When I was 15, the Beatles changed my life. It wasn’t really anything new or shocking to the rest of the world, because it was 1991, and John Lennon had already been dead for 10 years, but to me it was a cultural quake that defined my values clearly to myself, for the first time . . . . .
And looking back now, has probably underscored them ever since.
Yes, I was going through a retro music phase. Trawling second hand record shops for old classics on vinyl. The CD may have already been born but it hadn’t hit my horizons yet, and quite frankly it didn’t hold the romance of the old LPs and the scratchy sound of the needle travelling round in it’s steady groove. God, I think we even have the LP to thank for words like “groovy” entering the language of popular culture. Makes me yearn for them now, though I never kept my old collection. Or my record player.
But you couldn’t touch on the Beatles’ music without imbibing something of the essence of that time. I remember wailing to my poor beleaguered parents that it wasn’t fair ~ I’d been born 20 years too late. I absorbed everything about John, Paul & George with the full force of pure teenage obsession (poor Ringo, I always overlooked him ~ only to appreciate him more recently for his cult-quality narration of the Thomas the Tank Engine early series on TV). In fact I’m a little embarrassed, recalling it now. The posters on my walls. The change in style of dress. The smoking habit I adopted.
Of course, there were other things, which perhaps had a greater impact on my life. Now I was moving in different circles, and it wasn’t just smoking cigarettes that my parents had to worry about. Somehow, this interest in the music and culture of the 60’s coincided with my friends and I discovering boys-that-played-in-rock-bands, and hanging round in smoky pubs watching live gigs that would turn into all night parties. The lying I had to do to cover up the places we would go. My quest for freedom seemed to make it feel alright to me. But I don’t think teenagers are supposed to do guilt; I just wanted to experience life in all it’s colour and adventure.
Naturally, that phase of my life ended, and actually fairly quickly, because I was ‘free’ to indulge it at will, and because I had the sense to see through the glamours before too long. But some things from that time have never left me. I think I can credit the Beatles with awakening my interest in all things out of India, and the beginnings of my journeys into meditation. At 15 I started learning yoga ~ a practice that seemed to open up the possibilities of peace and harmony within myself, and which is still so dear to me today. By 18 I was exploring meditation (Buddhist) in earnest and my spiritual path really blossomed out from there.
Over the years, I didn’t give my Beatles-phase much thought. In my twenties, I watched as one by one the friends, and the boys from the band, got married, got steady jobs, bought houses, bought suits and signed up to the traditional values that our parents handed down. In truth, I felt a bit betrayed by those old friends. Didn’t any of them mean the things that we’d espoused at 18? The long, heady nights we sat and vowed we’d never walk that line? I tried to maintain my rebellion against the confines of that life that they were buying into, feeling more and more alone. After graduating University in 1999, a deep and long-lasting depression set in that I just could not shake. It seemed to me my world had shrunk, from possibilities and dreams, to limitations and convention.
I suppose I’ve always felt outside of my culture, outside of my time ~ outside of this place looking in, bemused by what I see. Whilst battling to establish my own identity it felt pretty isolating to me. And I still have to make a concerted effort to engage with others when it comes to bigger types of social gatherings. Who am I kidding? Often even small groups are a struggle for me! Motherhood has given me so much to be grateful for but one of the simplest blessings it has bestowed on me is an experience that I now have in common with so many other women ~ it’s given me an unlimited amount of social currency that I can tap into and apply when I am feeling like the proverbial fish (out of water). It has grounded me in life, at a time when I was perhaps in danger of severing myself too completely from communing with the world.
And now, through doing what I do, through writing and through being self-employed, I have begun to explore the real possibilities of defining my life by the values that I still truly hold dear. It hasn’t been easy these last few years ~ battling so many competing forces to bring things into balance, and though I love my holistic/healing/teaching work, it’s not really bringing in the money that I need to make life work (which is why I still do supply teaching here and there). But I’m bouyed up by a sense of deep, enduring, inner conviction. Certain that I’m at least heading towards the place I need to be, even if I’m not quite there yet. And this little world of Blogland makes me feel like I’ve found a place where I can just *be*. The pieces of my great cosmic jigsaw seem to be falling more rapidly into place the more I do this, more I write.
*~*~*~*#*@*#*~*~*~*
Today, I happened across some interesting information on my travels through Blogland, which really brought all this back to the front of my mind. Tara Joyce posed the question, “What does the word “hippie” mean?” She says, “I keep getting called a ‘hippie‘. It seems to be the only word some people can think of to describe me and my husband’s way of life and values. I know I should correct them and say that I am actually a ‘Cultural Creative‘ but I don’t.”
“Excuse me,” I nearly shouted across the web-space, to no-one in particular, “but what is a Cultural Creative?!?!”
Oh. After a few short hops around her site, I had my answer.
Is this something that everyone else is talking about already? News that hasn’t reached me yet in my little rabbit-hole down by the river? Well, it seems pretty interesting to me right now.
I know some dear ones are going to say, it’s just another label and you don’t need labels to define who you are. They’re right, but then I can’t pass up the comfort I receive from finding out that I do fit in somewhere; that I’m not the total outcast, complete freak I once thoroughly believed I was (yes, I do know that in myself now too ~ and, probably, I’m getting much positive reinforcement now from embracing those labels that once used to itch so).
It was statements like these ones that really rang bells with me:
-
Do you detest the emphasis modern culture has on success and making it, on consuming and being rich?
-
Do you care deeply about the environment and are willing to pay higher taxes and prices to improve the situation?
-
Do you place a lot of emphasis on developing and maintaining your relationships?
-
Do you give a lot of importance to helping people and developing their unique talents?
-
Do you demand authenticity – at home and work, from businesses and politicians?
Tara explains how the Cultural Creatives are a real and coherent subculture of the Western world who have moved away from the two traditional cultural paradigms in our society (what she calls the Traditional and the Modern). Whereas these two old paradigms tend to view life choices in black and white, the new Creative Cultural paradigm, which she defines as having been emerging since the 60’s (Flower Power in full force!), sees things more in shades of grey.
The Traditional School of Thought taught us to live by these values:
# Men should dominate in family and in business
# Family, church and community are where you belong
# Conservative religious traditions must be upheld
# Familiar ways of doing things are embraced
# Freedom to carry arms is essential
# Foreigners are not welcome
The Modern School of Thought taught us to live by the following values:
# Making and having a lot of money
# Climbing the ladder of success
# Being hip, stylish or trendy
# Consuming
# Having a lot of choices
# Rejecting the values and concerns of the minority
# Bigger is better; time is money
Cultural Creative Values are more like this:
# Authenticity
# Social activism
# Idealism
# Globalism and ecology
# Consciousness
# Personal growth
Is anyone else starting to recognize themselves here?
Tara goes on to say:
“We are simply a group of people who have discovered our own truth our own way. Each of us, independently, has made a shift away from established culture. We are not represented as a group because we do not realize we are thinking as a unit. We do not know that we are a million voices strong.”
Wow. I’m really thrilled by that description. A million voices singing in the desert. Or singing quietly to ourselves in our small spaces, little studies, studios or private garden sanctuaries.
A link to another site from Tara’s page took me to a more in depth description of the Cultural Creative (CC) type. Once I got over the fact that this website referred to all CCs as American, and I ditched my indignation at the mere suggestion (pah!), it made me smile with recognition. It states that we are the Readers and Radio Listeners, rather than TV watchers. We buy more books and magazines than any other group (oh, god, have they seen my bedroom and my living room?). They are “literate and discriminating, and dislike most of what is on TV. They demand good information, and have exceptionally good deception-detectors for ads and for misleading corporate or political claims in the media. They are particularly unhappy with the quality of TV news.” Here, here.
Naturally, CCs are aggressive consumers of art and culture and far more likely to be involved in the arts either as an amateur or a pro, and “are more likely to write books and articles, and to go to meetings and workshops about creative endeavors.”
Read it for yourself, if you are interested. Some of the descriptions sound a little bit bonkers, but I particularly liked this one at the end:
The Nest: When Cultural Creatives buy homes, they like homes that are “nests”: not only a lot of privacy externally, but private spaces within, including the buffering of childrens’ space from adult space, and with lots of interesting nooks and niches. They are more likely to live out of the living room and not bother with a family room. They are far more likely to have an office in the home, and to have converted a bedroom, den, or family room into that office.
Ha ha! That was my complete motivation for moving into this little house when I found it last November. There are some things I find hard to like about it, but it has given me that extra room to be my personal creative/office space. I’d got to the point where I really felt I needed that in order to move forward with my business and my path.
What am I taking away with me from this today? Why am I waffling on at such length now? Perhaps it’s that I feel an urge to celebrate my old hippie label that I once held so dear, which I’ve allowed myself to mock over the years, in the light of other’s changing values around me. And in my mind, I’ve been replaying the White Album whilst sitting here, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, rekindling the old flame of my devotion to George Harrison a little {we’ve all got our own favourite Beatle, haven’t we, and I wonder if it says more about you than you think? do tell ~ who’s yours?}
Peace and Love.
