Hi everyone
In my book, Somewhere Under the Rainbow, I tell the story of my first encounter with modern-day hippies in the Rainbow community of Beneficio in Southern Spain.
I found myself at the age of 19 sitting in a teepee in my first ever talking circle and was told off by an English hippie girl for swatting away the flies.
‘They’re actually repairing the holes in your aura,’ she informed me patiently.
We then passed the talking stick around, each person sharing what was going on for them that day, until it reached the owner of the teepee, a man called Sun Bird who shared with us that he’d recently learned the cause of his current troubles - it went all the way back to a previous incarnation when he had been King Arthur.
He had betrayed his people to the Christians, you see, and the anguish of his mistake was a pain that he heroically bore now, many lives after.
I began to laugh but quickly suppressed it as I realised that everyone else in the circle was nodding in apparent sympathy with his confession.
Nonetheless, spending time at Rainbow Gatherings (month-long temporary communities of 100-5000 people in nature) introduced me to a sense of community, freedom and spontaneity that was hard to find anywhere else.
But wow, did I hear some things.
I was once told to breathe in the smoke from the camp fire to cure my cough.
I saw a cook be accused of being ‘an assassin of tomatoes’ by a raw food activist as he made a pasta sauce.
I was told that bacteria simply don’t exist.
I learned of the existence of holistic dentists - one guy I met was told by his dentist that the cavity in his tooth was because he had a problem with his mother - and it was true, he assured me, he really did!
For 10 years I went from one Rainbow Gathering to the next, attending around 30 of them; I helped organise the running of the camp, learned to tell stories around the fire, met some of the strangest and most interesting people I’d ever come across and shared so much fun, laughter and music.
Now I organise my own events in the summer which mean I’m too busy to go to Rainbow Gatherings these days. I miss a little the chaos of being sat in a food circle with 3000 people, hoping the pot won’t be empty by the time it arrives.
I miss less the naked servers whose pubic hairs I once found in my porridge.
Somewhere Under the Rainbow by Tom Thumb is available in print or on the Kindle.
The link to the uk Amazon isn't showing an available Kindle version. Is there another way to find it? Thank you.