Whatever Happened to the 'Circle Of Life'?

From 'Baby Boom' To 'Baby Bust' In One Generation.

In 1994, you couldn’t escape it. The song was everywhere. We’d be somewhere with the kids, and it would waft from a PA system at the mall or a boom-box in the park, And our five-year-old would press her face close to her little brother’s face and sing “It’s the circle, Glenny … the circle of life.”

In those years, every outing was like going off on safari. With two kids, even a trip to the beach required mobile infrastructure. Stroller, check … diaper bag, check … sunscreen, check … ice chest, check … sandwiches, juice, snacks, first-aid kit, wipes, baby aspirin, two changes of clothes, sweaters in case it gets cold, shoes, sandals, towels, chairs, sunglasses, books, toys, shovel, bucket, etc., etc., etc. etc..

Nothing was simple. Everything was complicated. Nothing was easy. Everything was hard. Except for the people.

Except for laughter, and goofiness, and joy. And the certain knowledge that we would someday look back on these as the BEST years. Those things came easy.

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On Sunday April 7th, we gathered to properly say goodbye to Ric Taylor, one of America’s little known treasures. A songwriter and guitarist of enormous gifts. 24 of Ric’s admirers took the stage one by one, to sing a song in his honor. Some of us had learned Ric’s own songs. Some sang songs they had written with Ric’s help. And some brought a classic that expressed the right feeling, or one they had written that Ric had loved.

This event was held at Tarzana Community & Cultural Center. Mostly outdoors. There were a hundred chairs, a sound system, lots of instruments, a refreshment bar manned by volunteers. And inside, tables bursting with all the fixin’s for a late lunch and dessert.

Nobody had brought an ego to the affair. All were cooperative and helpful and kind. But there was something missing, as there is almost always something missing at the events I produce or just participate in …
… CHILDREN. Let’s talk about this.

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Right out of high school, I had gone off to join an older cousin, Bill Morrison, in Hawaii. Over the next few years, I was back and forth between my friends out in the San Gabriel Valley, and Bill’s friends in The Islands. These were people in their early thirties who’d gone to Haight-Ashbury, and left there determined to ‘get back to nature’. In 1973, on Kauai and Oahu and Maui, Homesteader Hippies were returning to the land.

As a working class kid from one of L.A.’s least interesting suburbs, I was being exposed to a lot of new ideas. And I soon came to understand that not all of the counter-culture types that I was encountering, were on the same page.

I later came to understand that I was witnessing a transition between Hippiedom, and The New Age. On the one hand we’d visit with friends way back in the woods near Haleakala, where shirtless long-haired dudes and their braless sweethearts in Madras-cloth sundresses, raised barefoot kids who ran in packs through the forest; with the barefoot neighbor kids. I don’t think I ever heard a political conversation in those largely self-built homes.

And on the other hand we’d receive visitors from San Francisco and Malibu carrying their yoga mats and taking over our kitchen to teach us macrobiotic cooking. These were educated city people with an appetite for anything new and unproven. Their ‘beliefs’ were trendy and stylish and were very often woven together with political opinion.

The Back To Nature Hippies are a breed of their own, and many are still out there in pockets of wilderness all over the country, making it on their own, little noticed or understood by the main-stream ‘progressives’ of today.

Strangely, I have always seen a connection between these free spirits - and the God-fearing farmers of the American Heartland.

They share a connection to The Earth, an eagerness to build and make, an innate distrust of far-away government, and a bone-deep understanding of community. I’ve visited a lot of hippie-farms, and a fair number of farmer-farms in the Midwest. The differences between them are superficial really.

It’s true that Hippies are associated with The American Left … but really, they are more ‘small-L’ libertarian … and largely apolitical. Just like many heartland conservatives.

In 1979, I roadied for a band on a tour through the Midwest, where most of the band had come from when they went to L.A., to be rock stars. While trekking from town to town and gig to gig, we stayed on the farms of various family members. Sometimes at the supper table, I thought of my hippie friends still over in Hawaii, and how they would fit right in with this family.

The difference, really, between these earthy Hippies, and the ‘New Agers’ who replaced them in our cultural consciousness is simple. Children. It never occurred to these young hippie couples that they would not soon become trios and quartets as pregnancies and births and childhoods arrived with all of their complications and rewards.

To love a woman or a man was to form a family and let it grow. Whether or not you ever got married at the county courthouse.

This was the circle of life. The young growing up through the process of bringing children into the world and helping them to grow up.

Unlike back-to-nature Hippiedom, the New Age is self-focused. SELF-discovery, SELF-realization, SELF-esteem, SELF-care, SELF-love. I came of age at a time when the one was giving way to the other.

It’s no joke when I sometimes describe myself as a conservative hippie.

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The following never happened exactly this way. I never approached a young pregnant hippie chick playing guitar cross legged in the grass and singing Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Circle Game’. But it might as well have happened. That song was my generation’s ‘Circle Of Life’. It too was everywhere, capturing well the passage of time, and the almost inexpressible joy and sorrow of being human.

Mitchell’s song beautifully renders a childhood. But the story ends at age twenty, Joni’s age when she wrote it. Before the real work of circles begins - that of passing the torch to the next generation. There is much wisdom about being a child, but none at all about making a child and raising a child.

Neither does ‘Circle Of Life’ mention anything about bringing forth an infant or sending forth a grown human being. Beautiful song, but essentially about ‘self’. About one finding one’s own path.

It's the circle of life and it moves us all
Through despair and hope, through faith and love
'Til we find our place, on the path unwinding
In the circle …the circle of life

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Joni Mitchell famously gave up a child early on to pursue a career. Just as famously, she felt boxed-in by her fame. Last year, another powerfully talented woman worked very hard to muscle Joni back into the spotlight that had always made her uncomfortable.

Brandi Carlile is as well known for her l esbian life style, as Mitchell is for ruthlessly candid dissections of her own restless heterosexuality.

The pairing of the two is fraught with irony. Joni had a child, gave her up, pursued the spotlight and lived to regret it. Carlile, on the other hand, has strategically mined the NPR-friendly queer identification, while raising a daughter. And being responsible for perhaps the most beautiful song ever written about motherhood.

It is simply called ‘The Mother’.

Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind
You tethered to another, and you're worried all the time
You always knew the melody, but you never heard it rhyme

She's fair, and she is quiet, Lord, she doesn't look like me
She made me love the morning, she's a holiday at sea
The New York streets are as busy as they always used to be
But I am the mother of Evangeline

The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep
She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep
She filled my life with color, cancelled plans and trashed my car
But none of that is ever who we are

Outside of my windows are the mountains and the snow
I'll hold you while you're sleeping, and I wish that I could go
All my rowdy friends around, accomplishing their dreams
But I am the mother of Evangeline

In this song, Brandi Carlile says what I too am trying to say. It is not achieving for one’s self that closes the circle of life. It’s doing the hard thing, and paying it forward with children who will carry the light and pass it on themselves. This notion has mostly gone missing from popular culture.

If you’ll bear with me a for another few minutes, I want to talk about the greater implications of being more concerned with self-expression than with finding a mate and raising a family.

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My mother came from a family of five children. Three girls, two boys. Combined, her children gave my mom’s mom, 14 grandchildren. My mother also had five kids. Two girls, three boys. Combined, we gave her only four grandchildren.

I was born just past the center-point of The Baby Boom. 3.4 was the average number of children born to an American woman in the mid-fifties. By 1990, when we were hauling a toddler and an infant to the beach, that number had dropped to 2.08. Just a tad beneath the replacement rate of 2.1 for modern human populations.

My then-wife and I felt good that we had precisely replaced ourselves, with a healthy happy girl and boy. Those kids are both now older than we were when we had them. Neither has shown much interest in reproducing.

By 2020, the fertility rate had dropped to only 1.64. Well below the replacement rate. And you can see by these graphs that this is not a problem unique to The United States.

In one generation we’ve gone from Baby Boom, to Baby Bust.

The so called ‘Social Safety Net’, is something of a benign pyramid scheme. The idea being that our populations would grow, producing more people paying in … than people taking out. This was complimented by the assumptions that our economy would always grow, and that old people would die not very long after beginning to collect Social Security.

Now we have people living until ninety and beyond, some of them collecting benefits longer than they paid into them, and having left behind only one child or none.

Even a benign pyramid scheme fails if the pyramid is inverted. In this piece I won’t get into all of the nightmare scenarios that plague a population of elders who never reproduced. Declines in everything from innovation to military strength.

Just one example will serve us here. Ponder for a second the elder-care industry that has grown as fast as our reproductivity has shrunk. More and more frail oldsters with an ever shrinking pool of the young and strong to care for them and to fund their care.

In every affluent industrialized nation, arguments rage over immigration. Often with those who want to slow it down being accused of racial motives, and those who want to make it easier, being accused of hating their country.

The simple truth is that these nations, including our own, are importing people from poor countries that are rich in young people, in order prop up our economies and do all of the heavy lifting. These hard-working self-sacrificing immigrants have not stopped reproducing at the replacement rate or beyond.

Whatever you think about the culture you grew up in, there is no doubt that these sweeping demographic changes WILL alter that culture.

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It’s time for us to stop with all of the relentless self-focus. Yeah, we’re cool and hip and looking good for our ages. But the proof of every generation is the NEXT generation. And in that department we’re not looking so good.

Encourage your children to have children. Let them know what a joy they were when they were making a mess out of your car, and making you miss a rock concert.

Both ‘Circle Of Life’, and ‘The Circle Game’ get their cyclical imagery from the ever-repeating swing of The Earth around the sun and human life through the rotating seasons.

But life is not a circle. We don’t loop back. The seasons may “go ‘round and ‘round”, but we do not. Life is a continuum. A straight line from here to the horizon. And we see every returning season through eyes just a little bit dimmer with age.

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I’m late with this post due to extreme activity and distraction. I spent most of last week preparing for and promoting another community event. 40 good solid people got together. They broke bread and listened together to meaningful music played with heart. Then they circled the chairs, and shared more laughter and homemade music.

It was good. It was worthwhile. And again, there was not even one child present.

We hope to change that in the coming months. Stay tuned.

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