honey from a gooey, drippy 

jar.  But where oh where was there coffee?  

I grew aggressive.  I could give up the sex, the drugs, but I could and would not the

precious powder that made my blood flow and my brain work in spite of being here,

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the powder that most importantly, took away my depression.  Wait,  I asked him, is

there any coffee?  “Coffee’s a drug.”  He said.

I queried random people for where there was any coffee.  I felt weirder than I had felt

while  panhandling in Boston, because I was a slave to my physical desires—not

cool, here.  It was also apparent that my interest this morning was only focused on

acquiring my drug.  I asked a woman if she knew where there was any coffee and

she answered briskly “You’re being carnal.”  Someone else didn’t bother to answer

me at all. I continued on my hunt. I foraged the house until I finally smelled it.  I

knocked on a door and asked a skinny woman with a baby, in a phony off-handed

way if she knew the whereabouts of some coffee. She barely spoke but ushered me

inside. “Cremora?’ 

I nodded, wanting to score and leave; her baby was crying and the room was stuffy

and smelled of urine.  “One sugar,”  I said.  “...Please.”

Then I might better face the lumpy cold oatmeal.  After breakfast someone called for

an “attunement.” This time we all held hands in a huge circle and meditated.  I sat

cross-legged like most people. Closing my eyes the sunlight streamed through my

lids, or was it a light from inside, I couldn’t tell.  My hands pulsated in the warmth of

other hands. I felt safe when I closed my eyes.  The hands seemed to be holding me

down to the ground, in place, part of a chain.  Someone said, “The energy moves in

through the left hand, the receptive side, and out the right.  I could believe that.  I

could feel it, in my body, and that made me know I was really there, not floating

disconnected.

After the meditation a dimpled, well-built guy boomed out that he could use some

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guys to help him clear some wood, where Gurf had been cutting a path in the woods

and Hoopie said he could use about a dozen people in the kitchen and to do clean

up.

A guy with a slow southern voice said he could use everyone else in the garden.

A blond bombshell asked for some help moving a woodstove out of a house that the

community had moved out of on a mountain in Guilford, Vermont.  Five guys offered. 

Later that night at dinner I would hear how 

I gulped the coffee covertly revving up to jump in the back of a rickety farm truck

where dozens of us herded in to go to the garden.  I felt like I was in a summer/work

camp.   I wondered what I’d gotten myself into, bumping over the dirt roads to the

farm in New Hampshire.  I was just a helping hand, another body crowded into a

boxy beginning of the good life.    Each time the driver turned I was in someone’s lap. 

I fell against a guy who looked like a kind of greasy Christ-like figure  in long army

overcoat and high army boots, sitting with a dazed, almost catatonic stillness. 

“Sorry.” I said.  He responded by saying something about  our “Howdy-Doody- God

connection.”  What?  I asked him.  He looked at  me with mournful eyes that

expressed a magnitude of suffering, and suddenly he broke into a spasm of rapid

blinking. 

In the garden I felt happy bending over in the cool damp brown soil.  By  mid-morning

and  the sun began to burn through.  I wanted to know more about the beginnings of

the community.  Donna, my outhouse buddy was working next to me bending over

the rows of carrots that we were thinning.  She gave me the low-down about  Elwood

and Michael.  Elwood Babbit was  a small older man who lived nearby and used to

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drive bus until he became a trance medium.  Through his channeling he provided

spiritual information and guidance for the community.  Michael was the person who

had started the community.  He was presently away on business in California,

promoting the community’s new album, “Spirit in Flesh.”

Michael had had total revelation in which he saw the earth changing dramatically as it

tipped over on it’s axis and had had attained a total comprehension of divine

guidance.  He’d started having visions when he was three years old and he left his

body, which Donna referred to as having gone out on the Krishna Force. Michael saw

the world from above and witnessed the future of man and a new age of love, peace

and brotherhood”. Donna added that Michael had had many lifetimes as a great

leader, including Peter the Apostle, Plato and Robert E. Lee. 

Donna’s testimony blurred together fuzzily with what Toby had said the night before. 

I didn’t discount what anyone said; I couldn’t think.  Having had my mind blasted

open all summer, anything seemed possible.  At least these people seemed to have

conviction about something;  that was more than I could say for myself.

In between the rows a woman was having some kind of heart-to-heart, sitting with

tears streaming down from dark eyes set against pale skin.   “I’m  just so grateful to

be here...” she said, stooping and looking into the face of a handsome man.

Something intense was going on  between them and I was pretending not to notice,

but the woman looked up at me and said quietly  right through her tears, “Hi.”  She

kept crying.  

“Hi.” I said, lowering my eyes.   I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that she wasn’t

hiding her feelings.

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In the next row I heard two guys, lost in a conversation about building a plastic house

directly over a stream in the woods. One of the guys, a dimpled curly blond, was not

weeding, but was twisting his mustache absentmindedly  and the other sweet faced

guy kept working, saying, “The energy over the water would be incredible for going

out on the force.”  I thought of astral-travel and nights by the ocean.

Moving up and down the rows together I didn’t mind bending so much.  So what

brought you here?  I asked her.  She said she had always wanted something but

hadn’t known what it was:  Brotherhood; to go deeper.  We talked about how our

parents had never been able to adequately answer our most pressing questions.  I

told her about the light I’d seen and the energy patterns I had seen as a child.

Donna reassured me that what I was seeing was not just in my imagination,

reminding me that artists like the French impressionists had painted these things. 

She asked me if I had ever noticed a halo around a person speaking, or around a

street lamp. That was energy too. She said that when you’re in the energy, when

your not using your brain you naturally see these things, it was a manifestation of the

force.  I asked her if she ever saw energy and she said probably everyone here did

sometimes. I thought of the Native Americans who went on vision quests.  She

added that when you were not aligned with  the energy, when your body or emotional

being was vibrating at too low a frequency, the energy could make you feel very bad;

giving you diarrhea or making you feel blown out and tired.  When you got tempted to

concentrate on your carnal needs instead of the good of the group, or the will of this

force you were misusing energy and that was your instant karma.  You had to be a

hundred percent committed or you could get flipped out she said.  I worried that I

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couldn’t get high enough to stay out of this sort of hellish state she was describing.  I

thought of Dexter. 

I asked her about this energy business. Hadn’t she learned when we she was

younger not to talk about these things.  Yes but that was what drove her to come

here. 

Donna confided that she was sometimes obsessed by thoughts about infinity, space,

time, and the purpose of being alive.  She sometimes got mad trying to  imagine how

we could ever have not existed, or how we could ever cease to exist.  One day while

she’d been driving in her car the impact of the realization that she would die some

day hit her.  It hit her so hard that she’d had to pull over to the side of the road and

just sit there.   It drove her crazy to try to  imagine “life without life.”

Our conversation stayed with me all day and into the night.  As I lay in my sleeping

bag, I retreated into my memories. When did that magic begin and how had it been

taken away?  I thought back to the years before we moved to Florida.  I must have

been no older than seven.    My friends had included the mica rock behind the house

who’s riches of infinite layers of sparkling sheets of silver, I peeled back and held with

awe in my hands .  

It was that anger that brought me here.  It was anger that propelled me to do things

I’d not otherwise have the nerve to do or say.

Before I dozed off, I thought of the woman who talked to me through her tears.  She’d

had a child with her.  I thought of her and that man  as “grown-ups;” responsible

people, unlike me

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