AUTHENTICITY & SELF-EXPRESSION

• People have an intuitive validity, so they weren’t just trying to impress someone else, they were trusting their own inner voice.

Do not consider present time as clock time, but rather as a

timeless moment when all are mutually engaged in

experiencing an experience, the outcome of which is yet

unknown. You're right there. You're connected and you don't

know what's going to happen and that's where the excitement

is and that's where the spontaneity is and that's where the

vitality is and that's where the joy is

--Viola Spolin, the “mother of Improvisational Theatre”

It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe. Certainly “safe” is what I am now-or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times..in the small city where we live, when I’ve left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-offy bird, like some fantastical mistake-what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it flooding the sky and streets,without its seeming preposterous-and in my walks, towardthe silent corners, the cold mulchy smells, the treetops suddenly waving in the wind, I’ve felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn’t sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy’s desire to run away,revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog. It has always stayed. --Lorrie Moore, From the Frog Hospital

• Life is supposed to be joyous. .. We’re supposed to love our lives and love the time and watch the oak leaves blossom, you know.

Ordinary folks of 1967

• Each and every one of us has absolutely everything we need to be perfect in this very moment. Realizing that and expressing it, absolutely understanding that there is nothing to gain, nothing to perfect, nothing to alter, will probably take me the rest of several lifetimes.

• Unless I’m desperately hungry or my family’s going to get thrown out on the street, I haven’t yet had to do anything which violated my political beliefs. And only occasionally had to step all over my artistic standards. It’s kind of what I held out for in the 60’s--to do what I wanted with my life and not waste it and not feel out of control any more than the universe is out of control

Long hair and beads and all that was a tribal identification system. It was a way of letting other people know what your values were. . . But when you get a little older, you learn that any style can be co-opted and you being to opt for a more secret practice. You begin to operate on a level of intention and just doing what you want to do. It doesn’t matter what you look like.

To live outside the law you must be honest

I know you always say that you agree

But where are you tonight, sweet Marie?

• --Bob Dylan

• LAW: You said that once you’ve done something with 100%of your being, you can never go back to being a lunchbox Johnny,.

• COYOTE: what the 60’s did was liberate people from the expectations laid down for them by their parents. People learned that they were completely free to commit themselves to what they chose to do. And once you’ve committed yourself 100% to something, you can’t settle anymore [for] a job that you’re alienated from.

• A lot of people would come down there. . . Seemed like archetypal forms of peole were free-free to do or become, that’s why you saw all these guys with tall silk, stovepipe hats, people in Indian shirts, acting out whatever tirp they felt they were on in discovering themselves: they would dress like it, act like it.

• I always felt that the people who were part of Gaskin’s group were part of it because they would adhere to a certain philosophy. In order to live at Gaskin’s farm, you had to put all your money in a pot, you had to live a certain way. . . And it’s not that way here. We live and change and grow and when we become different, we don’t have to leave.

SELF-EXPRESSION: MUSIC

• I really thought that Bob Dylan was the spokesman for the generation in the 60’s. I felt like the Hog Farm and our buses and stuff were on the forefront of what was going on and his music was always right along with us. . .He spoke our hearts and he was the first one.

• Dylan was the voice of the 60’s. . . He brought poetry into music, he brought insight, he brought truth

• The music associated with black people was earthy, authentic and compelling. People began rejecting canned music in favor of creating their own and they began considering what kind of life produced those sounds that were so compelling and true and that led to a search for new experiences

Well, you walk into the room like a camel and then you frown; You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose onthe ground-- There ought to bea law against you comin' around

You should be made to wearearphones because somethingis happening here but you don'tknow what it is, Do you, Mister Jones?--Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” 1965

• Lige and I, reflecting a new generation, had--before 1970-- grown our locks, donning those fashionable breeches of the time, bell bottoms. No longer did I have what Whitman called "the blanched, shaved face of an orthodox citizen." Lige's long hair, a feared symbol to conservatives who worried about too much likening of males and females, fell in sunny blondness over his shoulders. As he walked proudly past straight-identified hard-hats mending Manhattan streets, I noted with satisfaction that many would cruise him, thinking, it appeared, the unthinkable.

– Jack Nichols, gay liberation pioneer

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got."—Janis Joplin

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