Sleeping Where I Fall (New Review)
by Peter Coyote
Counterpoint Books, Washington D.C.

Peter Coyote emerges from this book a shaman of the land from which he took his name and learning. Firmly grounded in the realities that were swirling through the nexus of the counterculture during the sixties, this book is beautifully written with profound honesty.

Peter...fill in privileged Jewish, in the best of ways, his father, though a tyrant had a people's heart, his mother always adored him. As a young man he was a literate, charming, intelligent with a strong will to live and live he did. He went on the road, suffered, and paid his dues. He struggled with the rest of the tribe in the broken dawning and throughout this memoir, Coyote always returns to sing and tell about it.

Peter Coyote, the good scientist in E.T. is a damn good philosopher and story teller. Reading this book brought back to memory the way it felt to travel in those early days when there were only a few in the tribe, vehicles were recognizable, and the wilderness of northern California was always beckoning, as was the communal experiment.

He was lucky to land in San Francisco when it was a seedbed for the cultural revolution of America. He was fortunate to jump aboard the gypsy wagon. He was just one of many, many others, brilliant drop-outs, who were crafting the counterculture.

The Diggers are alive and well, just look at Peter Berg, a long-time friend, who is still calling for an auto-less downtown. I lived with them for a few months in San Francisco, doing food runs at the Farmers Market, and serving in the Panhandle but for me The Haight turned scary when the methedrine and motorcycles roared down the street. Coyote dug that action, he got in there, and partied with Angels. Always a ladies man, Coyote did not understand the power of his flesh until later in life (who does?), and rationalized his indulgences, until he woke up, slowly, to find love at another level.

Coyote was also very fortunate to land in West Marin, and man, was that place was happening in those days! He doesn't even mention John Francis, the black, silent, banjo player who would not drive in cars. Or Suzanne, the librarian of the Pt. Reyes library, who ran off with that cult which just expired in mass suicide, and yes, she was among them, and her husband a few months later. The tales with the Angels at Olema, his commune in Marin, are awesome, including the gross stupidity of the dopers, and their hubris to return from the dead to report on the state of the culture.

In the course of this narrative, Peter becomes the man he wished he were when he first started living in the wind, being blown like the cottonball clouds of New Mexico. Here he also lived collectively the way it was done in those days, around the fire, with songs, and more songs, pouring out of the heart of people engaged in the revolutionary swirl of time on fire to know love.

It is untrue that everybody sold out, indeed, this book is a testament to the enduring nature of the counterculture revolution. Though Coyote brings a perspective that embraces the loneliness of existence, the road is transmitted in the weaving of his redemptive legend. He married a Buddhist.

His analysis of Easy Rider was brilliant. So true, that the terrible ending of the film, was not at all what it was like for most of us. Much of the rhetoric of that fable was stolen medicine from the Diggers. It was a gas to read about people and places that figure so much in the counterculture as lived in the vanguard because just between me and you the West coast was ten years ahead of the East.

The only correction I could find was his misplacement of Wheeler's Ranch, which was not in Marshall, but in the rolling hills of Occidental, near where this web site originates from.

Indeed Peter Coyote is rooted in the counterculture, his politics and spirituality come out of it. I, for one, am very glad of that.

The Unimaginable Life:Lessons learned on the path of love
Kenny and Julia Loggins
Published by Avon Books

Every once in a while a book comes along that shifts the gender dialogue forward, that pushes us toward union, and truthfulness. This is such a profound book! For it is essentially about love, love as it actually is lived. It is about the need to be loved and how that need expresses itself. In the process of that observation, captured in naked letters on the page, a new self is born, out of healing and redemption.

Indeed, the perpetuation of culture, which at its core comes out of the procreative union of male and female, depends upon the viability of such active loving. Culture is born out of union, out of family. It is the love between men and women that keeps culture alive.

The Unimaginable Life is exposed in the process of making family. It is about merging families, into the great extended family, which our community is trying to foster. It is about how we are in the real world. This book is a redemptive cry for freedom, not freedom from pain, or freedom from anguish. It is about the real freedom of being a part of suffering, and transforming that suffering into the glory of the human spirit.

The path of the householder is the most exacting road, for it demands that daily life practice be infused with compassion. One cannot be a good parent without practicing the art of love. In the dance, the children are included in the circle, not out of duty, but out of responsibility to the spirit that lives in the holy circle. The universal and ancient question becomes, "Where does the foot dance begin and where does the circle end?" The answer over and over is, what is shared on the path of love does not end, it is grounded into the living ground, into the very nature out of which we all emerge.

What I enjoyed most, besides the epic drama and honesty (it reads like a novel) is the book's groundedness to place. The wedding scene in Big Sur was the most moving scene for me. The magic which emerged from the naked wedding circle, that party of united parts! Talk about radical! Talk about getting down to business! Talk about walking the walk! What a healing! Somebody buy the movie rights. What occurred naturally from this stalwart group of people was fundamental. The scene portrays a communal, congregational, tribal, real, palpable healing circle. A healing circle of multi-generational status, where there was a force that knitted the time barriers, and everyone shared the common experience.

There is magic in creation, in healing, and it emerges from Kenny and Julia's journey, in the healing of spirit. That is what is so really wonderful about the book, it offers solace to the bareness of ideology. There is so much cynicism these days about the work which men and women must do to make love happen in their lives. This book antidotes the sad legacy of our wounded pasts. It soothes those of us who have experienced divorce, and it shows that even once one has experienced abuse, there is still the possibility, indeed, the glorious certainty, that healing is our birthright. This is accomplished not by sugar coating reality, or by the repetition of mindless new age affirmations, but by the authors sharing their process, which is simply being truly honest.

The Unimaginable Life is a life lived in constant forgiveness, not in an abstract sense, but forgiveness informed by place and past, and body.

There is great honesty here about the intricacies and paradox of having a body, a hungry vessel that we reside in which universally longs to be held, and succored. Julia's honesty about her "sensitivity" was especially touching, as there is so much shame which goes along with being environmentally vulnerable.

What I so deeply respect about this book, even more than the great child-rearing information, which is also an important sub plot, is the humbleness of the authors. In laying bare their most intimate process of love, Julia and Kenny have made themselves a part of humanity, one with all the broken hearted world, one with soul searchers everywhere; one with each, and each with their own appetite for survival, oblivion and redemption.

The great thing about this couple sharing their true story is that many people who are caught in the illusion of the consumerist dream, think that wealth buys happiness. That stars have it made. What the struggling middle class, as well as the stomped on multitude believe is that wealth can buy sanity and love. That is why the lifestyles of the rich and foolish are the main obsession of media.

If one has enough, one will feel good. Even people who know better get sucked into this myth. Yes, comfort affords a certain relaxation, but there is absolutely no price on consciousness and though the authors have the luxury of being able to afford space to learn, wealth does not do the learning. It is by their effort, the grit of their love, the determination of their spirits and the sanctity of their vows, that Kenny and Julia arrive at harmony. Along the way they show us that everybody treads this same way, to find, usually in utter exhaustion, the startling fact of existence: love is, in its ultimate clarity, the only power worth struggling for.

Love is what this book is about: being love, learning how to listen to love, learning who to ask when needing to know about the shadow of the dawn, cast upon the splintered mind program. It takes guidance to find safe harbor. I love that they openly consult oracles. I love that their politics are grounded in spirit, and that in melding the two, they help create a new model of love.

This book is a great example of "humanarchic consciousness", where neither male nor female is in command, and both are in ascendance. Unlike matriarchy and patriarchy, humanarchy springs from the truly egalitarian collaboration of one beautiful, sensitive, struggling man, and one beautiful, sensitive, struggling woman.

Together they created a real book. Together they have opened a place for us to nestle into, tenderly like the moon sets into the ocean, with moans of joy. Indeed, this book teaches that life on the path of love is imaginable, for it is our basic nature, our essential core, our innate instinct. Love is actualizable, doable, be-able.

The Old Coyote of Big Sur:
The Life of Jaime D' Angula
by his daughter, Gui Angula

O.K. folks, this is a precious book, a really special treat for those of us steeped in the lore of the west. Jaime D' Angula was a rare man, who came west when he was eighteen, from France, where he was born of Spanish descent. He was in San Francisco during the quake of 1906. He earned his medical degree at a prestigious university and ended up living the life of one of the most original inhabitants of Big Sur, with periodic, and lengthy excursions into Indian Country.

Jaime was the one who brought Jung to Taos. Jung later repaid the debt by convincing Jaime's ex-wife not to let their child visit California. Nice going Carl, with your head up her panties, turning man against man.

Jaime was the man who Kroeber, yes, Mr. Anthropology himself at U.C. Berkeley, could never forgive, for marrying his star woman protôgô. This is what Kroeber said of Jaime, "De Angula has quite unusual intellect along with an unstable personality. He gets tremendous pure enthusiasm as result of which he works some aspect of science through and then drops it. Since I have known him in the past three years his interests in succession have been psychiatry from the psychoanalytic side, ethno-psychology, under the influence of Levy-Bruhl, phonetics, and now California general ethnology and linguistics. A few days ago he came back from a month of field work with the Achomawi. He certainly got insight into their minds, I think a good deal of knowledge on their culture, and laid a foundation for an analysis of the language. Whether he will ever follow the work up to produce a useful monograph I not know. I have always kept him at arm's length-in spite of a good deal of liking for him and a quite thorough admiration-because of a fear of his inclination to fall around one's neck when he forms an attachment. Emotionally he is inclined to be vehement and infantile. Also he is very anxious to break into our game professionally." With letters of recommendation like that, Jaime never did score a secure position, and in fact, lived hungry and lean up in the mountains of Big Sur rather than kiss such rigid ass.

Jaime went temporarily mad after his ten year old son died in a car crash that he was passenger in. His son lay dead on his body for fifteen hours after their fall down the steep cliffs of Big Sur. This is Jaime who prissy D.H Lawrence thought was so crude, not knowing real wildness in a man when he saw it. Mabel Dodge, the famous catalyst of the Taos scene, wrote of Jaime and Lawrence, "We all went to the hot springs together. When the men came out, Tony was laughing (Tony was her Indian husband) and Lawrence was in one of his rages again, while Jaime was oblivious to both of them. He was declaiming the magical atmosphere down there, and he said: "As soon as I entered I recognized the Power...the collective unconscious".

"What's the matter," I whispered to Lorenzo at first opportunity. "He started saying his prayers or something, in the water!" replied the incensed Lorenzo. "Closed his eyes and stretched himself out and began to murmur!" "It's the sacred Indian word,' Jaime explained, opening one eye and then relapsing into it again. "It's insulting! A man has no business to be so indecent in a nice hot spring like that" insisted Lawrence. This is Jaime who cross-dressed but was not gay, in San Francisco.

This is Jaime who wrote Indian Tales, and Indians in Overalls. Get these books, and order this one from Stonegarden Press, 2851 Buena Vista. Berkeley, California 94708. Only five hundred copies were printed, hopefully it can get another printing. This is a gold mine of a book.

KAFKA WAS THE RAGE
BY ANATOLE BROYARD, VINTAGE BOOKS.
A Grenwich Village Memoir

This book has a strange cadence. A kind, stacatto, delivery, making ordinary the most brilliant insights, into sex, and love, and hipness, in the days when books were life, and the rebels lived through books, and music, and tried to jazz dig everything that was different than post war happy face america.

Yet were blessed by the happiness, which a war won deserves. The G.I. Bill, new thinkers, classes at the New School for Social Research, sex, love, death. Broyard captured something unique in this book, it is a good, fast read.