Festival. Ritual. Opening and closing. Beginning again. Two years later our tentative commune, split by conflict, travel and overload, came together to join 3,000 brothers and sisters in practice for the future. I wrote a note for the intercommunal newsletter Kaliflower, about this night when children play at meeting their ghosts.

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All Hallow's Eve

        Dragon's Eye finally got itself mostly together, for Halloween Eve. Eight of us broke the bathroom sink by leaning on it to paint dominos and hearts on our whiteface, and then went out to spend the night practicing War Games in the Berkeley streets. Pretty strange: we were almost the only ones in costume or color, and certainly the only group -- except for the Krishna chanters -- making music on the angry street: finger-cymbals, drum, flute and dancers. Mustn't we serenade at least ourselves and maybe the pigs, even as we dodge and defy them? Shouldn't we bring as much life as we can to each nexus of coming­together and action, even the necessary ones of political anger? It was lonely to be making light on the swirling corners and in the doorways of empty shops, trying to bring together fragments of an example. But good to be there at last.

October 1969

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