Celia Gregory on the sixties' hidden contradiction — a movement built on peace that was, underneath, a generation at war with its own inheritance.
Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé. This week: novelist Celia Gregory, whose new book Hippie Wars turns the peace-and-love sixties inside out, tracing how a generation's mobility, drugs, and communes were shadowed by Vietnam, the draft, and inherited trauma. Gregory, raised in London and steeped in yoga, Osho, and marine conservation, connects the sexual revolution's first pill-era freedoms to today's reckonings with consent and equality.
The conversation turns to Taos, where she now lives beside Pueblo land and a mountain locals say chooses what to do with each visitor, and to the sixty-four-year legal fight that returned the sacred Blue Lake and its watershed to the Taos Pueblo, a story she uses to ask what we value when it isn't money.
Along the way: Ocean Vuong's reframing of "the American war in Vietnam," Ken Kesey's bus, Rajneeshpuram's rise and fall, and Gregory's path from chronic pain to yoga and creative freedom.
It's a wide-ranging hour on counterculture, land, water, and what gets passed down between generations, for better and worse.