LOOKING BACK ON THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
BOOK, MUSEUM EXHIBITION EXAMINE COUNTERCULTURE IN THE REGION
Harmony and understanding? Not always
It wasn’t just sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
The counterculture, according to Jack Loeffler, was about a whole lot more than that. “The modern environmental movement came out of the counterculture,” said Loeffler, who co-edited a book, “Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest,” published by the Museum of New Mexico Press and recently released to book stores.
Meredith Davidson, curator at the New Mexico History Museum, coedited the book with him and they both curated an exhibition on the theme that will open May 14 at the History Museum.
“I feel good about this book,” Loeffler said. “This is a subject I have lived for the last 60 years.”
He was a breakfast chef and meditation teacher at what became the Esalen Institute at Big Sur in California, an environmental activist fighting the Black Mesa coal mine in the Four Corners area, a gatherer of what he calls “aural histories” from interview, and a recorder of indigenous and Hispanic folk music in the Southwest, as well as ambient sounds in the wilderness.
Loeffler said he donated about two-thirds of his aural history collection to the History Museum and the upcoming exhibit will include a number of those voices.
And while he wrote a number of the essays in the book, he also recruited friends he had made along the counterculture journey to tell the
stories of the New Buffalo and Lama communes, and the Hog Farm in northern New Mexico, the experiments with straw bale building and organic farming, the backlash against hippies invading the Taos area, the importance of Native American and Eastern spiritual teachings, the music and poetry of the movement.
Then there’s the issue of eating peyote and other psychedelics, which Loeffler said was related to development of a new type of consciousness — or maybe a discovery and understanding of what he calls the “indigenous mind.” It’s a way of seeing the relationships among living beings and the planet, of understanding the long-ranging consequences of our actions and relating to the flow of nature.
“Plant and animal life — we are all cousins,” he said in an interview.
While many people remember those years with affection and even some longing, there was a dark side.
Writer, activist and actor Peter Coyote made that point in an essay he wrote in the book.
While he credited the counterculture with “moving the needle on culture” with contributions to women’s rights, the environmental movement, alternative medicine, organic food and expanded spiritual practices, he added that idealistic young people discovered that love is not all you need.
“Our imperfect knowledge of the greed, hatred, and delusion that shape the world, along with our imperfect awareness of our own muddy, contradictory intentions and desires,” Coyote wrote, “made us believe that we could create a world without shadows, a simpler, more understandable world in accordance with our simplistic understandings, better than the one we had failed to master as children.”
He said he wanted to balance out “self-congratulatory memories that fail to include sexual disease, death by overdose and murder, and the careless spending of life’s energies on personal indulgence and occasional twaddle.”
Multi-generational Taos resident Sylvia Rodriguez added in her essay: “It is easy for aging boomers to wax nostalgic about those days. But one must also look back with irony and a touch of skepticism because, contrary to their (our) youthful sensation of accelerating through some kind of Aquarian evolutionary process toward an egalitarian, spiritually enlightened, peaceful, and ecologically balanced society, the country soon veered sharply to the right in an overall trajectory that hasn’t stopped yet.”
And in her introduction, Davidson noted: “Fifty years after the Summer of Love, the youth of today’s world are facing similar issues of racial prejudice, global violence, and environmental challenges.”
Loeffler said he sees a resurgence of the conditions and concerns that launched the counterculture.
“The level of disgust with the political arena right now inevitably is going to result in a huge tsunami of counterculture,” he said. “An awful lot of young people are particularly distraught with the way it is now.”
And maybe because of that, Loeffler said of the book and exhibition, “Boy, it couldn’t come at a better time.”