I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
Subscribe and Save up to 55%
Stephen Gaskin founded a collective community called the Farm in rural Tennessee in the early 1970s, and it remains one of the oldest such communities in the country. He wrote many books, on subjects ranging from sustainable living to political activism to the use of psychedelics. He died last July at the age of seventy-nine.
Sixties icon and self-styled “nonviolent social revolutionary” Stephen Gaskin died this past July at the age of seventy-nine. Gaskin was a prominent figure on the countercultural scene in San Francisco in the late sixties and went on to found the long-running intentional community the Farm, which is still thriving in rural Tennessee.
Trust the teaching, not the teacher, goes a familiar spiritual axiom. But, in the case of Stephen Gaskin, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other, as his own lifestyle is a powerful reflection of the truths he speaks.