“There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. They say he wandered far, very far, over land and sea. A little shy and sad of eye, but very wise was he. And then one day, a magic day he passed my way and we spoke of many things, fools and kings, this he said to me: ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.’” These lyrics from the song ‘Nature Boy,’ were a major hit for singer Nat King Cole and became a jazz standard.
The author of the song was eden ahbez, one of the 1940s “Nature Boys” who lived in the as-yet-undeveloped canyons and backwaters of Los Angeles. They were vegan, ate raw food, practised deep breathing, cold water bathing and meditation. One of their members was ‘Gypsy Boots’ who opened the Health Hut in Hollywood selling organic food and was inventor of the ‘smoothie.’ In the ‘90s Gypsy Boots was a regular at the Natural Foods Expo in Anaheim, where natural foods folk queued up to enhance their credibility by being photographed with him.
In 1939 Lord Northbourne hosted the Betteshanger School and Conference on Bio-Dynamic Farming on his Kent estate. Leading lights of biodynamics attended and a major outcome was Northbourne’s seminal 1940 book Look to the Land. This is where non-chemical farming was first described as ‘organic’ - this is the 80th anniversary of the coinage of the term. Northbourne saw the real war of the future as being between organic farming and the industrial model. Eve Balfour’s seminal book ‘The Living Soil,’ which led to the foundation of the Soil Association, devoted 7 pages of the first chapter to a long direct quotation from Look to the Land. Her core message was “The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” In other words, people couldn’t be healthy if the land was sick. Or, as George Harrison, quoting the Maharishi put it ‘for the forest to be green, every tree must be green.’
G Scott Williamson, who ran the health-supporting Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham described the neighbourhood as having a profile of all communities, ‘from the dregs at the bottom to the scum at the top.’ His wife Dr. Innes Pearce, co-founded the Soil Association.
So was the confluence of thinking between the pioneering proto-hippie Nature Boys of California and the upper class English engagement with an example of a shared perspective by the nobs and the yobs? Mary Langman, Balfour’s personal secretary, confided in me that in the ‘70s the Soil Association was alarmed by the emergence of the hippie-ish natural food stores with their macrobiotic notions and long-haired approach to organic living. It took more than a decade for the Soil Association to accept the natural foods movement as allies.
A new book “Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness” traces the origins of the wellness movement and its roots. From the spiritual lead of the Maharishi and Rajneesh, from the Beats such as Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the liberating psychology of Jung and Wilhelm Reich, the author Matthew Ingram diligently explores the multifarious threads that came together to create the counterculture. The hippies didn’t just spring from nowhere, the idea of living in harmony with the planet had deep and multifarious origins. Plato had a thing or two to say on the subject. Ingram covers Timothy Leary and LSD - one wonder if the counterculture would have made the strides it has without it. Communes, retreats and ashrams were where the ideas were tested in practice. Even Charles Manson gets a mention.
For anyone who is interested in how we got here, “Retreat” is essential reading. It is a pity that the discovery of wellness on a global scale needed Covid-19 to galvanise awareness that comorbidities such as diabetes and obesity are what make us so vulnerable to what is, for many, a harmless virus. Lord Northbourne and Gypsy Boots may seem odd bedfellows, but they both saw the war that lay ahead, if not how prolonged it would be. Now more than ever, we need to understand and develop the connection between the planet’s health and our health.
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