I find it nearly incompressible that it was forty-nine years ago that the Human Be-In was held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
My generation had been born into a period of unprecedented wealth and wealth more broadly spread than ever before, and with that access to education and information generally. And, at the same time in the same place there was terrible poverty, and racism, and homophobia, and full on sexism, and symbolic of so much, a bloody symbol at that, our country was torn apart by our involvement in a war in southeast Asia, itself a proxy for a great conflict between what our elders chose to call East and West. Oh yes, birth control, and, psychedelics, and mutually assured destruction all happened right then.
Something trembled in its birthing. Some great turning seemed at hand. Of course the Human Be-In as a marker for the turning is arbitrary, and can’t really be right, too much happened before, too much after.
But, something was definitely happening. So, why not mark it here?
Later some small sense of this promised new age would be caught in a musical, if not fully accurately captured.
When the Be-In happened I was nineteen years old and full into my exploration of the spiritual explosion that was San Francisco. While I was in the neighborhood, I passed on what was expected to be, and in fact was a crush of many thousands. Didn’t need to go. I’d already fallen fully into the dreams of the Summer of Love that the Be-in ushered in.
A dream. A hope. And a hallucination.
But it hinted at something.
And while that psychedelic dream itself pretty quickly fell apart, the fervent quest continued.
At least for some.
Two years later I would ordain as a Zen monk.
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