I saw a brief clip the other day talking about bringing back the hippie mentality; grounding, forest bathing, psychedelics.  Hippies weren’t crazy.  We have such a different mentality now than we did even 20 years ago, let alone nearly 60 years ago at this point.  What always attracted me to the hippie movement was the idea that they wanted to enforce change and they felt it could be done in a different way.  They saw that things were wrong and they addressed it—this was a group that didn’t remain silent regardless of what it did to them.  I can see where some people of the time felt like it was a waste or like this group of seemingly unkempt and wild people didn’t know what they were talking about—after all no one had really seen people like that before.  Plus the contrast between those who had taken a mellow approach to life and the very real, very scary things that were happening at the time created confusion.  How do you address such volatile and politicized things where lives can be at stake when people are under the influence of some kind? 

In spite of all that, there is very real merit to some of those methods and it all comes down to intention.  Understanding that we are all working toward the same goal is key because that shows we recognize the issue.  From there we can work on reaching a common ground for resolution.  The other part of this is that was way ahead of its time was the idea that connecting with the Earth would provide and heal.  The idea of human industrialization is fascinating because it produced technologies and advances that wouldn’t have come otherwise and we absolutely learned about using power in a different way—simultaneously making life easier and more challenging (that’s a different piece).  But what happened during that time was the loss of some of our more basic skills—like using the Earth to provide and heal.  The more we advanced, the more we forgot the basics.  Thankfully not all was lost, but we certainly categorized the “old” ways differently and lost our trust in what naturally came from the Earth.

If we were all to get together and discuss the idea that we have a need for advancement and slowing down, we may see the opportunity to make that middle ground a real thing.  Sometimes we have to look at how fast we are going and ask if that is the best thing.  There are tools, medicines, resources, and skills that can very much take care of us and heal and even advance us in a better way than what we currently allow.  We can remove politics and commerce from the idea that people need to afford basic things like health care to survive and we can show people how to take care of themselves again until medical intervention needs to take place.  We can teach our kids about things that matter like the value of people versus the value of money and we can allow them to explore the things that raise their curiosity rather than forcing them to all digest and believe the same way.  We can promote a more fair and just way of life that’s inclusive rather than idolatrizing the things we create and buy at the expense of human energy.  We can learn to connect with ourselves again and at this stage in the game, that is one of the most advanced practices we can offer.