Excerpt From ‘Bathing In The Milky Way’

A memoir by Barbara Gates, TGS staff member

Chapter 8: Bathing in Thoreau Falls
1969-1975

Tearing off my shirt and jeans, I ran naked towards the rope hanging from a cyprus branch high above the pond. Pretending not to be nervous, I held my breath and leapt to catch hold. As I flew out over the water, someone shouted, “Let go!” I  plummeted into the chilly water.  I thrashed for a moment, then swam madly, every limb alive. Flipping over, I tried the breast stroke on my back like an up-side-down frog. I relaxed into the grace of movement in this fragrant and shimmering bath and opened my eyes to blue sky. Nothing could have been more bracing. Or more free. 

“The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth.” The very title entranced me. With growing excitement, I had studied activist/writer Peter Marin’s essay on his free school in California’s Santa Cruz Hills. I’d been raised and then taught in progressive schools, but progressive wasn’t enough for me. After graduating from Bennington College, I became a rebel teacher, I met in a cabal with others to buck staid rules and headmasters, and to foster creativity. Marin’s article ended with an invitation: Interested teachers please come to the summer training at our school and learn how to start a free school of your own. Just $400. It was the summer of 1969 and I was 23 years old. Marin struck a match and lit my mind. 

I took action—packed up my red VW bug and left Cambridge, Mass., where I’d been teaching for two years. Setting off for a summer adventure at Pacific Highschool, a Summerhillian private boarding school, I drove 3000 miles across the country. 

How I loved the summer smells of California—dry grasses, bay laurel, baked soil and the earthy odors of the pond. A tall suave director and an even taller wacky-haired composer welcomed me. There was only one other “work-shopper,” and he preferred to maintain silence; through the first two days, he sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the office, then left for parts unknown. Before leaving, he spoke up, “Since my first acid trip last week, all I want to do is  contemplate blades of grass.” 

Given the low turnout, the workshop was cancelled; I was offered a refund on my $400 but  invited to live at Pacific High School for the summer and learn what I could. Several Pacific High staff and students had arrived to build the very first geodesic dome designed by the visionary Buckminster Fuller. Who could turn down that opportunity to learn?  I slept on the floor of a storage room while some of the others slept in tipis. Each day, I joined a few of the staff to follow the dirt trail to the pond, and with increasing confidence, took the  plunge. 

In the Fall, I returned to the East Coast determined to create my own free school. Free the children. Free love. Free all political prisoners. Free the mind. Every moment felt like a love affair with freedom. Joining up with political activists, recent graduates from Harvard and MIT, I felt sure we were all powerful. If we acted together, followed our intuitions and committed our energy, we could save the world. 

 After convincing a wealthy educator to support my minimal expenses, I took to my VW bug again and crisscrossed New England, “free-school-hopping”— observing, volunteering and writing up notes on various alternative ventures. I typed up my observations for my “patron” and I continued to gather ideas for starting a school. In the summer, he sent me briefly to California, this time for a conference on free schools at a ranch in Santa Barbara. Unexpectedly, 3000 miles across the country from my “hometown,” another participant told me about some Cambridge free-schoolers so close to home who I didn’t know. “A few folks in Cambridge are starting a school for the working class.” This one was different—not just another “free” school for rich kids, but a tuition-free community organizing project for working class and poor teens a school where teachers and students worked together to design the curriculum and create a community. My excitement blazed.  

This was it! I couldn’t wait to get back to Cambridge and join in. No time to lose. What if they started without me?  Before I’d even unpacked from my Santa Barbara trip, I started going to the meetings between the organizers and the kids. I tracked down the organizers who had staffed a Quaker summer program near Jefferson Park Housing Project and had begun talking with the kids about starting their own school. The twenty or so first kids came from low income primarily Irish and Italian families; most had dropped out or been kicked out of the public schools; some were in trouble with the law for stealing cars; one was described as a “second story man” (a burglar with a knack for entering a house from an upstairs window). All were thrilled to meet young adults who listened to their ideas and were on their side. 

We gathered at night at “Shit’s Creek,” a hangout spot down the hill from the projects. Squatting by a campfire, smoking cigarettes, we talked with the kids while they passed around joints and drank Budweisers. We organizers asked questions: “What really matters to you?” “If you could learn about anything you wanted, what would it be?” “Would you like to decide together as a group what courses are offered and who is going to teach them?” A silky-haired girl spoke up, “I want to travel, you know, go find out the real story for myself.” 

Drawing on contacts of our beginning staff and volunteers from Harvard and MIT, we raised some funds from the Quakers and MIT Community Services and began galvanizing some of the parents who were cautiously relieved and excited that this new school might serve the needs of their kids. We rented a storefront where we could hang out and brainstorm indoors. Kids and teachers hammered out all our decisions together and voted as a group. Together we went to the Cambridge School Committee and persuaded the mayor that our project was worthy of certification. Together we brainstormed and came up with a name. For the next seven years, ages 23 through 29, my whole life would revolve around what we’d named—appropriately—the “Group School.”

As we each made new friends, our enthusiasm drew them into the school. The promise of our project attracted idealists—physicists, poets, actors—thrilled to teach low income kids who were creating their own community with our support. We imagined such communities transforming the whole society. 

One evening, Jonny Kabat, a graduate student in Molecular Biology at MIT wandered into my apartment at Arnold Circle near Harvard Square. Jonny vaguely knew my roommate, a friend from my student days at Bennington College. He sat down in our sparsely furnished living room, offered us a few tokes on a joint and started talking. Compact and lithe with a New York accent and a tough-guy-take-charge presence, Jonny was electric. 

He described an anti-Vietnam War protest a few weeks earlier. “I  got my entire face battered in. The police pulled me into the back of the station and beat the shit out of me.”  I was impressed.

Jonny had a wide vision. “We’re approaching a critical point in history,” he made a big gesture with his arm, “an ego disaster of major proportions—overpopulation, pollution of every conceivable kind, including mental.”  A scientist and an activist, he also taught yoga at a church in Harvard Square. I loved the way his view swept from outer world disasters to inner pollution of the mind, and then back out. We became pals and started hanging out together on Sundays, taking rambling walks through Harvard Square bookstores. 

I learned later that at MIT Jonny gave speeches at rallies and as he put it, “was a side-kick” of linguist Noam Chomsky in  protests against MIT’s role in nuclear weapons research. All of our friends started taking to the streets, for rallies and marches. Some of the Group School kids had older brothers who were already in “’Nam.” Guys were wary that after dropping out of public school, they’d be drafted.  

Before we officially started offering classes,  a few of us teachers took some kids on a trip to DC to take a stand against the War. Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, we drove all night in a caravan and arrived in the morning, exhausted, clothes wrinkled, hair tangled and matted. One, two, three, what are we fighting for?  Don’t tell me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam! The protest had been organized by the newly formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War. 

We wove our way through a crowd of a thousand veterans—amputees in wheel chairs, guys on crutches, in army fatigues, with helmets and camouflage hats, with shoulder-length hair, with pony tails, bandanas and sparkle-studded head bands. Most were white, but some were black with big afros. 

We marched towards the Capitol Building. Packed in close, we smelled each other’s nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, sweat. The night before, the authorities had put up a fence to protect the Capitol. The veterans had set up a microphone by the fence. A lanky white guy stepped forward.  “I am Richard Hornby, Mobile, Alabama, ex-Marine Sargent, two Presidential Unit citations, and other honors—all a bunch of crap.”  Then he threw his medals over the fence. “Maybe this will help save lives.” Another vet announced his name and battalion and tossed his cane over the fence. A young amputee shook his one fist and tossed his silver star as he cried out, “I don’t want your fuckin’ war.” One after another, each protesting vet stepped up to the microphone, introduced himself by his name, rank, regiment and honors he had received, then threw his ribbons, medals and certificates over the fence. A grieving Gold Star mother stepped up and threw her son’s medals as the crowd  shouted in support and she called out, “Bring our children home!”

Roused by the anger of the veterans, my soon-to-be students shouted in support. As I packed in close with the others, tears streamed down my cheeks. I felt part of a powerful movement that I didn’t completely understand. What did I know of risking my life, about shooting into a crowds of unknown villagers, about losing a limb? Yet in my belly, I felt their passion. 

Back in Cambridge, the Group School rented space at the Lutheran Church in Harvard Square. In classrooms used on weekends for Sunday school, we sat close around child-sized tables, and squeezed into miniature chairs. We teachers, barely older than the kids, gave our all—time, imagination, heart. “Sweet Baabra,” my students called me (said with a broad a). Jonny came aboard and we team-taught a class called “Beginnings and Endings.”  While I taught myths of creation and apocalypse, Jonny, with his science training and ever expansive mind, taught the Big Bang and other theories of beginnings and endings of the universe. 

My lawyer friend Judy Remcho and I team-taught Prison Literature—so resonant with themes that pervaded our young lives and those of our students: freedom, imprisonment. Many students were on probation and everyone had family or friends in  prison. This was the only course where every kid in the school signed up. They crowded around the little tables, perched on the low bookshelves, sat crossed-legged on the floor. Judy had co-founded the Law Commune which offered legal support for disenchanted American soldiers in Saigon. She also worked with local prisoners at Billerica House of Correction and Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane.  While chapters from Soledad Brother by George Jackson and prison excerpts from Malcolm X’s autobiography excited discussion and debate, by far the favorite readings we offered were prison journals written by one of Judy’s clients that she had smuggled, a few pages at a time, out of Bridgewater.

The writer, locked up for life for a crime we weren’t allowed to know, was in solitary confinement.  He described how and what he ate, how he brushed his teeth, how he peed and defecated in a hole in the concrete floor of the cell. Once a week, he was allowed to shower; this was his only chance to catch glimpses of other prisoners. He hated being trapped in his solitary cell. In class, we talked about ways we each felt trapped—in jails, in the projects, as women—how none of us felt truly free. 

In one entry, the prisoner wrote that he was so lonely he wanted to die. Kenny, a usually shy student, whispered. “I’ve felt that way.” I thought to myself, so have I. Gripped by worry, the whole class awaited the next pages. “That guy’s gonna do himself in,” said Rocko. “Someone I know from the projects did it with a smuggled knife.”

But in the next installment, the prisoner told an unexpectedly happy story. His sister had somehow snuck in a in small plastic bowl filled with water and harboring a goldfish. During the day, he now watched his fish swimming around in the bowl; he loved the glint of the fish’s golden scales, the gleam of the fish’s black eyes. At night, he tuned his listening to the ripple of water, to the fish’s tail fin in its subtle swish. Now, in his journal, the prisoner wrote directly to his new friend; he opened his heart, shared his fears and dreams. “I talk to my cat like that,” Coleen, one of our most warmhearted students, told the class. 

The kids couldn’t wait to read the next entries. “Even if no one else is free, I wonder if the fish feels free in her tiny ocean,” mused Alicin. 

 But, when Judy brought the next set of journal pages, there were only a few paragraphs and the news was grim. A guard discovered the bowl, yelled at the prisoner, tossed out the water and dumped the beloved fish down the toilet hole. As I read aloud the final entry, I scanned the room of students—hunched at the little tables, stretched on the floor, leaning against the door jambs. So many faces wet with tears. These were the last pages Judy was able to smuggle out.

The second summer of the Group School, three of us staff—Adria, with whom I taught Women’s Studies, and Mark, a physicist/poet—backpacked into New Hampshire’s White Mountains to camp at Thoreau Falls. New to backpacking, I struggled uphill through conifers, past beaver ponds, then through white birch and mountain ash. Finally, I detected a stream sliding across a shelf of granite. At the edge of the shelf, massive falls flowed down wide sloping terraces. Such an expanse! 

When we got up close, we stretched out on the warm granite, kicked off our painful sneakers and, cooled by the spray, napped to the song of rushing water. When we woke, we scrambled on the rocks, and each found a pool for bathing. I took off my shorts and shirt, gingerly tested the water warmed through a day of sunshine. Such relief to slip into the water in this smooth basin. I bent my knees, pushed my toes against the rocks in front of me and rested my head against the rocks behind. The falls coursed down the granite steps above, filled my bathing bowl, then tumbled on below. I lowered myself all the way into the water, even my head, with my long hair streaming. I remembered the goldfish. 

Then the sound of flowing water took over my mind, absorbing all thought. A moment of stillness—free of blames, of fears, even of wants. This was rare for me—usually so amped up in feelings and thinking, so quick to act.

We ran the Group School as a collective; the staff met every day for several hours. Each meeting had a purpose: we planned the specifics of our curriculum; we thought broadly about our vision for the future; each of us presented our own political history; we discussed individual kids. Throughout, we practiced the Maoist  discipline of “criticism/self-criticism.” I tended to talk a lot.

One day another English teacher was “up,” presenting his history.  He described growing up poor. “So when a kid at the school is in trouble, busted once again for stealing a car, I really get it. My family never had a car.”

I broke in, “My family did have a car. But I get it too… I get the thrill of a joy ride!”

Adria’s partner Steve intervened. “Please, Barbara, just stop and reflect before you jump in. He was telling his story. ” 

I spat back, “What do you mean?  Don’t you value spontaneity?” 

Steve, who was measured and thoughtful, deliberate in his contributions, looked me in the eye.  He paused, as was his way, then said, “There’s a big difference between spontaneity and impulsiveness.”  

When Steve made that distinction, I was too hurt to take it in.  But I kept contemplating the difference. It was true; I did act on impulse. I spoke without considering, acted without deciding to act. Unlike spontaneity, impulsiveness is driven. At moments, I got that. I saw how driven I was. It dawned on me that driven was the opposite of free.  

I had recently moved into a communal house in Arlington, just west of Cambridge. In spite of my intentions and my delight in communal living, I kept getting into fights with various housemates. Meanwhile my fantasies were going crazy about Jack, a blue-eyed artist/musician/fourth grade teacher whose bedroom with its alluring fireplace was right next to mine. After the exchange with Steve at school, I kept noticing how little control I had over my words and actions. I felt trapped by my own thoughts and feelings. What was going on? It felt like I was spinning. 

On a bookstore amble with Jonny, I noticed that he had changed.  He seemed less speedy, or at least he seemed speedy in a more right-here-with-me sort of way. He told me that he had started meditating. His mentor, a Korean Zen Master, Soen Sa Nim, had begun teaching out of a laundromat in Providence, Rhode Island, just an hour from Cambridge.  I wondered if meditation could help me free my mind of driving thoughts.  

I asked Jonny to meet me for a drink later in the week at the Newtown Grille near Porter Square so we could talk more.  We sat on stools at the bar, drinking Bloody Marys. 

“My mind is zooming with thoughts flying every which way and running me in spite of myself,” I told him. “I act before I think and it gets me in trouble.” 

 “You and most of us,” Jonny laughed.

His laugh made it easier to ask.  “I thought maybe you could teach me to meditate some time.” 

Jonny nodded. “Sure. I’ll come by your house some early morning next week.”

 So soon? I started getting anxious. I’d never done anything like this before. No church. No temple. No prayers. Such things weren’t done in my family. “Just give me a hint, what will we do?”

 “Actually, we won’t do anything. That’s the wild part. When we sit down to meditate, it will be a time for non-doing.” 

 “What do you mean?  We’ll be doing nothing?” I had thought there would be something we would be thinking about or maybe repeating to ourselves or some hard-to-manage way to sit on the floor.

 “Nope, that’s not it at all,” he corrected me. “A big misunderstanding.”

I waited confused.

“It’s that we’ll  purposely take that time for stopping outward activity. Think of Thoreau.” He and I had taken some walks around Thoreau’s Walden Pond. “Thoreau would sit in his doorway for hours, free from his usual preoccupations, just watching as the light changed.” Jonny smiled. “We’ll cultivate being still, just watching, with only one agenda: to be here and now. Finally we’ll just come to a feeling of not knowing, and resting in that.”

Jonny told me stories about his Korean teacher. “‘Only don’t know!’ Soen Sa Nim would bellow.” That appealed to me.

At 5:00 am, Jonny arrived at my house before he led the Early Bird Sitting at the Cambridge Zen Center which he and others had founded with Soen Sa Nim. Everyone else in commune was asleep. I met Jonny at the front door and we tiptoed up the stairs to my room. He had two pillows, one for each of us. We sat on the floor facing each other. 

He told me to make myself comfortable in an upright posture. “Non-doing requires effort and discipline,” he told me. “For ten minutes we’ll sit. Just try to notice what’s going on right here,. Maybe you can free your mind, for a few moments, of  all the forces driving you in every other direction.” 

I knew about those forces. 

“It’s good  to keep things simple,” he said, “Start with your breathing, feeling it as it moves in and out.” 

I sat still and tried to notice breath passing in and out of my nostrils; then a thought came: could I really do this? I felt tightness in my neck, in my folded legs. 

After a few minutes, Jonny spoke again, “You might have noticed that thoughts come up, sensations, feelings.  Just notice those and come back to the breath.”

It turned out that concentrating on the breath wasn’t so hard for me. But images started coming up in my mind; I saw a dark tunnel-like passageway as if in a medieval painting. After about ten minutes, Jonny rang a bell and asked me, “How was that?” I told him I liked it, and described the tunnel. “Very good,” he said. 

“The tunnel?” I was pleased. Was he saying it was a good thing?  

“No problem, tunnel or no tunnel ” he said, “Just notice whatever comes up and return to following the breath. Try sitting like this for ten minutes each day.” He said he’d come back in a few weeks to sit with me again and see how I was doing. “Keep practicing,” he said as he left.

One evening, a few days after my first meditation lesson, I took a walk with my painter friend Linda Emde. I’d met Linda at a School Committee meeting where we Group Schoolers convinced the committee to certify us as a school. Linda and I took a walk in her neighborhood on a hillside in Somerville, a mostly working class city next to Cambridge. I invited her to teach painting at the school. We became close friends. 

As with Jonny, who initiated me into Buddhism, Linda introduced me to brave new paradigm shifts. Following Linda’s lead, I listened to tapes of Ram Dass chanting, read a memoir by Angela Davis, admired the commanding cover photo of Angela with an afro, and, in a commitment that set a new drumbeat in my love life, began radical exploration with Linda’s Reichian therapist Myron Sharaf. Explosions in politics, spirit, body, seeing what I’d never seen before.

 It was dusk. Linda and I walked along in silence, smoking cigarettes. Linda, tall with long corn tassel blond hair, took big strides and I followed in quick short steps, my brown hair swinging down my back. I was preoccupied with conflicts at school, with my mother, in my communal house. 

Suddenly Linda took my hand, “Oh Barbie,” she whispered, “Isn’t it amazing that the world is in color?” She swept out her arm, pointing to the vista below, the light of a setting sun illuminating tiers of decaying wooden houses—tender beiges and greys, mauves and rose. 

The world was in color. When I stopped and took in that moment, clear and free of mental clutter, there it was. Color.

When Jonny came by for a second lesson, I’d only “practiced” a few times.  We settled facing each other on the floor again and sat, this time for 20 minutes.  He suggested I pay attention to sounds

I noticed the sound of my breath, the sound of my stomach gurgling, the sound of cars passing outside, the sound of my clock. Afterwards, he asked me if I had any questions.

I told him I was still confused about that non-doing business. “This sitting and watching the breath can’t be practicing to ‘not do’ all the time!” I knew he was a big do-er himself. What about all that we do at the school?  Or what we do on a march against the war? Those are good and important doings!”

“Once you allow yourself to be where you already are, then you can make a move, take a stand, take a chance. You are free to act spontaneously from a place of non-doing, of inward stillness, of being. The action does itself.”

That sounded like a lot of spiritual gobbledygook to me. “I don’t understand,”  I said.

“Understanding is overrated,” said Jonny, “Just stick to ‘don’t know.’” 

I liked the ‘don’t know’ idea. 

That spring I returned to Thoreau Falls with Jack (from my communal house) and his shaggy black and white dog Bo Jangles. Jack and I had begun a romance. 

Jack looked like he was born to carry a pack on his back and to wear a colorful wool cap to set off his craggy smiling face. He and Bo were the perfect camping companions for me. Along with a tent and sleeping bags we packed in a little cooking pot and brown rice, our only food. We set up our tent by the falls, with slender birches swaying above.  I’d forgotten the breadth of the granite steps, wide tiers descending down the mountain. So grand.

Jack and I bathed in the falls, as I had with Adria and Mark. Naked, I took a quick dip into chilly water, freshly melted this early spring from the icepack above. My whole body tingled in painful pleasure. Then I leapt out and shook myself into warmth just like Bo.  

The third morning, we woke to a fragrance, a sweetness filling the tent. What could it be? The scent of blossoms carried in a morning breeze?  That evening, as we cooked our third rice meal, I figured it out. The miraculous smell wasn’t outside of us. It had to be us—with our unusually pure exhalations from digesting sweet brown rice. It made me laugh.

We decided to meditate together. Jack had done some meditation in Tai Chi classes so he kind of knew how. We folded up our sweat shirts as cushions and settled by the falls to sit. Clinking a cooking spoon on our rice pot, Jack sounded our bell. I drew my sleeping bag tight around me as a shawl. In the early morning cold, I sat up tall, closed my eyes, found my breath at my nostrils, and felt the exchange—icy air from the mountains passing in, warm air from my lungs passing out. 

I began with the sound of the falls. At first I heard a roar. Leaning forward, I tuned my ears, freed from thought, and listened intently as the sound opened. Hasten, slow, quick, flow. A sudden torrent, fierce enough to crack a skull. A silence. Many tones called from the falls—gentle, brutal—in continuous stream. Images flooded through, faces of Group School students, Bunny from so many years before, Jack. Appearing, disappearing, gone.

Three taps on the rice pot ended the sitting. I bent close to the rushing water, shivered as spray bathed my face. Reaching my hand into the falls, I felt the urgent current run through my fingers, run through my fingers.