I am too old to be a Hippy Dippy so I will stick with just being dippy that comes along with aging, methinks. It is too much work to try to be anything other than who I am, but I do love the “light” hippy dippy me.
I love big ‘sacky’ maxi-dresses, and harem pants, and purple or other neon color strips in my hair. I love my grandson’s and other young men with a man bun. I hate “clean” eating and gag at food that simply is not palatable to me, no matter how soy-free, gluten=free, yuck whatever. I do not get the tasteless gnawing on raw almonds. I repel meditation and know that my meditative streaks happen when I am drawing, painting, carving, creating. I love the “soft” feminism that women seem to have found as level playing ground.
There is an illusion, I thin k, about bohemian women today. We see those beautiful octogenarian women in funky Bohemian clothing. They have had professional make up and stylists and dressers and look like the elusive magazine page photoshopped reality. Like teenagers being bombarded with photoshopped girls and young women from the big city modeling agencies, we are being tempted to be scripted by these older women who are supposed to tease us into trying to dress and look like them but don’t have a chance in hades, nor the money, nor the outlets to be octogenarian and in photo shoots. They portray that women in their 80s should do yoga, be nomadic, carefree, arthritis-free, women with layers of make up and anti-aging creams that do not allow for genetic hereditary wrinkles and physical liabilities that real women in their 80s, not living in New York, face as an every day reality.
We are conditioned, through the media, to be neo-hippy, to be vegan and swayed by Eastern Mysticism, be surrounded with expensive candles and be unwilling to make sacrifices or worry about each other while in the pursuit of the memememe culture that life is just beyond the turn of a page or blink of a screen. It smacks of the age of self-centeredness and ‘Rat Pack’ mentality, the high school ‘IN’ crowd, with all the precociousness of such. Somewhere in between all this is a simple aging woman struggling with her aging yet wanting to be part of the crowd.
In every age, there have been those who try to persuade others to be part of the “in” crowd. The teenagers and hippies of yesterday are still trying to persuade us that being “in” means looking like the glossy photo-shopped women and living their pretend life. We are bombarded with cutsie little sayings about age being a state of mine, about how women in their 80s are still sex objects, that we should be flying off to Budapest Hotel with a four-hundred-dollar dreadlock head wrapped in a four-hundred-dollar bandana-type silk scarf.
Down here, where life is real, there are women still running a ranch, a farm, a little apartment that is subsidized, where meals are cooked for us in an industrial kitchen, are women who cannot live at home any more, of women who are living on the streets, int heir vehicles, simply trying to survive. There are those of us who have retired and are enjoyed true freedom of not having to get up, put on our make up, and dress up our dogs to go out trying to act like we are show pieces. That is true peace, love, freedom, actually. We are not interested in being the neo-hippy bohemian who has nothing better to do and the type of ‘snobbery’ that is being pushed on us as the real 80s women.
It has become so blasé in our “namastes”, our pseudo–Native American jewelry, our tree-hugging, spirit animal divining reality for so many. As well, since we were teenagers during the ‘hippy daze”, we have romanticized what it was really like to live communally, to live lives that are seeking something that was never real and was only a way to gather into groups and say we really do care about Mother Earth, about losing species, about Green Peace and old forest trees. What 'neo-hippydom’ is about is the facade that we can all look like those octogenarian models, live a life they try to portray, decorate our houses, ourselves, the way of the ‘in group’ and brag about how we eat like birds on seeds and nuts and bitter natural foods that are hardly palatable in reality. We are far from being what was once hippy dippy.
We are so not into materialism and we did not truly change the world. The same issues that were there in the 60s are still here with us. Many are still pot smoking and idealistic in similar ways. It is just that the ideal has changed. There are few who truly live that lifestyle any more. We are either elitist in a new way or we have ‘dropped out’/living in reality of social welfare states of being. We live from old age pension check to old age pension check. Some have found a new shamanism and try to portray obsession with some spiritual path and some spiritual guru of new kinds. Many have dropped out of organized religion and are seeking triggers to how we act and react, are tired of delving into feelings, and are simply too tired to be what is not real. We wore ourselves out trying to have equal rights. We have gone broke trying to live lifestyles that we were conditioned to think …we could do it all mentality. We wore our bones out trying to keep up the pace on cement flooring. We may still burn sage, but we do not even know how to collect it. We might still wear patchouli but we no longer smoke it. We may listen to The Grateful Dead, but we have to tune in our hearing aides. We remember the lines to Beat Poetry but we still cannot remember where we parked our cars or why we went into a room. We go on trips, but the landings hurt. We’ve had hip replacements, maybe some lip-plumping Botox, don’t wear bras and it has nothing to do with feminism and more to do with it is just to difficult to try putting one on any more.
It just isn’t like the old days any more. Reality bites no matter how bohemian you are trying to be and live and look. We are not the romanticized aging women we thought we would be, once, when we were want-to-be hippies. Today I find myself a whole lot more dippy than anything else.
©Carol Desjarlais 6.9.21
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