In Pursuit of Timothy Leary, years before I realized it was really pursuit of the priest,

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I'm still the same person as the hippie who came out of Hollywood and started people singing:

All we are saying is give peace a chance

At a spontaneous event at Mystic Arts Bookstore in Laguna Beach, Summer 1969.

The same hippie girl who hitchhiked into Boulder for The Holy Man Jam in the student square a few months later, and as the clouds threatened rain, I jumped on the stage and did a sun dance,

and the sun come out.

The crowd hollered out, her name is Sunshine, your name is Sunshine.

And everyone started calling me Sunshine.

It stuck.

Two years later my common law mother in law even called me Sunshine, when I was living in her basement with her son and our baby. My own parents did not call me.

I left the Holy Man Jam in Boulder with a car full of hippies from Texas, we were segueing into Eastern Mystics with Swami Satchidananda, our guru, I moved to Dallas to live in the Integral Yoga Ashram.

Swami Satchidananda came through on a visit one week to “initiate” us, and he gave everyone a secret mantra and a Hindu name.

Except me.

Me, he said, “You are Sunshine. I can’t give you any other name, that is your initiated name, just like it was, Sunshine.”

Today at age 62, after four years of dealing with the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its upside down treatment of pedophile priest victims,

One would not be inclined to call me Sunshine.

One of the grown up victims, I am, which may explain my pursuit of Timothy Leary, Gurus, and astronauts- men with connections to the heavens...

Sun Shine!
is how I signed articles and letters for years, into the mid-1970s.
I always wrote, even in elementary school, I'd write stories through the summers.

What happened to Sunshine?

Somewhere along the way I lost that enthusiasm, that almost manic approach to life that brought rooms alive, that ignited projects, that got a gaggle of disconnected hippies to all sing together.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

At the Mystic Arts Bookstore in Laguna Beach 1969.

Hmm, maybe I should give peace a chance now.

In 1969, running away from Hollywood, I was hitchhiking up and down Highway Five, the Santa Ana freeway (there was no 405 yet), to go north you went on Highway One, twisting through Big Sur.

Always Running always living faster than the speed of life.

I was standing on an onramp somewhere south of Long Beach. A carful of guys got mad when I wasn't a hooker, when I really was hitchhiking not turning tricks, so they dropped me on some Anaheim area street, and I lugged my bags back to the freeway, my thumb stuck out as I stood on the onramp.

Looking for Timothy Leary. He had a ranch, I'd heard, inland from Laguna, you got to him through Laguna Canyon, Laguna Beach, the Mystic Arts Bookstore.

Just off Sunset Boulevard I had left an apartment full of belongings behind, had not even dealt with mounds and mounds of clothes, had left them in a friend's closet.

I packed a duffelbag for my trip in pursuit of Timothy Leary, and it was imbalanced and awkward, due to the portable typewriter I also packed, and a stack of typing paper, ribbons...

Left behind an apartment half a block from

Sunset Boulevard,

on Leland Way.

Left a mound of clothes a half block from Sunset Boulevard. Weeks later that mound of clothes followed me to Laguna Canyon.

-more to come