Until yesterday.

Ah ha,
This being High Street I will not feign to speak of the dead and relate a funny story I know of. From way back when I had settled permanently down on the Bay Area, and after I had run into him and his people at a local Berkeley event. This was before his first stroke I think and he was still speaking to folks in public and reporters when they called. At this time weird, funky things still flushed up like mushrooms from the fertile beds of  San Francisco proper. And even the tripped out kids were capable of entertaining antics

Some of these denizens had discovered that year, a yet unknown power stone in Golden Gate park. Which through whatever foggy haze hung that day they recognized as a Shiva Lingam. A massive Lingam at that, being several hundred pounds and 5 feet tall, lying their in all its pranic glory in the bay laural and Eucalyptus scrub out behind the Rose Garden by the Park Presido Bypass.  Now in this odd forgotten corner of the park not being that far from the Fulton St  pedestrian entrances, how the children of Aquarius and other hippies of yore managed to miss this powerful pointed beacon begs a question which might be explained by the fact that this particular and really, humongous Shiva Lingam was composed not of magical polished hard stone from the Himalayas, but was actually a concrete fire plug. Tossed there in the weeds by a sensitive SF Public works crew who felt it would better serve posterity in the brush than loaded at great effort into their dump truck. But no matter to the devotees living in the underbrush, for here they had discovered the real thing to polish their days. And polish it they did.


Now word of this discovery spread far and wide across the city, and many pilgrimages were made.  In fact it spread it farther and wider than even San Francisco could imagine; lo and behold, good folks, some in flowing robes, started showing up from India, Europe and even Canada. This created more hub bub for the Park works crews than they had surely ever contemplated when they placed said plug in situ. For this area of the park was abandoned on purpose and now they had to attend to the adding impact of daily rituals and holding of the station long into the night. New unauthorized  trails were cut and the tourist in the Rose Garden were in danger of being a bit freaked out by the new age hippies popping out of the margins.

So in a very San Franciscan way the issue was put up for public discussion. Sensible people in power even volunteered that the large stone could be moved to another location within the park and dedicated by all comers as a proper shrine to whomever it was meant to be a shrine to. That part was not required to be fleshed out at the moment of course, these being gentler times in all manner of ways. Yet in what is also a very SF way, no agreement for this pressing civic matter of vital social import could be settled upon. And so the Shiva Lingam sat where it was. Until suddenly one day it was gone.

Imagine the surprise when the daily meditators arrived to find their object of desire had vanished into the San Francisco night. What in the world had happened here? No one knew, no one was talking. It made the front page the next day. Such the local mystery!  Of course the ire of some was raised, and pointed questions were asked of the City. Had the Public Works crew set out to right the wrong they had originally committed and retrieved the plug to deliver it to its intended final resting place. The dump was searched, people were asked, assumptions made that were shortly debunked. For whatever balance the work crews and their Higher Park Authorities might have wanted to restore to our world, they were not the culprits of this caper. The trail went stone cold for the moment.

But not for long, oh no, for it was a very different kind of man who was behind this monument's momentous moment.  And cracks began to form soon after in the facade till a surprising leak appeared. That it became a veritable gusher of backtracking was all that more surprising.  It seems that our very own Ram Dass himself had dispatched his devotees of the night kind and absconded with the beloved pillar. And had he done this out of some rash of brash civic mindedness?  Maybe to preserve for humanity our shared Bay Area heritage, our adopted birthright for our newfound  California homestead? Oh my fellow traveler, such simple pure motivations are not to be our fate, read no further if your heart yearns for such things nor  never doubt the complexities of the human condition. It is best not to seek the interior of the deepest reaches of human souls, the veils and robes that separate us all are just tattered thin.

Here now in a most fascinating turn of events it  came forth that the desired Lingam had actually taken further flight and been sold by Ram Dass to an Indian coveter who had gladly handed over ten thousand good old American greenbacks for the privilege. Well that was a shocker for sure. One of our own enlightened had lightened our load. And he would have gotten away with it had it not been for those meddling kids at the newspaper. But in the end what is done is done, and after a check was cut back to the city we all settled back into being there for now in the city by the glittering bay.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2019-12-23 14:02:45)

I had to pull out and gussy up something entertaining. Especially  after remembering hearing some of yours!
Inspiration move me brightly.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2019-12-23 21:07:40)

I always got from his words the sense that it was never too late. And the ways to apply more love into the world can always be learned, always just within our reach, attainable with what we already have to work with.



Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

Fled wrote:

He wrote so much that one is tempted to think of infinite monkeys, yet he landed so many gems.  My introduction to him came in the way many delinquents found their way through their teenage years, based on one head's recommendation to another, The Joyous Cosmology.  It turned out to be something of a Fodor's guide for me for a time.  His exploration of the concept of time was like a pasture on which to chew.   

“[T]he present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present—the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower.”

Joyous Cosmology - Alan Watts.

Just Sayin'.  I have a first edition on my book shelf.

Johnny_Rotten wrote:

Ah another wordy wordsmith of note. His cabin in Muir woods still exists as it is next to the last of the lifetime leases granted when the park eminent domained the whole Druid Heights bohemian community. I sometimes walk through there and pay homage to the site of the very first California Hot Tub created and frolicked within. Now that is something from the sixties that provided many enlightening events across the years. Friends also found his pipe in the walls of his pilothouse cabin on Varda's ferryboat in Sausalito. Which is still moored on the beach in the exact same location.

Dredging up some of my old memories and times there Padawan.  Tripping from one House Boat to another, blissful in my youthful ignorance of the people I was rubbing shoulders with.  If I only knew then, I would perhaps of been less of a fool, but probably not.  The roll has stuck it after playing it all of those years.

Last edited by SpacePuppy (2019-12-25 19:07:40)