(...continued from part one)
1967 was 'The Summer of Love'. Fences came down and baby-boomers trampled across a dozen sacred boundaries. Something leapt in my belly!
I ended up at a Billy Graham crusade! Standing beside a pimply Christian with a radiant smile. He signed me up for the 'good news' while thousands around me sang and cried and thanked Jesus. I tried from the deepest bones of sincerity to see what they were seeing. Did the emperor really have no clothes? Or was I just the spawn of satan?
Each night I would still recite the prayer, three times. Each night it would be me and The Presence. Each night I would have more questions.
I left school at 15 with a rudimentary education and a passion for art, music and poetry. I had 'counter-culture' written on my forehead...no...blazing like a neon ad!
King's Cross and Taylor Square in Sydney in '68 and '69 were as close to Haight-Ashbury as we were gonna get in the antipodes! A super magnet to whatever was stirring within me. I would bus in and sit in a wine bar or coffee house and write poetry, or hit the local William Blake recitation group or folk club.
As the green and yellow council bus chugged up William Street one momentus day, I noticed a sign. Had it always been there? I really NOTICED it! In fact it caused my stomach to feel like a butterfly net tangled with a thousand wings! It simply said....ASTROLOGY.
It was not the meaning of the word. It was what it represented.
Somehow it blasted open a door to the idea that there are an infinite number of paths up the mountain. As this concept flooded my awareness The Presence became huge around me and I felt as though a seed of destiny had sprouted. There was also a strange chill...a scary kind of excitement...as though I was about to begin an adventure which would rival an assault on the summit of Mt. Everest itself!
(...to be continued in part three)
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