Conception

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

   I wrote the novel as a fiction and it didn’t occur to me to even consider going to the internet for research then. 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 to the facts with only a few adventures exaggerated or completely made-up in the interest of telling a story over any factual considerations. After I had written it, however, I searched for pictures on the internet for the adobe pueblo and fantastic kiva to no avail. Plenty of New Buffalo but very few of the mesa on the other side of Arroyo Hondo. 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 that, 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 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 he'd 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. I let Pam know that my fictionalized version of Morningstar was based on my experience there but that, since it, A Time Ago and Then, is fiction some of it, while truthful, is not factual. Pam expressed 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 and I hope to be as honest and clear about my own experience there and little more.

The Journey Begins:

     I had just gotten out of the US Navy in the fall of 1969 and wanted so badly to become involved in 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 a miserable four years of a moral compromise nonetheless. My first psychedelic “trip” had been taken while attached to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor after recovering from a broken back and awaiting my discharge. I was on the beach in Waikiki where 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 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 more akin 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”.