-Mark Peacock, Vacaville, CA
Glad to hear that the spirit is still alive, and I am very grateful that there are like minded brothers and sisters out there! I wasn’t born until 1962, so I missed out on everything that had happened back then. I had an older brother who grew up then, and he would come home and talk about how things used to be in those days.
Even though they were out of style in the seventies, he would often wear striped bell bottoms and leather sandals. I never asked if they were Birkenstocks or not. He always sported a beatnik style goatee, too. He left me a lot of sixties records, everything from the Grateful Dead, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Turtles, to all of the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane.
Long story short, I loved everything that the brothers and sisters stood for back then. I grew up in northern New Hampshire in an environment that fostered the idea that the sixties where history and the hippies were extinct, so you can imagine how much of a misfit I was.
In 1988 I hit the road, hitch hiking across the country trying to find a place that I could fit in (it wouldn’t be until much later that I would realize that I didn’t need to fit in. I was okay with who I was), and that’s when I arrived in Boulder, Colorado. I began to encounter others who were different; unique, but the same, like minded. I call them the children of the summer of love.
The spirit was still alive! I went to my first Rainbow Gathering in Elka, NV and it felt like I was in heaven. I felt like I finally found somewhere I belonged. Of course you’re expected to bliss out at your first gathering, and I did. It was possibly the greatest summer of my life!
Flash forward in time about twenty years, where I would wind up here, the end result of an addiction that spiraled out of control. Now, I’m trying to reach out to the brothers and sisters who may wish to write.
My future work will be quite different from anything I have done before. I’ve had an awakening, and I am looking at life and the world from a profound and a spiritual point of view. I can’t wait to see what the rest of my life is going to bring.
I hope my brothers and sisters keep in touch and spread the word of positivity.