ITHACA, NEW YORK

A boombox blasted from an upstairs window. My new friend Moon and I danced
in the courtyard between halls. We were students in the first third of the last
decade of the previous millennium – a time after many revolutions and before
many revolutions began — we spun around in circles like sufis.

We met at a party the night before where everyone sat around a candle on the
floor — we stared into the flame and received ancient teaching from the elements
— we talked about everything and nothing until the sun came up and in this way
we became family. One of the first things we did together was change our
names.

She changed her name to Moon.

I called myself Echo.

We became devotees of traveling — a newfound freedom since leaving home –
school was a detour on the road of life, we agreed, dancing is what really
matters. We spun ourselves into a trance in the hexagon-shaped courtyard on
campus. We practiced dance as a form of transcendence but the other students
stared as they passed on the way to class.

A guy in a baseball hat yelled, “Are you on drugs?”

“Wake up!” Moon illuminated the situation.

We did not stop dancing. The other students were sleepwalking through a maze
of books and grades and plans for the future. We knew — only the present
moment exists – we read it in a book.*

* BE HERE NOW

We spun ourselves to a place where nothing mattered – there was no matter –
no students, no classes, no degrees – we left the institution of higher education – we traveled by sound wave through time and space. The only thing left in the world of form was the boombox and the tape cassette recording of an old-time band playing psychedelic instrumentals.

We danced until Moon yelled over the music, “Do you want to smoke some pot?”

“I just had the same thought!”

“Synchronicity noted.”

It was not really a surprise as we had recently been introduced to the powerful local strain of Tompkins County (aka TC Kind) but I collected moments of coincidence as evidence of the nature of existence. I had a theory — all living beings share one communal consciousness on planet earth — but I was still looking for proof. I was eighteen so there was infinite time.

“Quieres fumar un poco de marihuana?” Moon asked in rapid-fire Spanish.
She stopped spinning suddenly and with no sign of dizziness, scooped up her
string bag and Peruvian wool sweater and headed to one of the stone buildings
that boxed in the courtyard. The student housing was built in a gothic style — slate roofs, walls of local shale, wood doors with wrought iron handles — that evoked the architecture of medieval Europe. It was meant to weigh heavy on the mind.

Moon unlocked the door with a key she wore on a ribbon around her neck.

“¡Vámonos hermana!”

Unlike her celestial namesake, Moon was the most down-to-earth person that I
knew. She always took the wheel on late-night road trips when no one else could keep their eyes open and the car began to drift across the double yellow lines into the oncoming lane. As her chosen name suggested, she was brilliant like the moon – she won every award in the school of advanced studies — but the most important thing on her mind was travelling — she liked to keep things in motion.

“Rapido! Rapido!”

We walked up three flights of stairs to Moon’s room, an empty space except for a mattress on the floor covered with a bright Mexican blanket. A woodblock print tapestry from India hung like an A-frame from an overhead pipe, which made the room feel like a tent. On the walls “Bouquet of Peace” by Pablo Picasso and an anti-war poster from the ’70s:

WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN
AND OTHER LIVING THINGS

Moon sat in lotus on the mattress ransacking a carved wooden box with an inlaid mother of pearl infinity sign on the lid for her stash. She found a small glass jar that held jam at one time but now displayed chlorophyll-green flowers dusted in microcrystals. She packed a thumb-sized ceramic pipe glazed metallic while we talked about future travel plans.

“The Grateful Dead play New York at the end of the month.”

“I am there.”

“You are here.”

“Now where should we travel?”

“Let’s go to the hill and catch the sunset.”

I visualized myself running to the west with a basket to catch the setting sun. The best view of the sunset was from the top of the slope that cascaded from the heights of campus to the center of town also known as the Commons. A
Romanesque stone library with a bell tower and a clock crowned the top of the
slope. A symbol of the tyranny of time.

“I have to liberate myself from here,” Moon swept her hand around the room,

“this school of patriarchal thought and the capitalist economic system which is built on the oppression of others.”

She brought the pipe to her lips, touched the flame to the flower and took a deep breath. She exhaled in a series of consecutive smoke rings that grew
progressively larger and less dense as they floated into space — an effect that illustrated her point perfectly.

“Are you dropping out of school?” I asked but I already knew the answer.

Moon sang a line from a song, “build your penitentiary we build your schools — brainwash education to make us the fools.”*

*“Crazy Baldheads” Bob Marley 1975

She borrowed a motto from another generation:

TURN ON TUNE IN DROP OUT*

* In 1967 Timothy Leary spoke these words at the Human Be-In, a peaceful
gathering of 30,000 people in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

“We’re getting deeper in the pocket of the man every day that we’re here — room and board, student loans, textbooks — it’s all part of the plan to get you in debt and then they own you — the bank, the job, the house, the kids!”

We chanted the last line a few times and then changed the chorus, “wake up, go
to work, come home, go to sleep.”

“Welcome to the rest of your life!”

“None but ourselves can free our minds,” Moon sang a line from Redemption
Song.

She was collecting student debt. I knew I didn’t know anything yet. We were
ready to set sail but we were trapped by a complex equation so we used books
as a ladder to escape.

SHELTER

HEY BEATNIK!

BOOK OF THE HOPI

POWER OF THE WITCH

THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA

SEEING THE DIVINE IMAGE IN INDIA

We listened to music that was recorded before we were born and danced at
every opportunity — we traveled up and down the east coast on a moment’s
notice and as far west as we could get and still make to class on Monday — we
smoked a lot of cannabis sativa and discovered that everything we had been
taught to think about the world was an illusion. Our parents told us, “go to school and get a job,” but we knew there was more to life than a paycheck. Moon picked up a bill from the floor and ripped it in half. The return address said:

PEACE OF MIND

YOUR HEALTH

OUR PLAN

“Health insurance is a pyramid scheme run by the pharmaceutical companies —
you pay the doctors to tell you what’s wrong with you and they pay the doctors to tell you what drug to take -– only the government-approved ones though – the ones with a patent — everyone’s got to make a profit.”

“Let food be your medicine and your medicine be your food!”

Moon told me she was dropping out of school — in fact she said she was
dropping out of the whole capitalist system. “I will not support a corporate military government.”

She sewed her own clothes out of recycled fabric and only wore shoes in town — she made bars of soap with essential oils and foraged for edible plants in the graveyard — she wildcrafted herbs for medicinal tinctures and donated them to the free clinic downtown. Moon woke up to a lineage of witchcraft – the kind of skills that were not taught in the lecture halls at school.

After the next lunar cycle, Moon and I drove to New York to see the Grateful
Dead and ate LSD on little squares of blotter paper in the parking lot before the show. We had no money or tickets but we joined a line of people walking into the coliseum and ran past the security guards at the door. I heard someone yell,

“STOP!”

And then I heard, “call the police!”

I lost Moon as we zigzagged through the crowd to escape but when I reached a
safe place to dance and the house lights went out she was already there. The
moon travels with you — or maybe it was a miracle. We joined a group of
spinners and made our way across the sky, catching trails of light off the other dancers like neighboring constellations. We caught an echo of an echo.

After the show we roamed through the makeshift festival in the parking lot for as long possible before heading to Moon’s hometown in rural New Jersey. Of
course she said, “I’ll take the wheel.”

We took a wrong turn before the bridge and got lost in a neighborhood that
looked like a warzone with prison yard lights and barbed wire fence. We looked
for someone to ask for directions but the streets were deserted.

“Wherever we are it is not on the map.”

“If only we knew celestial navigation.”

* At a time now past we used paper maps.

“Follow the sound wave cosmic traveller.”
We found a gas station that was open and got directions from a man behind a
wall of bulletproof glass. We drove through the streets in silence witnessing
decades of neglect. We passed a burnt-out car on the side of the road. Moon
said, “What happened to ‘we the people’?”

“This country is built on lies.”

“The land was stolen, the treaties broken.”

“No one is free until all of us are free,” Moon said, quoting so many
revolutionaries before her. We crossed the bridge.

We drove to New Jersey in a bubble of protective light listening to reggae but it did not save us when we walked into the house and found Moon’s mother waiting for us in the kitchen. “Dón de has estado?” She demanded under the buzzing fluorescent light in the ranch house kitchen. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I was still seeing everything as geometric mandalas of light.

“Mama we got lost but we’re home now,” Moon tried to steer a course across the
kitchen but her mother blocked the way.

“Where were you?” She demanded in a heavy Spanish accent.

“We took a wrong turn mama,” Moon said, “please go to bed.”

I focused on tropical plants in hanging pots above the sink.

“We need to go to sleep now — te amo mama – see you tomorrow.”

Moon’s mother put her hands on her hips. “Not. So. Fast.” She said with
emphasis on each word. She zeroed in on her daughter, “First you answer my
questions,” then the tidal wave hit, “where were you, what were you doing, who
were you with, what are these clothes you are wearing?”

She switched to Spanish, “Te ves como una persona sin hogar!”

Moon was wearing the clothes that she had made herself. She did not look
homeless. I thought she looked at home in the world.

Moon chose one question from the barrage, “we saw a band play music in the
city.”

“Mi hija está fumando marihuana?”

“Mama no marijuana! Now I’m going to bed,” Moon stated as a fact.

“How dare you talk to me that way!” her mother’s eyes flashed with anger, “yo
soy tu madre!” There was the force of all of the mothers in the history of the world behind her words.

Moon took a different route. “Mama, we have to leave early in the morning to go back to school please let us get some sleep.” She made another attempt to cross the kitchen.

Moon’s mother called her by her given name, which invoked the names of her
ancestors, “your grandmother is rolling over in her grave!”

Her words chased us down the wood paneled hallway into Moon’s childhood
room. As soon as the door closed we found sanctuary.

“Thank goddess we escaped the fluorescence,” she said.

“The life-force pattern of the houseplants!”

I told Moon about seeing everything as mandalas.

“I saw my grandmother look over my mother’s shoulder.”

We laughed because it was all real. We knew because we felt it in our bones.
The room glowed with warm light from a single incandescent bulb. Moon lit a
stick of incense and we played records on the family turntable. We listened to
Bob Dylan “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Here Comes the Sun” by Nina
Simone.

In an unrecorded amount of time, everything that was not the spinning vinyl
record became hazy around the edges like an out-of-focus photograph — the
suburban town, the ranch house, the chemically treated lawns – eventually it
disappeared. We made another travel plan.

We would live close to the earth and grow our own food – we would make our
own medicine from plants and heal our minds and bodies — we would remember
the old ways and give birth to new traditions — but first we had to question
everything we had been taught to think about the world.

We asked ourselves, “What is real?”

by Lea Lion