“…and we sail into the mystic…”

I’m sitting in the winery at Edgefield, listening to Raina Rose sing. I’m here with Kate, Kate’s parents, and Raina’s dad.

I am trying to define what I am sensing and observing. The generation of parents, now dressed in button-downs and Docker khakis, members of that special generation in American history–the one that tore down the walls of the Establishment, of the “big snowed American public” as Steve MacGarrett of Hawaii 5-0 called it, of racism, of rigid lock-step allegiance to the war machine. The generation that broke open contemporary art and creative culture. The generation of drug culture, the generation that taught us all that we are free to be you and me.

These three proud parents here tonight are of the generation who taught their children to sing, you know, to give voice to their experiences big and small.

As I sit here and sink into the sounds and the thoughts as they amplify in my mind, I realize that the singer in front of me and my yogi friend sitting next to me are gifts, beings given into a time when the “big snowed American public” needs a reminder of what should be at the heart of every day: peace in one’s heart, family, community, gathering. A song. This is the generation who still believes that we not only can, albeit we should, let our souls and spirits fly.

My generation seems to have forgotten all of this. Or, quite possibly, the true midlife crisis is something akin to finding oneself, on a random Wednesday night, sandwiched between cultural shamen older and younger than oneself and realizing that you, too, have a gypsy soul, that you once believed in the truths, that you once upon a time were not snow-blind. And then you realize you can still step outside the air-conditioned nightmare as Henry Miller called it. You realize that age and generations are all one, and you, too, are younger than the sun.