People sometimes ask me what I do for fun.
I visit shrines of nature and shrines of culture.
Henri Matisse’s “Luxe”
(his interpretation of The Birth of Venus by Botticelli).
At the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2016
Alelele Falls in Kaupo, Maui, 2006
I also love to dance.
Cafe Unizon, Ginowan, Okinawa, 2015
Greg Castillo and Alicia Bay Laurel meet and instantly become dear friends at the Summer of Love Academic Conference in San Francisco, July 2017
Utopian Discourse in the Counterpublic Sphere:
Bay Area Counterculture in Print
Greg Castillo, Associate Professor
College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
Paper for the Annual Conference for the Society of Utopian Studies
“Disruption, Displacement, Disorder” – November 1-3, 2018, Berkeley, California
X – 1 Last year, in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love, I served as guest curator of Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia as installed at the UC Berkeley Art Museum.
I’m an architectural historian, not a trained curator, so my learning curve was steep. I edited down an exhibition originally created for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, then added hundreds of locally-sourced objects to explore the distinctive regional origins of a movement that had global repercussions.
I approached the show as a public history project, reexamining a culture often remembered through dismissive stereotypes.
The dominant architectural stereotype equates hippie builders with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.
Hippie Modernism included a reconstruction of one built by artists at Colorado’s Drop City commune as an installation for the 1968 Experiments in Art and Technology show at the Brooklyn Museum.
X – 2 Geodesic dwellings at the Drop City commune, a sort of trippy First World favela, initiated the hippie infatuation with geodesics, as seen at the left.
I would argue that Fuller’s key contribution to the counterculture was instead the notion of technological breakthroughs occurring “In the Outlaw Area,” as his 1966 New Yorker interview was titled.
In this idiosyncratic origin myth of innovation, Fuller claimed that ancient civilizations advanced only upon taking to the open sea, an “Outlaw Area” that imposed challenges outside the authority of land-based cultural orthodoxies.
X – 3 Stewart Brand popularized “the Outlaw Area” in his epochal Whole Earth Catalog, a crowd-sourced review of ideas, practices, and objects. It opened with the proclamation: “the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog.”
The Whole Earth Catalog advanced D.I.Y. (or do-it-yourself) publishing as a medium of counterculture skill-sharing. A decade before desktop publishing, Brand trained other hippie self-publishers how to operate new, user-friendly equipment – namely the IBM Selectric composer and Polariod MP-3 halftone camera – to generate justified copy, shoot halftone images, and create camera-ready paste-ups.
A ‘new materialist’ or Object Oriented Ontology would add these graphic arts devices to pharmaceutical LSD as key non-human ‘actants’ that exerted their agency in hippie self-fashioning practices.
All were included in the “access to tools” promised by Brand’s catalog, which was originally devised as a reference catalog for back-to-the-land pioneers.
The flowering of Bay Area alternative publishing has become equated with its “greatest hit,” the Whole Earth Catalog, which is too often treated as a default value of counterculture history.
But the phenomenon of Bay Area alternative publishing was much broader in both output and impact.
X- 4 Among the torrent of manifestos addressing hippie self-invention, that of Alicia Bay Laurel, born Alicia Kaufmann, has been ignored in counterculture scholarship. It was enormously popular and influential in its day, and remains in print in Spanish and Japanese translations 50 years later.
My focus on Bay Laurel’s book Living on the Earth reasserts its role in teaching readers how to become counterculture subjects by estranging the normative arrangement of the modern world, to paraphrase Phillip Wegner, and disrupts the “he said, he did” bias of counterculture scholarship.
Joan Didion’s 1968 essay ‘Alicia and the Underground Press’ praised Alicia’s skill as a seventeen-year-old journalist for the LA Free Press – just as Alicia was being committed to an insane asylum by her mother upon discovering that her daughter had used LSD.
Involuntarily incarcerated as a minor, Alicia secured her release upon her 18th birthday. She abandoned her privileged Southern California family life and fled North to San Francisco.
After a brief stint as an arts student, Alicia joined the hippie urban exodus to a rural commune, where she changed her last name, abandoning her Kaufman family tree for a native one, the Bay Laurel.
X5 – At the Wheeler’s Ranch open land commune in Sonoma county, Alicia used her drawing skills to address the problem of clueless newbies arriving daily without any of the skills needed for rural living.
During the1967 “Summer of Love,” sensationalist reporting had flooded the Haight-Ashbury district with new hippie converts, runaway teens, drug dealers, and a spectrum of predators.
As LSD supplies dwindled, heroin and speed made rapid inroads. New arrivals burdened free food programs, clinics, and other support services beyond capacity, sending Haight-Ashbury veterans to the countryside in search of greener pastures.
Life on an open land settlement demanded D.I.Y. production skills that few new converts possessed. Alicia resolved to solve the problem with a pen and a sheaf of blank typing paper.
X – 6 To orient newcomers to the Wheelers Ranch Open Land commune, she compiled an illustrated guide for rural self-reinvention. It takes readers on a skill building trip through technological ontology: quote “from traveling the wilds to the first fence, simple housing, furnishing houses, crafts, agriculture, food preparation, medicine, not unlike the development of our ancient ancestors.”
Bay Laurel begins with a depiction of arrival on the land as a camper, a liminal state of awakening. Once woke, novice communards began their immersion course in mastering tools needed for their performance of an Aquarian rebirth.
Some skills were social, like those of amicable collectivity.
Material tools for Aquarian self-fashioning were to be crafted through adaptive reuse of detritus generated by a throwaway consumer economy.
X-7 Titled Living on the Earth, Alicia’s hippie Bildungsreise (or journey of self-discovery) assaults middle-class culture with the wide-eyed wonder of a joyful exile.
Panels devoted to making a Mexican peasant blouse or “elegant unbaked confections” are vulnerable to a misreadings as a mere hippie repackaging of repressive gender conventions, rather than the short-lived phenomenon that counterculture scholar Gretchen Lemke calls “difference-based feminism.”
The potted plant – pun intended – on the right provides a clue to the active ingredient in Alicia’s “Moroccan Surprise” desert recipe.
X-8 Panels on massage and how to get rid of public lice flout a host of bourgeois conventions while illustrating the expansive scope of relations between human and non-human communards at Wheeler’s Ranch.
X-9 Living on the Earth includes an evolutionary narrative of D.I.Y. architecture. It begins with tent making and progresses to wooden shelters. Quote: “If you live on land that has been raped (that is, ‘logged’) you may find stumps that work as foundations for your house.” Outlaw building tips that seem like hippie fantasies describe actual construction experiments conducted at Wheeler’s Ranch, as you can see on the right.
X-10 How-to instructions on hunting and butchering wild game, curing pelts, and making shoes promote skills not typically found among young women raised in West LA.
In fact, the practices of self-invention inventoried in Living on Earth were crowd-sourced.
In researching her self-help manual for open land acolytes, Bay Laurel interviewed Wheeler’s Ranch residents to compile a master list of useful skills and best practices.
X-11 Panels on childbirth and forest cremation celebrate the alpha and omega moments of Living on the Earth, and make explicit the breadth of this vision of anarchic self-production.
Bay Laurel’s original goal of creating 200 photocopies of her manuscript foundered on the economic realities of the commune’s voluntary poverty.
Undeterred, she visited the headquarters of Steward Brand’s operationin Palo Alto. Brand sent her across the Bay to Berkeley to Book People, the alternative press enterprise that published and distributed the Whole Earth Catalog.
Reviewing the manuscript, a 23 year-old associate, Sam Matthews was enchanted. His enthusiasm convinced the firm’s founder, Don Gerrard, to secure an $11,000 family loan to have the book printed.
Matthews specified cheap unbleached stock and brown ink to give the finished product a homespun look. All ten thousand first edition copies sold out in two weeks after a rave review in the Whole Earth Catalog.
X-12 One copy landed on the desk of Bennett Cerf, the CEO of Random House Publishers in Manhattan. He purchased rights and made it a bestseller, with 350,000 second edition copies sold in ten years.
International success followed. Readers relished the naïve charm of a manifesto so gentle that its revolutionary program is easily missed.
Living on the Earth, which taught readers how to quote “dig a proper shithole” and live under a tarp, earned Bay Laurel a 1971 ‘Woman of the Year’ award from the fashion merchandizing journal Mademoiselle: proof that mass-marketing had negated the anarchism of her handmade call-to-arms.
X-13 Living on the Earth was just one of the Book People releases that Random House acquired in its California Gold Rush. Starting with the Whole Earth Catalog, the Manhattan giant turned one alternative press offering after another into bestsellers.
In a blunt take-down of what he calls counterculture “lifestyle publishing,” Sam Binkley mounts a Frankfurt school mass-culture critique of such texts as artifacts of a hegemonic consumption regime.
Dismissals of Bay Area guidebooks to self-reinvention as capitalist lifestyle ventures manifest an inaccurate accounting of agency, eliding the shift in goals and audiences as texts moved from regional to global distribution, and from skill sharing to naked profit motive.
The Aquarian optimism of these texts, Binkley writes, “depended on an ill considered humanism that was sophomoric at best and sentimental and baseless at worst.”
Let’s file away the charge of hippie sentimentality for a moment. I’ll return to it after presenting a radically different formulation of the Bay Area alternative press project.
X-14 In addition to their status as commodities, books transact and consolidate discursive practices about issues of common interest and political significance.
The Habermasian notion of Öffentlichkeit or “the public sphere” relies on a free market in texts as a springboard for social integration and new citizenship ideals.
This, I would argue, rather than superficial lifestyle consumption, is the context of works like Living on the Earth prior to their successful monetization by East Coast profiteers.
X-22 More compelling yet is Nancy Fraser’s feminist revision of the Public Sphere concept. Subjects marginalized by a bourgeois public sphere – she calls them subaltern counter-publics – construct parallel public spheres in which to circulate counter-discourses.
This, it seems to me, is a precise analogue of the function of the Bay Area alternative press: a regional information conduit that was, as Fraser emphasizes, quote “not an arena for market relations, but rather one of discursive relations.”
X-23 International transmission of Bay Area counterculture discourse and a transatlantic dialogue between counterpublic spheres followed the mass-market commodification of Bay Area alternative press offerings.
Just over a year after Bay Laurel arrived in Berkeley looking for a means to distribute her how-to guide, the Zurich-based underground journal HOTCHA! conveyed her message to German-language readers.
You see the book’s review at the lower right, complete with Bay Laurel’s illustrated method of building shelters from scrap.
Before returning to the transatlantic circulation of Bay Area counterculture discourse, I’d like to respond to Binkley’s critique of counterculture optimism as sophomoric and sentimental.
X-17 Intellectuals believe that anxiety is the emotional hallmark of postwar culture. Could there be any other conclusion when WH Auden, Leonard Bernstein, and a host of cultural critics all agree?
Yes, actually, there is an alternative framing of this conformity, courtesy of the affective turn in cultural history. The privileging of anxiety by transatlantic intellectuals consolidated what historian Barbara Rosenwein calls an “emotional community” unified by quote: “the modes of emotional expression that its constituents expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”
For intellectual elites, anxiety absolutely defined the postwar era.
X- 18 Haight AshburyHippies, in contrast, founded a community upon Aquarian Love, as celebrated in San Francisco’s “Summer of Love”.
s l o w: This historically and culturally contingent emotive fused categories of affect formerly segregated in Western traditions of love.
Aquarian Love conjoined Agape, bonding creator and creation; with Philia, fraternal or communal affinity; and Eros, sensual desire.
LSD and its “en-then-o-genic” property, which connects its user to a holistic cosmic order, made possible the transgressive excess of Aquarian love.
Living on the Earth exuded the bliss of the counterculture’s emotional community. According to Sam Matthews, this auratic quality prompted him to champion Bay Laurel’s odd, hand-drawn manuscript when it arrived at the office of Book People and convinced his boss to borrow 11 thousand dollars from a family member to fund the book’s first edition publication.
Aquarian love was, of course, quickly commodified to sell a variety of goods in the booming marketplace for hippie byproducts.
Meanwhile, among “serious” intellectual circles, counterculture emotives, now as then, remain an alienating Terra Incognita – all the more reason to critically scrutinize them with the historiographic tools of the affective turn in cultural research.
X-19 I’ll close this talk with an episode of transatlantic cultural transfer informed by methods of the “visual turn” in cultural studies.
As Stuart Hall has argued, one can’t decode the meaning of a photograph without considering how it’s quote “regulated by the formats and institutions of production, distribution, and consumption.”
A case in point is this image shot at the Wheeler Ranch Open Land commune in 1969 by photojournalist Bob Fitch. It shows Sue and John Mikhul and their children from two marriages about to enter a sweat bath.
A homeless family that had lived for years in the camper lurking behind them, the Mikhuls refute the trope of hippies as children of privilege on a low-stakes fun ride before the resumed more affluent lifestyle consumption pursuits.
At Wheeler’s Ranch, the Mikhuls found a community that did not shun them as pariahs before police ordered them to move along.
X- 20 An Italian design collaborative called Superstudio discovered the portrait of the Mikhul family in a mass-circulation magazine. It became part of a collage in a conceptual art project called Vita Superficie: an ironic vision of a totalizing global infrastructural grid providing utilities and communication everywhere and anywhere. It was one of a series of propositions for what Superstudio called “anti-utopias.”
Created for a 1972 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Superstudio’s collage shipped the Mikhuls back to the US as savages, stripped of individual identity and family history.
Reduced to a tribal semaphore, the Mikhuls became late contenders in a tradition of ethnographic representation of New World primitives initiated by European explorers centuries earlier.
X-21 The Superstudio essay in MoMA’s exhibition catalogue relayed formulaic counterculture tropes back across the Atlantic to their source of origin.
Bay Laurel and her fellow communards believed that one could not theorize a path to a non-dystopian future. One had to enact it as a high-stakes performance informed by the practices of fellow travelers.
Superstudio, used the Mikhuls as poster children for a contemporary nomadicism conducted not as an embodied critique of postwar mass consumption, but as a performance art exercise in which quote: “At the most we can play at making a shelter, or rather, at [making] the home, at [making] architecture.”
The Vita Superficie, with its nihilistic approach to play – a practice revered by hippies as a tool for emancipatory self-fashioning – is about as far from an “outlaw builder” ethos as one can imagine.
X-22 In January 2017, I worked with staff preparators to hang a panel from Superstudio’s Vita Superficie project on the gallery wall of the Berkeley Art Museum for display in Hippie Modernism.
In an exhibition dedicated to public reconsideration of a regional movement of self-build utopias, we were displaying its transatlantic translation as dystopian irony.
Historicizing the reproduction, distribution, and reinterpretation of utopian performances is a vital aspect of counterculture scholarship.
I get that.
Still, I’m grateful that no child of the Mikhul clan showed up in Berkeley as an adult to discover how an outlaw childhood had been reprocessed as an object of postmodern art.
Thank you.
Interesting that the Berkeley students noticed the feminist aspect of Sylvie Sunflower. I wrote it in response to a letter I received from a woman friend who noticed how stereotypical the gender roles were in the illustrations of Living on the Earth. That letter was my feminist awakening!
I set forth to break that obsolete mental pattern by writing and illustrating Sylvie Sunflower. It did not go unnoticed! The book was center-folded into a 1973 issue of Ms. Magazine as part of Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s series, “Stories for Free Children.”
My dear friend, Professor Greg Castillo of the School of Environmental Design in the School of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, co-taught this class! He said, “This [website] was a great student project.”
I received a welcome message today from the new director of communications at Editions Ulmer, the publisher of the French edition of Living on the Earth, Vivre sur la Terre.
Congratulationson your book, which I found absolutely fabulous! I’m a total fan.
I wanted to let you know that a very nice a review of the book has been published in Top Nature [magazine].
I hope we will have the opportunity to meet one day if you come to France in a near future.
Have a beautiful day,
Giada
To purchase a copy of Vivre sur la Terre, click here.
To see a flip book of the covers and opening pages, click here.
Here is an English translation of the introduction to the book written by the editor at Editions Ulmer, Lila Hervé-Gruyer.
“How Living on the Earth became Vivre sur la Terre…
“The story of this book is magical. For several years, I have dreamed of getting my hands on this mysterious book, but second-hand copies are sold at a high price on the Internet. One day, I came across a website that sold the Spanish version. When I received it, I was moved.
“Alicia’s drawings and words resonate very strongly with me. This 19 year old hippie embodies a freedom, a simplicity and a carefree attitude that we miss today. An almost dreamed life, a total commitment. Alicia proposes to live like a flowing river or a growing tree. To live in the middle of nature, in community, out of the consumer society and far from capitalism.
“50 years after the first edition of Living on the Earth, the biosphere is enoxerably degrading and anxiety is rising, even faster than the ocean level. Alicia reminds us that ecological movements are not new. Today too often derided, the hippies had the courage to question the very foundations of a capitalist society. It does a lot of good to delve into their legacy, full of struggles and inventiveness. Reading Alicia, the answer is here, almost obvious, in front of our eyes. I am convinced that living on love alone is not naive, but one of the possible solutions to face this ecological crisis. A fair, beautiful, desirable, joyful and fun path.
“One day, I bring this treasure to the office, to share with my colleagues. This hippie bible is a literary UFO! A bestseller that has gone around the world, translated into Japanese, Korean, Spanish… And sold more than 350,000 copies for the American version.
“We bet with Emmanuelle and Antoine, Ulmer’s managers, that it could work. I contacted Alicia who quickly told me that the book would be published in English to celebrate its 50th birthday! What a happy coincidence, life is well done. Virginie started translating and Alicia agreed to rewrite everything by hand in French, a language she does not speak. Once the translation is finalized, Alicia starts writing, courageously. She spends more than 6 days on some pages. Until she injures her hand and the project comes to a halt.
“That’s where Harmonie the aptly named comes in. I was working with this potter-designer-artist on another book. I had shown her Alicia’s book and she too had fallen in love with it. She often asked me about the translation and I was disappointed to tell her that it wasn’t going well… Until I received a handwritten note from Harmonie: her handwriting looked like Alicia’s! So Harmonie started to rewrite the book with a lot of enthusiasm. 248 pages later, Agathe proofreads, Camille prepares the files, it goes to the printer’s.
“This is why you can now hold this precious book in your hands. The moving testimony of an emancipated young woman living as close to nature as possible, patiently rewritten to be as close as possible to the original. Because in 2022, we continue to have a great need for Peace and Love.
“I wish you all to live closer to the flowers!”
Bill Wheeler, hard at work on his land, in 1972
“Round, brown eyes, round, young body and round, curly brown hair, Alicia spoke softly but with assurance. After thinking quietly for a while, she asked me if I knew of any coffee houses where she could play and sing for money. Shortly before dark, she dressed warmly and set out to find a place to stay. My concern over her welfare that rainy night was unfounded as I discovered a few days later when she returned to the studio, bursting with merriment, and related her adventures. She had been welcomed at several people’s houses and was planning to go back to the city, get her things and come back to stay.
“Gray weeks passed before I saw her again. This time, Alicia wore the air of an established resident and nothing else. When most folks were still in warm sweaters, Alicia could be seen wandering around in the fog without a stitch of clothes, a book or some sewing under her arm. When the sun began to warm the air the following spring, she was in the garden almost every day, doing yoga and tending the vegetables. She was the only community member who gardened regularly that second summer. Without her care, the community garden would have never started. In those days she was also the only person on the Ridge who was neither ‘without income’ nor on welfare. She generated income from various creative projects which she sold, an activity then unique among Open Landers.
“Alicia began working on an intercommunal newsletter, describing in unpretentious script and with simple line drawings the basic skills needed by newcomers to live primitively in an isolated, rural community. She demonstrated with childlike fluidity how to build a shelter, shit in the ground, chop wood, have a baby, etc. The project took her over a year, during which time she left with the winter ’69 exodus that took many Ridge residents further north into Humbolt County.
“When she returned the next summer, she announced that the newsletter had grown into a book which was being privately financed and published by a Berkeley publisher with the title Living On The Earth. It turned out to be a phenomenon, the first edition of 10,000 selling out in three weeks. One copy found its way to Bennett Cerf at Random House. Delighted and impressed, Cerf bought the book and Alicia, now Alicia Bay Laurel, was sent on a national promotional tour to explain to America the joys of Open Land living. By the following Christmas, Living On The Earth had become a best seller with 150,000 copies sold. It engendered much sympathy and interest in a simple, non-technical life style. Whatever it was we were doing together on the land, people were hungry to know more.”
Verkami: Viviendo en la Tierra de Alicia Bay Laurel
por Cristina Camarena | May 25, 2017
Hoy os cuento este proyecto que busca fondos a través de Verkami porque me ha parecido maravilloso. Confieso que no conocía Viviendo en la Tierra de Alicia Bay Laurel, a pesar de ser un bestseller, una guía clásica para la vida natural, bohemia y alternativa en el campo escrita por Alicia Bay Laurel en la comuna Wheeler Ranch en el norte de California a finales de los sesenta. La biblia del movimiento back-to-the-land y las comunas hippies de la década de los setenta que capturó el espíritu de toda una generación.
Viviendo en la Tierra es para aquellos que prefieren cortar leña para el fuego antes que trabajar en una oficina para pagar la factura de la compañía eléctrica. Un libro diseñado sin índices, sin capítulos, sin reglas ni estructuras, un libro que se construye sobre el aprendizaje del día a día.
Escrito e ilustrado a mano por Alicia Bay Laurel cuando esta tenía tan sólo 19 años, como si se tratara de un diario, originalmente fue concebido como una guía destinada exclusivamente a distribuirse internamente entre las comunas. El libro fue publicado por The Bookworks en Berkeley, California y se agotó inmediatamente. Random House lo reeditó en 1971 y vendió más de 350.000 copias en pocos meses convirtiéndose así en un New York Times Bestseller. Viviendo en la Tierra cambió radicalmente la forma de concebir un libro y con su estilo ha influido durante décadas a numerosos artistas y diseñadores.
Kachina ediciones pone en marcha este proyecto, para hacer posible la traducción, edición, impresión y distribución de este mítico libro. Podéis contribuir comprándolo y eligiendo modalidad para las recompensas siguiendo este enlace. Es un proyecto valiente que vale la pena apoyar.
Illustrated with art from Living on the Earth. Lisa is a skillful interviewer!
I am happy to say that I’ve now watched Agnes Varda’s joyously surrealist film about her uncle, my artist mentor, Jean “Yanco” Varda, many times. I also linked it to the page in my online store for the blue on blue t-shirt I designed with the Living on the Earth houseboat pages, which arose from my years living at Gate Five, Sausalito. I made a black and white version of the t-shirt as well, with the movie link there too.
Here’s where I found these pages online:
https://aliciabaylaureldotcom.files.wordpress.com/2022/04/76197-aliciabaylaurelwildersummer-fall-final.pdf
Please vote for Being of the Sun in the “iconic book” section of the Coalition for Visionary Resources contest. The ballot is at: https://covr.org/covr-awards-public-voting/ Deadline is April 24th.
Note from Tracee Dunblazier, the president of COVR:
“The important thing for voters to know is that they cannot navigate away from the ballot once it’s begun. They’ll want to have gone through all the entries in the voter’s guide beforehand. Voters must make a choice in every category, even if it’s ‘none-of-the-above’.”
Here’s where to download the voter’s guide!
Author’s statement:
Behold:
I present for your consideration, Being of the Sun, an un-guide for curating your own path to higher consciousness, originally published in 1973, and re-released last October 2021 by Echo Point Books & Media.
In between then and now, Being of the Sun has done yeoman duty, providing ideas for ceremonies in the wild, chants, drone music and music theory, amusing craft projects, healing practices and freedom from dogmatic concepts to wiccans, pagans, Druids and unnameable other free-spirited beings for decades.
I am Alicia Bay Laurel, the author/illustrator/designer of the best-selling early sustainable living classic, Living on the Earth, which is newly in print in its 50th anniversary, 5th English language edition. I’ve created other illustrated books, fine art, and commissioned illustrations, as well as producing/designing/performing/touring eight albums of original and historic music.
I collaborated in 1972-1973 on the text and the music in Being of the Sun with composer, musician, author and philosopher Ramon Sender Barayón, a friend since 1969. I illustrated, designed and hand-lettered Being of the Sun myself.
You can hear me and Ramón improvising our ecstatic music in the soundtrack of the book trailer for our book, Being of the Sun:
I’ve submitted Being of the Sun as an “iconic” book, because it is, in fact, iconic – it’s not just previously published, but a book that has already moved thousands of people around the world to insist on spiritual creativity, freedom of consciousness, and oneness with nature, over the past 49 years.
Here is the history of the book and reader comments:
Here is the book’s page in my store, Indigo With Stars:
Ramón and I also made a recording of the music from the book. He recorded us on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in 1973. In 2013, I obtained a digital copy of the tape, took it to a recording studio, and had it remastered into a CD.
https://indigowithstars.com/…/songs-from-being-of-the-sun
“Your work still inspires and brings joy to so many!”
Alastair Gordon
Author, Architecture Critic
Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design
New York, New York
“Beautiful Extraordinary Book!”
Brigitte Mars
Herbalist, Professor, Author, Plant Expert, Natural Food Chef
“Alicia Bay Laurel and Ramón Sender Barayón share their vision of yoga, healing, sun songs, moon songs, meditation, ceremonies, communes, solitudes, and more in a how-to format connecting us back to our inner child, naked & free!
“May the holy words found in this book heal the world at a time when we need them most!”
Tracy Conti and Stephen McCarty
Solar Return Shop
Echo Park, Los Angeles, California
“We don’t own or keep much in our lives, but this is one of the most treasured. This book came into our lives and gave us such joy. Wonderful images and genuine words of love and care for the planet and each other. Gratitude each day for the arrival of the Morning Star, bringer of life and joy to each and every living being on this planet.”
Neil and Ness
Getting high on nature
Podcast: November 2021 interview of Alicia Bay Laurel by herbalist/skateboarding goddess/millennial bohemian Bianca Scott, broadcast on Spotify.
Writes Bianca: “Alicia Bay Laurel, a pure child of the revolution. We seek the truth as we discuss Alicia’s journey of peace, love, freedom, poltergeists, acid and spirituality. We share our thoughts surrounding The Cockette’s pink velvet cock and balls of sexual anarchy to the power Media has over innocent human beings. For the first time on LifeFlux, I drank tea picked out by my guest. Who would have thought ginger tastes so good in hot water? It was a dream come true to speak with such a bright soul who’s book, Living on the Earth, gave light to my journey just a few years ago. Purchase Alicia Bay Laurel’s handwritten and illustrated, award-winning books and music CDs at aliciabaylaurel.com. If you are human, these books are meant for you. Cheers!”
Alicia Bay Laurel 
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