Project Hippie Conversion declared completed

For some of you, your worst fears are realized: After 6 years living in San Francisco and now the East Bay, your friend/relative Christina is now admitting she is a full-fledged hippie.

Trust me, I’ve been fighting the conversion pretty hard, even throwing off my new hippie belt with big pockets at a party after feeling utterly ridiculous wearing it. But it really was inevitable.

For the past 2.5 years, I’ve been growing out my hair. I love my new longer locks.

I stop to dance in random public places, just because I feel like it.

I stopped wearing metal-based deodorants in favor of salt-based deodorants. I still think I mostly smell ok, hence I do not identify as a “dirty hippie.”

I don’t wear sunscreen, lotions, makeup, shampoo or condition my hair.

I sold all my metal jewelry this week and I gave away all my titanium cookware and bought/swapped for cast iron. I won’t be wearing earrings anymore except the wood variety.

I walk around barefoot. I’ve been barefoot now for 25 days straight and it feels amazing, especially in the rain.

I even hugged a tree this year.

I smile at random strangers, talk to them, get rides from them in their cars to get into the city. I practice yoga every morning at 5:30am.

I buy 90% organic foods and don’t overeat anymore.

And, with the most hesitation, I started growing out all my body hair last week. I have never actually seen my own armpit hair in my whole entire life, nor my leg hairs fully grown out. This was the final and biggest personal change I’ve decided to make. It still disgusts me, but I want to experience that disgust fully and get over it. Sorry guys.

I gave away all my shoes and all my bikini bottoms. I’ll be sporting the 50’s style swimsuits from now on.

And I’ve never been more joyful, peaceful, and content. Life as a hippie is good. :-D

In Pieces

Turns out it’s all about devotion
Pouring your heart’s love into the open cups around you

God is the one holding the cup
The one doing the pouring
And the liquid itself

And my yearning for a strapping young man to press against my body right now
Is a fraction of what it feels like to be separated from the Divine I was birthed from
Oh,
To be completed again

Like Humpty Dumpty
We’re just picking up the pieces
Knowing
It’s going to take more than
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men

Missing the Point – Beauty is Simple

1995. I’m camping out in Yellowstone National Park with 75 of my closest friends – well, my ninth grade class – on a field trip. The girls are sitting around the tents gossipping, and we start talking to the beautiful foreign exchange student from Latin America, Minerva.

Minerva has perfect bronzed skin, round, smooth cheeks, perfect teeth, and gorgeous black curly hair. She’s so nice, we all want to look like her, and we start asking her, “What is your secret? What do you wash your face with?”

None of us can believe her answer: “Soap and water,” she says.

“What kind of soap?”

“Bar of soap.”

Here she is, surrounded by Montana teenagers with a dozen facial products each packed with them: Benzoyl peroxide cream, salicylic acid pads, day face wash, night face wash, toner, witch hazel, apricot scrub, Neutrogena, Oil of Olay, Proactiv, mud masks, sunscreen, Accutane (for those “lucky” enough to afford it) etc.

It just goes to show, beauty really is from the inside-out.

Soap and water.

What she probably wasn’t doing was eating the kind of diet we were eating, nor stripping her face of its natural oils and protective bacteria with harsh chemicals. She wasn’t waging war on her skin with weapons of mass destruction or harboring inflammation and disease in her body, and it showed.

When are we going to realize that enough is enough, and just get back to basics?

I haven’t used shampoo or conditioner in my hair for nearly 2 years now, and I constantly get complimented on my hair. I don’t use any shower gels or lotions on my skin other than simple ingredients like olive oil and coconut oil or pure soaps, and I constantly get told how healthy and soft my skin is. I brush and floss my teeth once a day, at night, and my oral hygenists have told me I have the healthiest teeth they’ve ever seen. It’s not that complicated, folks. Don’t let the swindlers tell you that it is. Keep a simple and pure diet and keep your products simple and pure, and beauty will come naturally.

Ego Trip

My room is all cleaned
I’m ready now
Nature abhors a vacuum
And I just asked for the Universe
Don’t tell anyone
But I’ll be walking on water soon
Commanding the clouds
And vanishing at will
They’ll all find out anyway
The changes, they’re starting
The weather’s not normal
Regimes are unstable
Women are rising
Institutions are trembling
Power is being taken back
Wealth soon to follow
Whose side are you on?
Life or death?
You or us?
We’ll start over
And this time remember
That as we grow
Our egos should die
Or they will kill us all
With their fear of death
But we already know
How this story ends…

More testosterone, fewer lies

A really interesting study came out this week showing men given shots of testosterone told fewer lies. http://mobile.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/health/121014/men-higher-testosterone-tend-lie-less-study-suggests

Other interesting points included: average person tells 1-2 lies/day, half of all lies come from 5% of people (low-testosterone people?)

This makes evolutionary sense if you consider that testosterone likely allowed men to band together, communicate, and cooperate in order to compete against their fiercest rival historically: the lion.

This also has really interesting implications. If you consider that lying peaks in children around the age of 7, it is before kids receive their last big testosterone surge during adolesence.

Then can you really punish someone for lying in court? They could argue they are low testosterone (and can prove it!).

I still believe that punishment will become a thing of the past. The more you understand about a person’s motives, chemical or otherwise, the less likely you are to treat them harshly.

It also makes me think about obesity, which causes the body to give off more estrogen than testosterone. I then thought of my mother, and how overweight she might have been when carrying us kids, and what effect that would have had on our testosterone or androgen, and might explain some differences in siblings, their body type differences, success, etc. Or not! :)