Ten days out of Viet Nam 40 years ago yesterday, I was vacationing with my wife at a B&B in Woodstock, Vermont. At our first breakfast we read the morning newspaper about an incredible happening in a small town in upstate New York by the same name — Woodstock! I had not known about it but was ecstatic that perhaps it signified a radical shift in our cultural consciousness against war and capitalist economics.
Sitting next to me at breakfast were a couple from Connecticut who, it turns out, were on a healing vacation recovering from having lost their son, their only child, a month earlier in combat in Viet Nam. He had been a draftee, reluctantly serving his conscriptive assignment, hoping to return to start a career in the healing profession.
When all this news converged — 500,000 people celebrating at Woodstock, my excitement as a fresh war returnee that a new spirit was in the wind, the couple’s mourning over their killed son, and my deep sadness about their son’s death, I started sobbing. Those mourning parents then gently reached for my hands, and as I clasped theirs, we cried together.
More than resistance at that moment, we wanted a revolution in our society that would make war impossible ever again. That is how we experienced Woodstock in that moment! I was stirred by feeling part of a collective energy for emergence of a new man, and a new woman.
I am still wanting to feel the stir of a zeitgeist of consciousness that recognizes deeply within that when others are suffering and hurting, I am also, and that everyone else is feeling similarly. If we could grasp in the depths of our archetypal souls that there is a boomerang force inherent in any toxic energy thrust at others, meaning that that dark energy will return in one form or another, sooner or later, to the thruster, then war would end, just like that. It would be an evolutionary breakthrough.
