Feast: A Tribal Cookbook

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THE TRUE LIGHT BEAVERS
From the book FEAST: A TRIBAL COOKBOOK
Copyright © 1972 by The True Light Beavers
To be published in October by Doubleday and Company, Inc.

FROM ZEN BASKETBALL TEAM TO MOUNTAINTOP TRIBE —

The True Light Beaver Story

Back in the Summer of '66, when family still meant nuclear, and our heads were into dope, and reclaiming the city streets with flowers, love, and costumes, the True Light Beavers were born, delivered on a back shelf of Moe's Discount Mart. Susan Beaver used to shop at Moe's for old football jerseys, basketball shirts, and the like, finding the beautiful colors and nice slogans (Courtesy Taxi) just right for decorating body and soul. Her real find was a batch of nine basketball jerseys, white and shiny green, with the words True Light Beavers emblazoned on the front. (The True Light Beavers, we discovered years later, were a defunct Zen Buddhist Basketball team from Chinatown.) We found the name fitting and symbolic of just about everything. Instantly, the shirts were passed out among friends, and True Light Beavers started showing up at sweep-ins, ESSO meetings, psychedelic .showcases, be-ins, and finally, at the raising of the Pentagon. When the Pentagon was raised, so were many consciousnesses, and flowers and costumes started being replaced by flags and overalls. A big exodus started taking place: some flower kids tookofffor Chicago (Yippie!), others for the woods; some dropping out, some digging in.

The True Light Beavers dug in! From a nuclear family of four in New York and three its Boston, the True Light Beavers became seven in the woods of New Hampshire. Brothers and sisters moving together, we became a clan of ignorant Indians, learning, that first year, how much we didn't know. Life-art is where we're at, and that year inNew Hampshire meant a lot of life-art dealing with heating a house, making a garden, stringing beads, doing some movies, and a lot of drawing. We grew close in New Hampshire, brothers rediscovering each other, sisters working it out, all of us, with the kids, making it work. We learned a little bit to read the seasons and interpret the messages, we learned a bit that to make the revolutionary alternative first meant getting ourselves together . . . . New Hampshire got the clan together, a new order came into being, and we flashed that we were at the beginning of the biggest trip we've ever taken.

To Woodstock! And we become more of what we are: energy artists! The new lessons that began in New Hampshire are continued here: we learn new skills, develop new tools. The progession of the seasons now forms a strong rhythm for our lives, with spring devoted to gardens, chickens, a new baby, and plans; summer busy building new systems; fall, harvesting and getting ready for winter, which becomes less isolating because of the new community of many clans growing and living around us. We find new needs and meet them with a school, a switchboard, new medicine, food sharing, trading, new communication systems, more land, earth people buildings, and suddenly we find ourselves a tribe expanded to eighteen on a mountaintop. And going further! We find, as we build, builders all around us . . . a tribe on every mountaintop. The years of digging in and learning are now producing so many new life ways that are just now beginning to trade and expand and be together cooperatively.

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