What do people have against hippies these days?? I am appalled at some of the derision I hear. For example, when I was working at a local restaurant last year a young woman was hired. You know how people chat while they work. One day she informed me “I hate hippies! I can’t stand them!”

She didn’t know I was one.

What venom! I guessed I didn’t look like much of a hippie that day. Mostly these days I just look like a little old lady with gray hair and too much baby fat (after five children some of us unfortunately get that way.) Well, I pretended not to be insulted and let it go, but purchased several tie dye shirts just to make it clear that I’m still quite the hippie even in my old age. I needed a little self-identification, apparently.

I guess the word “hippie” means different things to different people. To some it might refer to a dirt-bag unwashed, unkempt drug user - indulging in heavy drugs like heroin - perhaps. …Or just a stoner looking to take advantage of others. (Just a guess at what people might be thinking when they’re all negative about the hippie counter-culture movement.)

But hippies are more than that.

The most important aspect of being a hippie is the creativity: the desire for inventing new modes of art and the ability to be unique enough to put those arts into form. Hippiedom also is a form of spirituality for me. It is an acknowledgement that I’m able to develop my own spiritual connection with the divine apart from rituals and set forms devised by others for their organization into groups of spiritual worship realities. My spirituality is my own alone. It encompasses nearness to the divine source through creativity.

God is creative, and so am I, so when I’m involved in an act of creativity I’m closer to God than at any other time. Plus there’s the fact that love is an expression of god-self within. For me, loving everyone was the most important aspect of hippieness, plus these realizations of the reality of God through being in nature, through aligning oneself with nature and all that is natural. To me, those are the qualities of being a hippie, and drugs and free-love type sex have nothing to do with that which is natural and pure… other than use of herbs of course which sometimes includes something as amazing as marijuana which is a very cool herb helpful in many medical need situations.

Anyhow, I don’t see why people should speak badly about hippies and make people like me think we need to hide our hippieness. I’m not going to hide anymore. Too many years I’ve been diverted from what is really me. I’ve been a hippie since the sixties. Just because I’m almost sixty years old doesn’t mean I should change and be someone else’s idea of the perfect little old lady grandma … you know what I mean?

Well, this week I was reading two different books that mentioned hippies. One was Tribal Bigfoot. I was in the middle of an absolutely awesome story about a guy who had been in a forest in Del Norte County, California when he was surrounded by Sasquatches… and then the author told of his own walk into this area. He was approached on the trail by a man. He wrote: “I hadn’t seen anyone on the trail or in the parking lot for two hours. I held my ground and watched as a derelict looking hippie walked up to me and asked what I was doing there. I was a little miffed, but I couldn’t tell what kind of weapon he might have had under his tie-died sweater and coat. He wasn’t a large man, but he smelled and looked like he’d been in the woods too long…. It was a little nerve wracking having that encounter unarmed.” (Tribal Bigfoot, Paulides, Pg. 285)

Okay, now I’m a little miffed. Are hippies so bad you have to suspect them of being dangerous? The author of the book is a former law enforcement agent who I guess has decided that hippies are to be avoided unless you can arrest them.

This morning I was reading a book of Bigfoot fiction when I got to a page that said, “We needed more scientists with real clout in the community to come forward, look at the data and see that the hard evidence was already there…. Instead we get sociopaths and rednecks and hippie cultists.” (North American Primates, Durgee, Pg. 209)

Can you see why I feel hippies are under fire from the misperceptions of prejudice?

Now I know I’m not going to change the opinions of millions who have already made up their minds one way or another on whether or not hippies are good or bad. I happen to live in a community, however tiny, where there’s a lot of drug users. I see more than my share of them. MOST of them are not old enough to have been part of the hippie movement. My neighbors are huge users of drugs, ex methies, current full-time potheads [and I should add this is medical marijuana at this point, and quite legal]… they aren’t but in their forties and not wise enough to know what being a hippie really meant. They just want the drugs, not the spirituality and lifestyle of creativity that the early hippies brought into focus.

There are a few young people hereabouts that have the beauty and spirit of real hippies, but not many. Most are completely clueless… they just want drugs. Pathetic, in my humble opinion! And there are a few old hippie artists in the community who are carrying on the mysticism of true hippie life, with love.

Hippiedom is a liberation of the spirit, an expansion of consciousness, a flight of amazement on the journey to reach forth toward world consciousness and love. To denigrate it into a ‘hey we want drugs’ thing is to entirely miss the point of what the movement was actually about.