by Mariana Caplan Excerpted from the forthcoming Adventures of a New Age Traveler (Hohm Press, 2002). There were no welcome banners at the entrance to California as I had imagined from the way Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Kate Wolf sing of it. The Rainbow Family didn’t throw a welcome party just because I had arrived. Instead, I spent my first weeks in Oakland, looking out between the steel bars of a dusty attic-bedroom window, wondering what the hell to do with my life. Occasionally I would dare the walk between myself and the Underground, where I would pass the afternoon getting on and off at random stops, trying to figure out where I was and waiting for something significant to happen.

by Michael Dinan

My name is Michael and I am an addict. When I first made that statement over nine years ago, it felt like a shameful straightjacket. It choked in my throat as I coughed it up in a cloud of noxious cigarette smoke at my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Over the course of my recovery, the edge of judgment in the word “addict” mellowed. It slowly changed tone and became instead a soulful liberation. I scrutinized the rest of humanity through this lens of addiction and found them all qualifying in some respect. Now the phrase sounds to me more like a gentle observation of a universal truth on a par with the noble truths of Buddhism. Simply substitute attachment for addiction and it translates: Anyone still manifesting in a clunky 3-D body should be under suspicion of suffering from some degree of addiction and could certainly benefit from the 12-step yoga of letting go and yoking their ego to its soul source. How many king and queen babies today have been weaned at the military-industrial teat and can't be pacified by anything short of total remote control from a cushy sofa?