I had long heard that Peter Coyote is kind of an amazing person, what with his roots in the very birth of the '60s San Francisco counterculture along with his past time spent on communes and his current activism. Now, having heard him speak at the Booksmith last night, I can say with certainty: he is an amazing person. His extraordinary memoir Sleeping Where I Fall has just been published in a new paperback edition with a fresh 2009 postscript, and after reading a couple passages last night he answered questions from the audience that allowed him to muse on where America is at right now, engaged in the age-old struggle between ignorance and wisdom. He talked about how perhaps the great mistake of the '60s was the attempt to create an alternate culture in the hopes people would flee to it when the dominant culture collapsed, instead of merely staying present and trying to effect change from within. I so relate to that idea, and it comes up again in the afterword to his book when he talks about taking his son and his son's friend to the site of a commune Coyote lived on in Olema and the reflections on his hippie past the visit evokes:
Our relative innocence and the impending century of struggle I envision as the heritage for these boys and their children is cold comfort as I gaze out over the Olema hills. The world is not as I once imagined it or hoped it would be, but then neither am I. Neither revelation is a total disappointment. We are, finally, our intention, and we will be known by the footprints those intentions leave. In this moment, what I can attend to are these boys.