A Morningstar Romance

Introduction

My time at Morningstar East in New Mexico was as well-spent as it was a short and powerful one. I was young, in my early twenties, and so were the others on the mesa. I don’t recall anyone there over thirty but there might have been. The prism of time distorts the memory but I was trying to sort out the memory of that period when I was writing the novel, A Time Ago and Then. As I wrote I became curious about the people and the place that was so crucial to my spiritual evolution. The vision I have retained and the compassion of that remarkable group of young people, whose creative vision put together such a remarkably courageous attempt at an altruistic and free-form communal living, is still with me today even though I have moved on.

     I didn’t even consider going to the internet when I wrote this novel as a fiction. I was recalling that experience as I’d seen it without any outside input. I have no regrets about that because most of what I had written was true with only a few adventures exaggerated in the interest of telling a story over a factual exposition. After I had written it, piqued by curiosity, I searched for pictures on the internet of the adobe pueblo and fantastic kiva to no avail. I wanted so badly to refresh my memory of the buildings these people had put together and to see pictures of the people that I had once been so fond of. I assumed, because I am getting older, that some of these people were getting on in years too; my chance of making contact with any of them was getting shorter as time takes its toll. I hoped a picture, or a name mentioned, would refresh my memory and that I might recognize someone I knew from those days so very long ago.

     I did find a website, the Morningstar Scrapbook, which had much of the history of the commune’s battles with Sonoma County and some of the people who’d founded Morningstar East in Taos New Mexico. After leaving a comment on Ramon’s site (one of Morningstar West’s original members), he passed it on to Pam Hanna because I’d mentioned the amazing roof of the pueblo’s kiva. Pam was the mate of Larry Read who’d come up with the design and made it happen. It was she who contacted me via e-mail correspondence. I let Pam know that my fictionalized, albeit thinly veiled, version of Risingstar was based on my experience at Morningstar.  But, that since it (A Time Ago and Then; published as an E-book at Smashwords.com.), is fiction, some of it, while truthful, was not factual. Pam expressed to me that her reticence about fictionalized versions of Morningstar was caused by T.C. Boyle’s use of “narrative skill to malign, characterize & misrepresent us”. I am happy to have her blessing and this inspires me further to call this memoir a Morningstar Romance. It will have insights about the place and the people I met on that plateau of my own experience in Taos. I hope to be as honest and clear about my own experience there and little more. 

Chapter 1:

The Adventure

I had just gotten out of the US Navy in the fall of 1969 and wanted badly to rejoin the San Francisco scene that I had left four years before. My experience in the Navy was mild compared to those who’d been sent to the front in Viet Nam but it was four years of a moral compromise on my part nonetheless. My first psychedelic “trip” had been taken while attached to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor while recovering from surgery on three crushed vertebrae. It was on the beach in Waikiki that I had gone through a powerful eye-opening spiritual transformation. Every lie I had ever told…lived… or otherwise convinced myself of, was revealed in stark detail. This was not a disturbing revelation because, after ceding to this spiritual void I had been living in, I was able to transcend guilt and shame to actually see a harmony and sense to it all… whatever “it all” was. It was one of those mountain-top experiences that so many people had undergone via the vehicle of LSD, peyote or psilocybin. I saw my alcoholism as a silly obsession… a diversion… a clouding… that kept me from living fully in the light of what I understood to be God… the creative energy… the Heart of Compassion… that was The Reality. It was like being able to see music… every note of an orchestra in the rhythms and harmony… colors and forms… patterns really… than it was a vision of God. But I saw God in “it all”.

     Having had that mountain-top experience, I hungered to find people to share it with. After I was discharged, I hung out in North Beach selling underground rags (the Berkeley Barb, Good Times, Berkeley Tribe and so on) at the hub of Columbus, Grant and Broadway, down the street in front of the topless bars. It gave me enough money to eat and enough contact with others, but the scene in San Francisco was going to the dogs: street dogs, runaways, heroine addicts, speed freaks, and those who preyed on them. The psychedelic revolution I’d hoped to become a part of had moved elsewhere and I had almost given up that hope when the Rolling Stones came to Altamont Speedway. That gathering turned out to be a fiasco almost directly opposite of Woodstock, even though it was touted as Woodstock West by the “underground” press. I saw the whole thing through the lens of LSD and it was not anything I wanted to have anything to do with. I stayed on there with a rag-tag group that had been foraging for whatever was left in the field… at first it was sandwiches and pot… later we were the clean-up crew and lived in the race-track tower. My experience there is covered with detail in A Time Ago and Then and I see no purpose in describing again those ugly details of that eye-opener here.

     I left there for Hollywood to see what that scene was about but it was decaying faster than San Francisco. It was depressing and, when word got out that there was a Free Land movement in Taos New Mexico, my road-dog buddy, Norman, and I put our thumbs-out. I was introduced to the magic of New Mexico on a ride that picked us up at a corner in Las Cruses we stood at for hours. A woman in her forties (which was an ancient age to us then) told us of the mystery and power of the landscape. She had been a Black-Jack dealer in Vegas who one day packed up and moved to Questa. She was familiar with the communes in Taos and encouraged us to find one we liked and explained the history and philosophy of each that she knew of.

I wish I could remember that wonder woman’s name; I think it was Maggie, but time has clouded the old muscle between my ears. I do remember being dazzled by her spiritual awareness as she drove that Volkswagen bus, weaving back and forth over the center line, gesturing with abandon and shouting over the rattle of the engine so affectionately, the sights and history we passed through.

We came to Taos where she had friends that were mostly musicians. I have no idea where it was or whose house it belonged to but we sat and talked, played music into the night as a pipe was passed around to the light of a small kerosene lantern common everywhere. There was no electricity and a sort of flatbread chapatti was, almost universally, cooked on the top of a fifty-gallon drum made into a wood-burning stove. Those drums too would be common everywhere.

One of these folks explained that New Buffalo and Morningstar were the closest and most open communes. However, New Buffalo, being the first commune in the region, was pretty much full-up and harder to get into. It was explained that Morningstar and the Reality Construction Company were on the same property owned by Michael Duncan and close by. Of the two, Morningstar was friendliest to newcomers and allowed anyone to join… if join is the right word… it was more like welcomed in. There was no visible leadership and the only rule was Love. It sounded like the kind of place I needed to air out in because I had enough of authority in the Navy… and seen street corner gurus of wild enthusiasm and conviction, cultish Christian preachers, and manipulators of every sort in Hollywood. The whole bit about Charlie Manson had gone down already by then and the wild chaos and disappointment at Altamont had sucked my soul dry of what little hope I still desperately held on to. I had to check it out. It sounded like the vision I had for the future on the beach in Waikiki. I wasn't at all sure but, if there was hope, perhaps I might find it at Morningstar.