Ageing Aquarius

I have always had a yearning to be a hippie* but in my own way.  This yearning is a whole new blog post, but for now its safe to say that I identify with the hippie ethos - well most of it anyway.

This post is about what came out of the first writing workshop  -  the idea for a whole book - about Hippies.

I even had the name of the book come to me, which often does not come until the whole thing is written. Having said that, I may yet change it, but for now, its called -

Ageing Aquarius.

Have you ever wondered what happens to old hippie's?  I guess it hasn't really been an issue up until recently as the hippies of the sixties and seventies are still relatively young.  But what about a baby boomer, born in 1934, so she is 35 in 1969 when the Woodstock Festival brings the hippie sub-culture to the light of the rest of the world?  In 2012 she is 78 years old.  What happens to her then?

It came to me when we had to write a short piece describing a persons physical description to tell a story about who they were.  I think I wrote something about wooden bangles and flowing skirts, but not on a young fresh body, but an ageing, wrinkly, paperthin body.  It got me thinking - what does happen to an old Hippie? We always think of them as young and carefree, with no responsibilites and freedom. 

This is the premise of the book I want to write.  So in preparation, I am reading all things Hippie, which is very dangerous if you are married to me,  It's evoking all kinds of mid life crisis, probably a lot like the Hippie movement itself.  I want to shuck off all the contraints of affluenza, run naked in life, with no burdens. 

Maybe after I write my book, I will have come back down to earth.




* The word Hippie comes from the word Hipster.  It was used to describe a sub-culture of people in the mid 1960's on the west coast of the USA, predominately around San Francisco.