When I was a college student in the 1960s, I fell in with a Bohemian crowd. I had a four year Scholarship to the University of Miami, and began my freshman year in the fall of 1965 as a commuter living with my family in North Miami Beach, about 20 miles North of the school.
The next year I moved to Coral Gables and shared an apartment with a friend near the school. During that year I wound up with a room-mate that knew much of the Coconut Grove community, and I connected with something special that was happening then and there.
The following year I moved into a low rent apartment in Coconut Grove, parked my car in the yard, and rode my bicycle to school at the UM and to work at Burdines department store in the Dadeland Mall, before it was enclosed and air conditioned. I had the downstairs apartment behind the Easy-Quick at 27th Avenue and Bird Rd. It had broken windows, a wall AC, and the rent was $35. a month. On the other side was a laundromat.
You could buy two bags of groceries for about three dollars, a new Volkswagen bug was $1,200., and an MGB sports car cost $2,600. The tuition at UM was $600. a semester, and my scholarship paid $500. of that.
In the upstairs Apartment lived Pete and Ann, old Grove Bohemians, where the musician Fred Neil often hung out when he sometimes retreated from the world. (Later the upstairs apartment was rented by some friends who were part of putting together the Doors concert at Dinner Key Auditorium March first, 1969, along with Timothy Leary, but that’s another story.)
I was the quiet, sometimes stoned kid who occupied a corner and didn’t talk a lot. I was younger than most. Freddie befriended me and sometimes we’d chat.
I didn’t know a lot. I was a sponge, that absorbed much from the bohemian folk music and intellectual environment.
Dinner Key and the ‘Safe harbor’ anchorage designation off the marina, on the other side of Sand Island, on the nautical charts that allowed free anchorage to all sailors, also added to the community of free spirits and added something special to the mix.
People that lived in the anchorage would sometimes gather around a campfire on Sand Island, and I sometimes found myself a part of some memorable times there.
My dedication to my schooling and college education saved me from falling into the self-destructive drug behaviors to which I was sometimes exposed. (My Scholarship required me to maintain a minimum ‘B’ grade average, and, as I was an Honor student, my classes were sometimes somewhat challenging).
Coconut Grove, in those days harbored a community that was an outpost, or extension of the culture found in Greenwich Village in New York City. It was a part of the Folk and intellectual community found there, perhaps reminiscent of Paris in the 30’s…, and I was lucky enough to find myself there.
In those years, when many went to school to get a career, I was trying to find myself, and looking for meaning in life. The people in that environment, mostly older than me, seemed to exhibit a sureness that promised the understanding that I sought.
There were people there who knew Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, amongst others. I would sometimes hear stories and anecdotes of their lives and antics, that couldn’t be read in any book.
I sought to become a Renaissance man, and took lab courses in chemistry and biology rather than the survey courses taken by most liberal arts majors. Besides a major in Psychology and Philosophy, I completed the requirements for a minor in English.
Inspiration
T’ai Chi is so much more than the physical movements, which are just one way to look at something much larger and all encompassing!
The principles of T’ai Chi, the connectedness and cooperation/integration of all the parts of not only the body, but of any closed or open system, (including feelings and insights as well as thoughts), can foster an extremely useful and practical path toward generating a more encompassing world view or consciousness.
This opens the door to including such topics as these above musings in this blog.
They have helped me to grow and integrate a world view that might encompass much within a framework based upon the principles of T’ai Chi. For this I feel Blessed.
Blessings to All,
Daniel
