Tom and Budda Shakti
in front of Taj Mahal

I was one of the first Memphis hippies and with my friends owned three head shops, took buying trips to Acapulco, grew my hair long and then was busted for minor possession in Memphis. I had to "behave" for my last two years at Memphis State University of college to stay out of jail. I worked for a year in Washington D.C. and then joined a month long European graduate study program from Memphis State where about 700 students and teachers went to the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

After the month in Europe everyone flew home except me and I stayed and hitchhiked all over Europe for 4 months. At the end of that hitching through Europe which was a major experience in my life where I first heard of India, I was in Rome about to return to the United States. I received a letter from home, realized nothing was different there, and took off for Istanbul and the overland route through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan to India where my life was to completely change.

I wound up on a completely spiritual path in India walking barefoot for most of a year, going into silence while trekking to Mr. Everest, studying with many teachers, ....

I only returned to the US to get my physical body well enough to return to the caves in the Himalayas. But while in America I went to the first Rainbow Family Gathering in Grandby, Utah over July 4th, 1972 where I met the 30 members of the Love Family of Seattle.

To make a long story short I became part of America's oldest and largest (other than Gaskin's Farm in Tennessee after Berkeley) hippie commune. This was a major fun wild ride itself. There are still about 50+ people who in the community, now known as the Love Israel community, living on a 300 acre farm outside of Arlington, Washington. For 11 years my legal name was Helpful Israel and I had no age or birth date... as we were 'eternal'. I lived with people named Love, Strength, Honesty, Charity, Hope, Allowing, Bliss, Integrity, etc. In 1983 there was a big breakup where the community went from 400 to about 50 people the size it still is today. We the Love Family made friends with many other communes and groups. One was in San Francisco was the Foundation of the Revelation whose Indian leader Chrinchava (sp?) had 12 American wives. They lived in the Haight-Ashbury district. We were also friends of the Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm from San Francisco, whom I had first met outside Katmandu in Nepal. And then there was L.A.'s The Source, America's spectacular Hollywood, occult cult led by Yaweh. There were many, many more. Most of them very small.

Have you ever been to any of the Rainbow Gathering's over July 4th held in some wilderness area of the US every year? The last bastion of hippiedom. If you are in for an adventure you should go one year.

My life changed when my son's mother who I was with for 7 years left our community with our young son and wound up back in Hawaii where we had lived as a outpost of the Love Family. Wanting to support my son, I basically had to learn to make money again having been farming, logging, gleaning, milling, homesteading, fishing, etc. in the commune and so I went back to graduate school at night. I got two graduate degrees and discovered computers. I have been a programmer since then. My son who grew up in Hawaii with his mother until he came to live with me full time at the beginning of his 9th grade in Florida about 1993. Last May he graduated from the University of Central Florida in Orlando with a degree in Computer Animation and is a computer animator with N-Space in Orlando. With my fun responsibilities to my son completed I have just returned to Memphis after a 33 year absence to help my mid-80s parents being able to live out their lives in their home instead of going to a nursing home.

So that is my life... there was about a 20 year stretch that was wild and fun... it has been a very quite life for a long time now. But I still have long hair and pony tail with a very high forehead. My best friend and wife still live in a bus in Tucson and my other best friends live in the Puna district of Hawaii and are world traveling old hippies...