Well, I had met RD through Be Here Now when Stanley loaned me Vicky Hemmis' copy back in the very early 70s.

I thought NKB looked like a big ol walrus and wondered if that was who The Beatles were singing about around that time and before.

I thought RD looked like someone out on a guru jag, but who's possible saving grace was his wonderful sense of humor, and that it might be interesting to meet this teacher of his, this Hari Das guy who had such long hair because he only cut(s?)it once every 12 years at some whoopdeedoo they called a Kumba Mela.

He was said to be mauni, meaning silent. He communicated only with a chalk board. Ok. I wanted to see this.

But, as much as I was preoccupied with the dying of my mom during her fight against the big C, and raising my sons in the middle of a home tainted by alcoholism and out of which I worked as a teacher both in public and private schools, while also doing crisis intervention work in the middle of the Vietnam era in a a college town fraught with Campus Unrest (where even a simple housewife could not go from here to there without being accosted by police for one reason or another) and the sexual revolution was in Full Swing and the Drug Culture was merrily downing this and that and smoking and snorting this that and the other thing.

Well. You can imagine. Maybe, or not, but it was hard to remember that I wanted to go to Lama on the mountain and see those folks. the Lama Beans. Oh yeah, and I was also in grad school, simultaneously with attempting to start a business so I wouldn't have to make a living with my art, or depend on my alcoholic husband, who might stumble while switching out trains on the ground. That was before he went firing to go into engine service.

Anyway. I originally came out of a home wherein I had been abused while a child by an elder, for one thing.

To further digress for a bit: My people are Polish Folks. As just about everyone knows Polacks are an indulgent and self-indulgent people. Polish weddings are the kind of event that everyone who has never been often wonders about or knows someone who has wondered what one might be like. They are said to be gala feasts, and that they are, or were, when I was a kid. Sometime I might try to write a description our feasts and frolics but Polish Halls and what happened in them in Detroit during my childhood will have to wait for another time.

When I was badly used and abused quite early in life by a sibling of my mom the event threw our home into a chaotic state that left me both detesting and avoiding conflict whenever and wherever possible.

Later I found out I was one of the lucky ones, incested, yes, but at least my parents believed me when I revealed it to them. Furthermore they tried to do something about it.
It was a giant uproar at the time and only gradually reduced itself to a dull downroar, if that's a word. I think it describes my life to date, beginning with that one event. How would I know, though, it's the only life I have had, so far as I know.

You might say that to a greater or lesser extent our lives are not really ours to control, anyway, incest survivor or not.

Me, I was born just as the first world war began simultaneously going over the air waves on the radio and in theaters, TV was in its infancy, at the time, but my world awareness was based on my home life and the electronic buzz that was also within it, thereby I was thrust into a simultaneously personal as well as international conflict that not only echoed the one in my personal life but regularly reverberated in the world due to historical circumstances.

For me, just by being born when and where and to whom I found myself being reared by in 1942 and thereafter was one long drawn out conflict situation after a fairly happy (with a couple of exceptions)and oblivious (despite an over-active brain)two years of waking to my surroundings.

So, when some twenty-some years later, Vietnam came along, I was busy with art school, my head in a bucket of paint and my hands clutching sculpting tools.,

I kept especially busy due to wanting to avoid all the shit that was hitting the fan at the time, wanting that a Great, Huge, Whole Lot. It wasn't possible, of course, but I did make a valiant effort.

But, back to Hari Dass, after one more digression:

I did finally get out of the loonie bin that the above noted conflict-ridden world quite suddenly, it had seemed, got me trapped. Mostly it was by the skin of my teeth that I got out. So, while still in stir, just about all I knew at the time that I wanted to get out for was to go to the Lama Foundation which was all non-electric, but for the gas powered generator, situated at over five thousand feet above sea level.

Very different was my home situation. I was very much used to living on the terminal morain that is Michigan, a lot of which is pretty low in relation to the sea, making for a heady experience conferred upon an erst-while hippie, on foot, back-packing a good 45 or 50 pounds on an inclined plane, 18 miles north of Taos, NM and six miles south of Questa, comprising a four mile walk up the mountain from the cattle gate. Without a water flask. Shows what I knew.

I had taken a train from here (East Lansing) to there (Raton, NM) and a hitch or two from there to Taos and a bus from there to the cattle gate, the hitching involved meeting some nice people and a lotta standing around and some little carrying while walking.

There was some time spent in the town of Taos, lusting after beautiful turquoise stones, beautiful blues and greens with matrix marks nestled in metal beds, ready to become jewelry to the story. This, along with a general miasma of unreality that I encountered along the way to seeing and while seeing Hari Das, but I did buy a Yellow Book and maybe that was the most I accomplished on that particular trip to Monkey Heavenliness which was my first to Lama where I met the Lama Beans who were, as a result of my bell ringing introduction to them, almost as disappointed with me as I was with them.