Berkeley Hippie Revival Project

What can I say to the people I write to? Do I write to an audience? Surely, I do, whether it be to the voices in my head or to an imagined BHRP body… maybe those two things are linked.

My voice is beyond my words, its action and intention. What are my intentions? What do I want to see in this world and for why? It might be change, but relative to what? I want to see this world how it was, that is, an image made in my idealised thought. And if man is evil? Maybe it wouldn’t be that ideal for me, but to say that man is evil is to make a figure of humanity just as limiting as my ideal and any other.

So what does that mean for what BHRP does on Sproul? Can I expand Sproul? The political center of Berkeley’s voice, less relaxing than the Glade and louder than any library, it is a passionate voice. At night, when the tiny parts of that energy go back to sleep, to rest on class material and life events, they bring that voice with them. A voice, it runs, not just through sound, but through time and thought. I cannot expand Sproul; I am just one part. I want to create a space for that voice to echo beyond just 12-3pm on a Friday afternoon. I want it tomorrow and yesterday, in a faraway land and next to people’s hearts.

A shout dies out quick. An email gets lost in hours. This website shuts down when someone stops paying for it. A conversation and a memory can go far.

I chat, and I listen, and I recount: more tales, more parallels. I want all of the narrative. I want to expand it as far as it can go, and that means telling more stories and learning every day. When I go to sleep at night, I remember and draw connections. Inspiring this is what I want, I think, for now.

An ideal is necessary to guide, maybe. We can all agree on and understand the complexities of life and emotion to as far of an extent as possible, but what do we do from there? All make our own ideal? How could we know that none conflict? Would they not always conflict, even if we had a societally guiding ideal? It’s a cult, I think, to truly have one moral pillar followed by all. And is that beneficial? Is that what we want? I don’t know, but I certainly wouldn’t want to impose that unless it was asked of me.

For now, I’m starting on making that place for ideals to be searched for and reasoned with and communicated. That is my intent…

just so that it’s clear to everybody.

Everybody?

To those reading this now, and to those who haven’t yet but have spoken to me, and to those yet in the know: I am speaking to y’all!

Everyone is a part of BHRP, even if they don’t know it yet.

BHRP is an amorphous blob of thought and specific moments that lives adjacent to the amorphous blob of thought and specific moments with a campus, UC Berkeley. We stand with the community of students, and Berkelites, and Oaklandanders, and Americans, and Global citizens that are all touched by the tendrils of that institution and others similar to it. In that, BHRP is large, growing with every mention and conversation.

We will be bigger, and we will eventually be smaller,

somewhere in the dust,

like all things,

soon to be made anew again by the rain.