Map of Ohshima at the pier.

Dawn from the deck of the overnight ship; our first view of Ohshima.

We are thrilled to be here!

Magically, Hiro, a friend of Mana’s, has arrived on the same ship and is waiting for us at the pier with her car to take us to the hot springs and the top of Mount Mihara, Ohshima’s volcano. Good thing we missed the bus!

Beside the indoor hot springs pool are showers, where we clean ourselves before entering the pool.

The outdoor hot springs pool looks out upon the summit of the volcano.

Hiro goes off to work (she’s a massage therapist), and Enchan, an artist friend of Mana’s, comes to pick us up and show us the views. Mayumi and I get up on the fence for a better look at Mount Mihara’s caldera. The last eruption occured only 20 years ago. The volcano is definitely still active.

Near the volcano visitors center, a sign showing the viewer where to look across the ocean for Mount Fuji. It’s the blue cone on the horizon, and a huge feature in the distant landscape.

The volcanic seacoast near the house where Enchan lives with her baby Mani, aged 15 months.

When we got to Enchan’s house, I took a long nap. I hadn’t slept much on the overnight ship. When I awoke, to my surprise, three people were waiting to interview and photograph me for a magazine article! Hiroshi, Maki and Takashi were good-natured about the communication mix-up, but they were also on a deadline. So, I pulled myself together, put on a lovely dress, and off we went, with Mana and Mayumi, for photos in the forest behind Mana’s house. After the magazine people left, Mana, Mayumi and I visited Junko at her very aesthetically advanced Oasis Cafe and Inn, and she served us a healing tea. Tomorrow night I will sing at the cafe.

Enchan and Mani. Mayumi and I are bedding down at their home tonight. Mayumi made pan breads with a whole wheat and raisin dough she brought from Yokohama; Enchan prepared a green salad and a pumpkin soup from her own organic garden produce and sashimi with cayenne pepper from a fish caught two hours earlier off Ohshima. Mana gave us freshly prepared brown rice, and excused herself to go teach a class. While I happily cleaned up after dinner and did the dishes, Mayumi played my guitar and sang for us.

Last night in Yokohama Harbor, at 10 PM, Mayumi and I boarded an overnight ship bound for Ohshima, a small volcanic island close enough to Tokyo to be included in its city limits, but far enough away to be another world, like Martha’s Vineyard is to Boston, or Catalina is to Los Angeles. We will visit our mutual friend Mana, who introduced us.

What you get with an economy ticket is a tatami sized piece of the carpeted area onwhich to sleep and keep your things. Mayumi and I are amused.

For 100 yen, you can rent a blanket. The black foam filled headrests are free. Pretty soon everyone is tucked in, and at 11 PM, the ship’s crew turns the overhead lights off. You can still see your way around easily with the hall lights, which remain on.

I see recycling containers everywhere I go in Japan, and the ship has six different ones at each staircase.

Toilets are traditional Japanese style; you squat, which I think is much healthier than sitting on your thighs western style, since you can actually use your abdominal muscles in a squat, and avoid straining your rectum.

There is no way I can fall asleep to the immense growling of the ships engines, so, I don’t. No one else seems to have this problem, but, so what.  The hour until the lights go out seems like as good a time as any to practice guitar. My Pro Series Traveler Guitar is practically silent, and it comes with a stethiscope (the diaphragm is built into the guitar body and the tubes to the earphones detach) so that you can hear yourself play without using an amplifier.

It’s a pretty good sounding guitar; I’ve been using it professionally for a couple of years now. It’s got two pickups with separate volume controls, one that sounds more electric and one that sounds more acoustic, and you can blend them for a third sound. It has a full sized fretboard, but the tuning pegs are in the center of the guitar (where the sound hole would be on an acoustic guitar), and the lap-rest on the bottom of the guitar detaches and then reattaches so that the guitar is ultra-compact for traveling. No one has ever hassled me about bringing it on an airplane. It’s the size of a soprano ukulele and easily fits in any overhead compartment. And it’s not an expensive guitar.

Man hole cover on a Yokohama city street

I am visiting musician, dancer and bodyworker Mayumi Hirai in Tsurumi, the section of Yokohama closest to Tokyo. Today she took me on a magical walk around her neighborhood.

We walked along the Tsurumi River where it flows through an industrial landscape to the sea.

We passed a little karaoke bar with a bit of everything in its decor.

Mayumi showed me three beautiful old temples, and we silently prayed at the entrace of each one.

A trio of holy statues at the entrance to a temple garden.

Before we approach the temple, we clean our hands and souls with spring water from the mountain on which the temple stands.

Dragon fountain in the temple garden.

A shrine for children next to the temple.

A Shinto shrine.

Leaving the Shinto shrine through the torii.

Down the stairs below the torii.

The Buddhist temple where the Hirai family’s ancesters lie.

The magnificent interior of the Buddhist temple.

Funerary statues in the cemetery behind the Buddhist temple.

Mayumi brings water to refresh the spirits of her ancestors.

She tenderly pours water upon the tombs of her family members.

We return to Mayumi’s apartment on a quiet side street, downstairs from her parents’ home, to which she returned five years ago after decades of travel and learning. She prepared us a scrumptuous lunch of healthful traditional Japanese foods–lotus root, edamame, tofu, sea vegetables.  Now, while I am writing this blog, Mayumi plays her shamisen. Sometimes life is just SO good.

“Cat hope welcome you cat’s happy home!”

At the end of a thirty hour day that included crossing the International Date Line and being sidelined by a typhoon, which closed Tokyo’s Narita Airport for several hours while our plane waited at the airport in Osaka, I lay my weary bones upon a floor futon in a tatami room and breathed in gratitude for Toyko’s remarkable hospitality. Dear Koki Aso waited for me for EIGHT HOURS at Narita, sweetly and cheerfully, and delivered me to Yuko Tsukamoto in North Tokyo, who waited up for me until 1:30 AM, and stayed up with me another hour to make sure I was comfortable. I am fortunate indeed to have friends such as these.

I discovered the little box above on the bathroom shelf in Yuko’s family’s apartment where I am spending four nights.

October begins and the Communal Studies Association Conference ends. I bid a fond farewell to my friend Tim Miller, who chaired the conference and had invited me to perform and speak at it, and who wrote a wonderful foreword to the fourth edition of Living on the Earth, chairs the department of Religious Studies at University of Kansas at Lawrence, hosted my visit to Lawrence in 2000, when I did a concert and booksigning there, lived on a rural hippie commune himself in his younger days, and has published immense amounts of scholarly research on communes through the ages. And a dear heart as well.

I drive south along Tomales Bay.

I come to the end of the bay, where the Bolinas township begins.

View of Stinson Beach, Bolinas, and Bolinas Lagoon from the cliffs of Highway One.

View of San Francisco from the cliffs of Highway One, just before I pass Muir Beach.

Today Ramon, Delia, Art and I shared our experiences and fielded questions as a panel on northern California communes. I think the point I am trying to make in this picture is about bonding.

My sister, a psychologist, taught me that physical closeness with emotional openness (which she calls bonding) is a human need on the level of food, air, and water; certainly babies die when they are deprived of it. She says that bonding is scarce in modern societies, and that lack of bonding is the source of much of what we call mental illness. I think that the hippie communes of the 1960’s grew out of a hunger for bonding and the deep relaxation derived from an abundance of it. The bonding that we offered one another created relationships far more deep and durable than those with our blood relations, indeed, here we sat, Ramon, Delia and I, as close as family members nearly forty years after we met, due to the immensely intimate experience of living outdoors together in an anarchistic society.

I found homes for a whole bunch of my books, CDs and t-shirts among the attendees of the conference.

In the late afternoon, Nicholas Alva presented his musical Morningstar Idyll, based on the story of Morningstar commune, with songs by Ramon Sender, Joe Dolce, me, and others. Steve Fowler, an actor formerly with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and a neighbor and long time close friend of Lou Gottlieb’s played him so closely I felt he was channeling Lou’s spirit. Delia’s son Jeremy Sharp played Ramon Sender. Nick himself narrated, and a colorful cast of Gen X and Gen Y folks sang and danced the parts of the hippie folk. I was moved to tears when the full cast sang and danced my song “Thanksgiving Hymn” (the fifth song on Music From Living on the Earth). Afterwards, the cast presented me with a bouquet.

Boats on Tomales Bay as seen from the Marconi Conference Center.

Buck Hall, the main meeting room at Marconi Conference Center, which in the 1970’s had housed one of the Synanon communites.

I arrived yesterday at the Marconi Conference Center on Tomales Bay in Western Marin County, some beautiful miles west and north of the Golden Gate Bridge, for the 33rd annual Communal Studies Association Conference, a gathering of mostly academics who research and present papers in this field.

A group of academic folk who study communes (and get a little needlework done while listening) attend one of the many presentations at the conference. We were listening to Susan Love Brown talk about a Rastafarian intentional community that flourished in Jamaica in the 1940’s.

Tomorrow I speak as part of a panel about life on Northern California communes, along with Ramon Sender Barayon (first resident of Morningstar commune, resident of Wheeler Ranch commune, author of A Death in Zamora, my co-author on Being of the Sun, and pioneer of electronic music), Arthur Kopecky (former resident of and author of two books journaling his days at New Buffalo commune in New Mexico), and Delia Moon (founder/owner of Bodega Pastures commune, former resident of Star Mountain commune, and doctoral candidate in sociology, who will presenting her documentary about communal residents.)

Ramon Sender Barayon (right) and his wife Judith Levy Sender (second from right) at lunch at the conference, along with Ruth Lambach (second from left) and Julius Rubin (left).

I guess I should qualify myself, too. I lived at Wheeler Ranch commune, founded Star Mountain commune with the advance from my first published book, lived at Packer Corners Farm commune in Vermont and participated in creating its communal book, Home Comfort, and wrote/illustrated/designed Living on the Earth, the most famous insider’s account of commune life of its time, which is still used as a textbook in college courses on the history and culture of twentieth century utopian communes. Yes, indeed. I belong here, too.

Megan Mulet presenting her paper on the gift economy at Burning Man.

One of the highlights of today’s presentations was by Megan Mulet, a sociologist from UCLA, who has been attending Burning Man the last seven years, and, in the past three, gifted her time as a census taker (her Burner nickname is “The Countess”). She spoke about the benefits of living in a gift-giving economy for those of us living in what she dubbed the “default world,” (she says that’s a Burning Man term), which is more involved in Market Pricing, Equal Exchanges, and/or Priority Status, than in Communal Sharing.

I loved presenting my show! I told stories about my communal life and how Living on the Earth came into being, plus sang songs from all three of my CDs.