Alternative Spirit

The list of people leading alternative spiritual practices in 1969 when I arrived in California is so long, I can’t do more than name them in a blog piece. But even to name them evokes the rich spirit of aspiration, exploration and controversy rife at that time at the edge of the continent, where, as my Dad said, “all the loose nuts and bolts in the country had rolled!”

Two Episcopalians probably opened Pandora’s Box. Bishop James Pike, who led Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill only a few blocks from where I lived, had just died. But his charismatic personality and challenges to orthodox belief were legendary. He advocated the ordination of women, racial desegregation and the acceptance of lesbians and gays as leaders, things so common now we cannot imagine the heat they generated in his day.

Alan Watts was on the radio so often in the early 1970’s, I could hardly bear to listen. (I would be more receptive now!) He had been an Episcopal priest, but by this time was living on a houseboat in Sausalito and interpreting Eastern philosophy for the West both as a teacher in the American Academy of Asian Studies and a programmer for the radio station KPFA.

Murshid Samuel Lewis gave up his inheritance to embrace mystical and spiritual teachings, becoming a teacher in the Chisti Sufi order. Known in San Francisco as Sufi Sam, a voice told him, “I will make you spiritual leader of the hippies.” He developed the all-embracing dances which were the beginnings of the Dances of Universal Peace, now done all over the world.

Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu Suzuki headed the burgeoning San Francisco Zen Center. His book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was read by almost everyone. (Still is!) When he died in 1971, Zentatsu Richard Baker enlarged the focus and reach of the Zen Center, leading it to become an institution with monasteries at Tassajara, San Francisco and across the Bay in Muir Beach, as well as opening Green’s restaurant. The Zen Center became a huge educational, and even a political force during Jerry Brown’s governorship of California.

Though not associated with traditional spiritual groups, Esalen Institute, located near Carmel and in San Francisco, played a huge part in our cultural life. Studying consciousness using countless psychological and physical methods, the Institute fostered everything from meditation to organic food! Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, it is still going strong with public workshops exploring the sciences and humanities.

By the time I arrived, the Diggers, founded by Peter Coyote and Peter Berg, who met at the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had left town. The Diggers were an anarchist group which provided free food, health care and shelter in the Haight Ashbury, but then merged with other communal groups to form the Free Family.

Steve Gaskin, 1969

Steve Gaskin, a teacher at San Francisco State, was giving Monday Night Class in an auditorium on Ocean Beach (also used for rock concerts), attended by hundreds of people up and down the coast. He had been greatly affected by his psychedelic experiences and was a proponent of right livelihood and ecological practices. One night, Alan Ginsberg introduced Swami Bhaktivedanta to the group, unleashing the Hare Krishna movement upon the city! I certainly never went to Monday Night Class, but we were all very aware when Gaskin collected a caravan of over 60 vehicles in 1970 and left San Francisco, traveling across country and forming an intentional community at The Farm in Tennessee.

Werner Erhard started his est seminars in San Francisco in 1971. After a Dale Carnegie course and teaching Mind Dynamics, he felt he could develop a course of his own. Hundreds of thousands of people took est training which fueled the personal growth industry of the 1970’s.

I felt inoculated from much of this discussion by my powerful Lutheran background and I was too independent to become involved in communal movements. Being able to support myself meant that I could think what I liked, and in the shifting friendships and involvements of those years, world literature was my guide.

Neither Line nor Marty are bowled over by the self-styled gurus arising around them. Line goes Sufi dancing which leads her to herbal healers and teachers as well as the early women who worked with natural childbirth. But she is pragmatic and working at a hospital. Marty plots an aesthetic course, studying photography and reading Russian literature in addition to working full time. Nevertheless, the winds of exploration blowing through the Bay Area, the storms of controversy, and “the sunshine of your love” all wafted through their lives to some effect.

First Computer

In 1970 I got a job with the legal publishing company Bancroft-Whitney typing case summaries dictated by attorneys. In a large light-filled room on an upper floor of a brick building south of Market in San Francisco, eight of us did this work day after day. (In truth, work was secondary to the lively cultural traffic in the office! Probably no different than it is today.) In the corner was a large computer terminal, which came to life when a computer at the home office in Rochester, New York, called it through a WATS line. When the beautiful girl who ran this behemoth quit, I got the job.

The point of this particular dictation was to composite indexes. Thus, an attorney could cite subjects of a case, dictate a page number and the computer in Rochester compiled the page numbers into a list, an index at the back of a book. This exacting work was done by only one attorney as the subjects must take a particular form. The job introduced me to the life many of us now have, in that we are at the mercy of the internet! (“You were doing cloud computing back in 1970,” says Don.)

It was frustrating to wait for the call which was supposed to happen each day at the same time. It didn’t always. Often one end or the other would lose communication, dropping the line. I had to figure out what had gotten saved and what hadn’t and how much work to re-do! I would be fuming in my corner, trying not to disturb others who were humming along at their work. The terminal used pin-fed green-and-white-lined paper. Due to deadlines, I sometimes worked Saturday mornings, though I took off another day of the week to make sure I was only working 40 hours.

Computers played a big part in my work life from then on. I typed and retyped manuscript on mag cards, cassette tapes (frustrating because when the writer added a paragraph, you had to go in and reformat a lot of data when it was stored in a limited, linear fashion!) and finally random access floppy disks. I ran Fortran programs written by the crack programmer Pat Schilling whenever she wanted to accomplish something. I was even part owner of a company which introduced computing to architects, the unique Design Logic, which contracted computer-aided drafting among other services.

Discovering databases was something of a watershed for me. Before relational databases came in, I could cause quite a bit of structure, slicing, dicing and reporting on data using dBaseIII and IV. (I made up databases for the characters in the novel I was working on as well!) Ditto for spreadsheets. For a while I worked at one of the early computer help desks, aptly called Computer Hand Holding.

Without a clear career path or even a desire for one, this becomes Marty’s experience. In her artistic life, she journals and takes still photographs. In the full flush of her new intellectual freedom, she doesn’t want to write for a living or get into the technical demands of professional photography. She gets better and better work in offices as her computer skills increase. But it isn’t without hazard or frustration, as most of us now know!

Food Revolution

Line, Marty and Paul’s mother was not very interested in cooking. She was a superb baker. She always started with the best ingredients and taught her kids to bake exquisite pies, cookies and delicious breads full of interesting grains (some they ground themselves). But for meals she provided the meat, potatoes and vegetable diet common to the post-war era. After a few years in which she researched Adele Davis’ ideas, she went back to using the prepared ingredients and frozen foods which were so available at the time. This was especially true after the older kids went to college and she began full-time teaching. The younger Mikkelsons recall that almost every recipe she used called for a packet of Lipton’s dried onion soup!

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, big gardens played a part in the Mikkelsons’ lives. In Montauk, a fictional town in northeast Iowa, a half-acre garden was attached to the parsonage. Though planting in the spring was exciting, everything from the usual vegetables to sunflowers (to feed the big cardinals and bluejays in the winter), corn and peanuts, the kids’ enthusiasm for weeding and hoeing was tepid. The bounty from the garden was never wasted, however. Many of the vegetables were partially cooked and frozen for eating in the winter. Dad planted apple trees at each parsonage, but the Haroldson parsonage had no garden. Only a rhubarb patch.

Line’s cooking develops from living around so many people who came up from the South to work in Chicago. She learns how to cook okra, collards and fried chicken, to fry up hoecakes and make delicious cornbread. Money is short, and Line becomes expert at getting the most for her money at the new food co-ops run by activist groups. From ex-Texans, she learns how to soak and cook beans, refry them and wrap them with onions and tomatoes in tortillas.

Marty learns the romance of cooking from a year-long stay in Oxford with a family whose European values dictate great food every day. When she moves to Berkeley, the exposure to fresh and raw vegetables educates her palate even further. She doesn’t like salad, but she finds that no California meal is complete without it.

When Line joins Marty in San Francisco, they become even more excited about food. Any Saturday that someone with a car turns up, they go out to the farmers' market on Alemany Boulevard in the southern part of the city, and buy the fresh produce of the season. They were not necessarily vegetarians, but the cookbooks of the time celebrated the peasant meals that world travel was introducing to people with a desire to live lightly and well on our fragile earth.

Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery by Alan Hooker, which appeared in 1970, contained recipes influenced by Indian and peasant cuisines all over the world. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, showing how to get complete proteins needed for health using particular vegetarian and sometimes dairy combinations. Laurel’s Kitchen, by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey first came out in 1976, again providing much information about vegetarian nutrition. The Moosewood Cookbook, completely hand-written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen, came out in 1977, reveling in the “health food” cooking of the restaurant collective she was part of in New York. Versions of all of these books are still in print and tattered copies can be found in my sisters’ and my kitchens even today!

It is hard to convey how exciting this revolution was, as today farmers’ markets abound and everyone at one point or another gets excited about real food. To the Mikkelson kids, however, who grew up on canned and frozen foods, packaged meats and Betty Crocker baking mixes, the idea that you could start from scratch and everything would taste better, and perhaps make you healthier, was heady indeed.

Hannah Arendt, Boris Pasternak and Us

The film Hannah Arendt dramatizes the controversy which raged around Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Though she lost friends and alienated family members, who misunderstood her reporting as lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, she continued to insist that individuals should be seen as persons, rather than members of “a people,” a tribe. Eichmann, the organizer of transportation for millions of people taken to concentration camps during World War II, was found in Argentina and taken back to Israel for trial for war crimes. He was hung in 1962.

Because Eichmann insisted he was simply obeying his superiors, Arendt did not see that he could be convicted in a court of law, though she wrote that he must hang because he had “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth” with others. Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe those who are simply thoughtless, who refuse to connect their actions with the consequences, who refuse to be persons.

I am currently reading the new translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This book helped set me on my path when I first read it in 1966, but some of it, especially the philosophical discussions, were fuzzy in the earlier translation. In this one they are extremely clear! The first time I read it, I gravitated to the powerful story of a man who remained a person in the face of the monumental pressure of the ideological revolution in Russia. In the first translation, the story was wrapped in thick romance about love and art. [The movie, of course compounded this!] In this translation the romance is pared away, revealing a story which is set not only in history, but is about all of us.

Here in the West, too, we’ve been buried in ideology. If you think you are free, have a look at the BBC production "The Century of the Self", a four part series on how corporations have used Sigmund Freud’s and his nephew Edward Bernays’ theories to subliminally affect your life. In order to be free, to be a person, one must look deeply into one’s reasons for doing things. Most of us, in order to work, to have friends, to contribute to society, make some compromises with our innermost beliefs. But, being a person involves drawing boundaries and acting on them. Our global economy and information system relentlessly inform us of the effects of our actions. Do we pay attention?

Doctor Zhivago is filled with moral quandaries and ideas, a long rumination on life and art. Tolstoy’s social doctrine of the Kingdom of God on earth was part of the huge ferment of revolutionary thinking at the end of the 19^th Century. Pasternak’s Tolstoyan character Misha Gordon, a childhood friend of Zhivago, believes that personhood began with Christ. For him, the Gospel began as a “naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? … In that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.”

It doesn’t matter where our personhood, our responsibility comes from. It is a gift which we must not refuse. Eichmann and Pasternak are good examples of the poles which may be lived out with relationship to one’s culture and society. “Life,” Zhivago tells the partisan leader who has imprisoned him, “has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle; it eternally alters and transforms itself; it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”

It was this trust in life which initially thrilled me about Pasternak’s book. Harrowing experiences awaited its characters, as they await us. That trust did not desert Pasternak, even as much that he loved was taken from him. It was a good thing for me to learn as I was setting off into the future.

The Zorba Method

In telling the stories of Line, Marty and Paul, I believe I’ve been quite brave, showing their sibling rivalry, their misery at being unusual as teenagers, their youthful passions and misconceptions. It seems now that as we go into their lives as adults, I must continue to be brave. Braver.

As the 1960’s became the 1970’s, the peaceful revolution went underground. People began to explore their inner selves, believing that if they raised their own consciousness, the world as a whole would benefit. A fair bit of self-indulgence went along with this!  Line, Marty and Paul are no exception. I am going to have to describe the part in their lives played by sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We were certain that “the body was the unconscious” [Wilhelm Reich], that the body expressed one’s innermost self. Everything one did, how one dressed, how one moved, what one said, was revealing. We were certain we could start with a blank page, express exactly what we wanted to be, that the potentials for being human had scarcely been scratched, that we could move further toward investigating their limits. Desire was, for each of us, an earnest of truth.

From the movie Zorba, the Greek

We developed what I used to call the “Zorba method,” named for Nikos Kazentzakis’ character, Zorba the Greek. The philosophy was: act freely, fear nothing, live in the moment. Trust your desires to show you yourself. Know that you will come to end of them. Don’t avoid or go around trouble. Go through it! In those early days in San Francisco, it could be considerable.

Like the young English teacher in Kazentzakis’ book, I arrived in San Francisco full of book learning, shy, disciplined. As the eldest in a large family, I was not indulged. I was sure that the only way to become who I wanted was to do what I was told and work very hard. And only as I served others would they love me. I needed to let go, get into trouble, trust myself and learn to dance.

I did that. Delight, beauty and awe seemed to be around every corner. The intensity and variety of the music took us there, as did unexplainable, diverse friendships, and as many experiences as we could pack into a weekend and still get to work on Monday morning! Exploring a town Herb Caen extolled every day in the newspaper as Bagdad by the Bay (at the time meaning a place of unimaginable splendor!), we reached a shining coastline in three directions. We had enough money to eat interesting things, buy second-hand clothes and indulge ourselves in many and various arts. The flip of a thumb took you far from the city into natural wilderness preserved for all of us by diligent men and women.

The young people I know today could not read Zorba the Greek without commenting on his attitude toward women. But political correctness is a poor substitute for passion, I believe.  And one learns from neither literature nor life if his or her tea cup is so full there is no room for more.

In exploring our desires, I doubt that we were worse than many others. Certainly the culture as a whole has slid into a prurient interest in each other’s darkness, which everyone assumes is there. Self-indulgence does have its consequences and I don’t want to shy away from describing them. Line, Marty and Paul now tremble in that early and dangerous time of openness between the ages of 20 and 30. I want to emphasize the bright sides of my characters, the astonishing beauty of each upstanding person, flowering in so many and various ways. Brightness and shadow make up the whole, helping them grow into real people.

Poor People's Campaign

As a young, barely-politicized person, I ran across a notice inviting people to come to Washington, D.C., with a group studying non-violence. Leaving from Ann Arbor, the plan was to stay in churches and college dorms for a week, participating in marches and meetings in Resurrection City, built along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I signed up with the group of eight or so people.

The campaign had been Martin Luther King’s idea, but he was killed in April, 1968, and the campaign started in May. It was left to Ralph Abernathy to head up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I recall how tired Abernathy appeared to me, sitting across from him in a poorly attended meeting. By contrast, Jesse Jackson was everywhere! He was only 27 and had been leading an SCLC operation in Chicago. His upstart, attention-getting ploys caused a rift with Abernathy later. But Jackson’s attempt to downplay race in the struggle against poverty and the grass-roots organizations he created were certainly affected by his experiences at the Poor People’s Campaign.

In addition to poor black people, Dr. King had reached out to Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poor white Appalachians, all of whom came to Resurrection city. Multi-cultural experiences and classes for all were held in the “Soul Center” tent in the middle of the city. I’ve since learned that the Highlander Folk Center and the Smithsonian Institution assisted.

Every night, under the Lincoln Memorial, with acres of people around the reflecting pool singing along and dancing, groups played pop music. It seemed to mostly be a Motown Sound. Marshall Tate, who became a friend that week, drew me instead to the tent nearby where the old blues and bluegrass people were playing and Pete Seeger moderated the evenings. Seeger had been blacklisted from being on television in the early years of the 1960’s when I was watching, so I’d never seen him though we were all singing his songs. I don’t remember exactly who we saw, but probably John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, lots of banjo pickers.

An odd thing about the present, is that you don’t know the significance of what you are doing until later. It is only now, forty-five years later, that some of the pieces click into place. For instance, marching in a long, winding column throughout the capitol alongside a nondescript middle-aged white man, I heard the whispers, “That’s Dave Dellinger.” I knew he was a peace activist, but it is only now that I am aware of his power and significance. He was 53 at the time and had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. All through the 1950’s and 60’s he participated in freedom marches in the South and hunger strikes in jail, eventually coming to apply the principles of nonviolence to the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was indicted later in 1968, along with the rest of the Chicago Eight.

June 18, 1968, Washington, D.C.

Marshall and I stayed on in Washington when the others left, marching, exploring and going to the Smithsonian. I recall the warm rains which left mud everywhere and getting arrested (actually taken to a police station!) because I was jaywalking, barefoot and looked like a hippie. Delicious bread was baked in coffee cans day after day by an older couple in blue denim. On June 6, hitchhiking back to Ann Arbor, we got into a car and heard that Robert Kennedy was dead. Marshall says that when speaking to groups as part of his work for the Pacific County Democrats, he always mentions this. “It was a life-defining moment for me,” he says.

The Poor People’s Campaign is generally seen as a failure because it did not produce anti-poverty legislation, it didn’t get much press coverage and the campaign died out in the middle of June. Residents were divided about whether they wanted to share in America’s “culture of abundance” or revolt against it. One of the mule trains, however, did travel to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. And the campaign’s legacy lives on in the indelible experiences of those who were there.

None of my characters attends the Poor People’s Campaign. Marty is in California in 1968, Line is pregnant and working, and Paul is in Minnesota. But my own involvement informs the writing and everything that happens in With One Hand Waving Free.

"What's Happening, Man?"

In the process of finishing the book With One Hand Waving Free, the task I set for myself this year, I can report that I just finished Chapter 14 and thus am half way through the book. The part I’m working on, set in 1968, is intense for Line because she finds herself accidentally pregnant and is not at all sure her politically-active boyfriend Stephen wants to become an involved parent. Marty meets Erik, a student of architecture at the University of California, who will mystify her for years. And Paul moves further north, into a larger Minnesota college to finish his B.A.

Line, Marty and Paul do not know that it is “1968”. Their own awakening lives absorb them. Paul does not know that when he plays the guitar and sings “Take my hand, Precious Lord,” that it will be sung at Martin Luther King’s funeral in April. Line does not know when she sees Tom Hayden, his sad, charismatic face all broken out from living on peanut butter and coffee, sitting on a stairway in a hall where Democratic convention tactics are being discussed, that he is the poster child for the year. Marty does not know that watching Janis Joplin perform with a boozy passion, accompanied by her band Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Carousel ballroom above an auto showroom in San Francisco, is a historic event.

June 24, 1968 Washington, D.C.

1968 “rocked the world” according to those looking back. As a student in a Master’s program, I spent most of the year on the active University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. I marched in Washington, D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, traveling with a group studying non-violent action. In August I took a job in Chicago just as the Democratic convention was getting underway. The urgency behind me was more directed toward earning a living than working toward social justice, but I did what I could. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, having moved far from my origins, I was too sick to work and landed back in the bosom of my family. I was grateful they took me in and took care of me until my next foray into the great world.

The world is very large. In 1968 it was knit together by television, which provided nightly news almost raw, lifting events into a visibility upon which people could place their own value. At the time we did not know that the tide was turning, that there would never be another 1968. It was just what was happening. A question which we began to ask each other frequently! “What’s happening, man?” Because something surely was.