This is the first post in a series about the boldest adventure of my youth—running away at sixteen to attend Woodstock.
Some Sixties veterans compare Burning Man and iconic hippie gatherings like Woodstock, the Trips Festival of January 1966, the Summer of Love, and the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park the following year.
The parallels are unmistakable: Burning Man and those early countercultural events embraced free love, wild costumes, audience participation, and the exuberant spirit of loud music and psychedelics.
I experienced Woodstock firsthand, though I’ve never attended Burning Man.
To me, Woodstock carried a deeper power. We were a community of mellow, free-spirited hippies, gentle in our energy. From what I’ve heard from those who’ve experienced it, Burning Man combines a different blend of artists, modern-day “hippies,” musicians, rowdy beer drinkers, and New Age healers. As long as you’re not harming anyone, you can express your passion however you choose.
The idea for the Woodstock Music Festival took shape in early 1969, when four young promoters envisioned a large-scale concert to help finance a new recording studio. Although they first planned to hold the event near Woodstock, New York, they ultimately found a home at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel.
The festival unfolded over four unforgettable days, from August 15 to 18, 1969.
Burning Man began in 1986 as a small fire ceremony and beach gathering in San Francisco. After park police cracked down on the event in 1990, it relocated to the Black Rock Desert, where it rapidly grew.
To this day, it culminates each year on Sunday night with the burning of a giant wooden effigy — the iconic Man.
Burning Man is an annual experiment creating a temporary community built on radical self-expression and self-reliance.
Some say the sexual revolution began on May 10, 1960 — when I was just six years old — and it measured only two inches long.
Maybe size isn’t everything.
It all started with a modest two-inch notice in the New York Times: the FDA had approved a new drug called Enovid, developed by G.D. Searle & Company. Marketed as a treatment for menstrual disorders, it quietly introduced a revolutionary side effect—contraception. By 1966, six million American women were on “the Pill.” The revolution was underway, and it showed no signs of slowing down.
Love always seems to bloom with the arrival of spring; however, in 1966, it felt even more pronounced. That April, Bill Masters and Gini Johnson released their groundbreaking study, Human Sexual Response. While the work was more scientific than sensual, it marked a major cultural shift—sex was no longer hidden behind closed doors, and Masters and Johnson quickly rose to fame.
For those of us who came of age after the arrival of the Pill, love, sex, marriage, and children could finally exist apart from one another. It was nothing short of revolutionary—and it felt profoundly freeing. I was young enough for the sexual revolution to shape my teenage years, and old enough to experience its aftermath as an adult. I often found myself wondering: Where was God in all of this? And, having married at seventeen, what exactly made matrimony sacred?
By the time I reached adulthood, I learned that even the Pill couldn’t always untangle sex from conception. In the 1970s, I was riding the wave of liberation, with women newly empowered by the right to abortion. Conceived. Aborted. The party continued until the 1980s, when the music faded. Liberation slowly gave way to loss.
Yet, in time, I learned: loss, too, can be its kind of liberation. The wheel keeps turning.
The social and spiritual upheaval of the Sixties unleashed powerful forces, with women’s liberation and the sexual revolution among the most transformative.
I believe their impact still echoes through our lives today. I came of age right in the heart of that storm.
For better or worse, I experienced the sexual revolution first as a teenager and later as an adult—an era that brought me freedom, confusion, and a complex tangle of emotions. Even now, I sometimes find myself wondering what it all truly meant.
Every picture tells a story—and so does this blog.
It’s a story of a crisis of faith, the restless spirituality of the ’60s, and the messy, enduring family ties. It’s about children who were never born, babies conceived without a plan, and a world spinning faster than anyone could control. For millions, the Pill was hailed as freedom. In the 1960s, birth control wasn’t fenced in by the strict rules we have today.
Some states tried to put up barriers, especially for anyone under 21—the so-called age of adulthood—but the truth was messier.
With a bit of persuasion, my stepmother convinced a doctor to put me on the Pill at fourteen. Fourteen.
In 1967, California passed the Therapeutic Abortion Act—one of the first cracks in the wall. But it wasn’t about choice; it was about survival.
Abortions were allowed only if a woman’s life was at serious risk or if she had been raped. No one was handing out freedom. Not yet.
By 1968, Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ screamed through speakers, and I knew exactly what it meant to fall into a hole you didn’t dig yourself.
I wasn’t chasing dreams—I was running from choices made in my name and futures locked away before I knew how to want them.
I carried the ghosts of what could have been and the cold, sharp grief of paths I never had the chance to choose.
Liberation came dressed in bright colors and loud music—but underneath, it carried its kind of silence. A silence I still hear.
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