International Writers Inspiring Change presents: Chasing Karma (Memoirs of a 1960s Hippy)
Updated: Oct 2
Ron is a young radical with a busted suitcase, a probation problem, and a heart full of unfinished business. In Chicago, he has fought cops, sold underground newspapers, fallen in love, lost his collective, and watched his world splinter under the weight of politics, drugs, and desire.
Then a Wisconsin farm opens a new door. Out in the country, surrounded by fellow freaks, horses, goats, and hard labor, Ron begins to imagine a different life—one rooted in the land, love, and some kind of spiritual balance he can barely explain, let alone achieve.
But the commune is not a miracle cure. Desire gets complicated. Friendships fray. Meetings collapse into arguments. And as Ron tries to keep his heart, his ideals, and his future intact, he faces the question at the center of it all: can a free-spirited rebel really build a lasting home, or is every dream just another thing the road takes away?
The International Writers Inspiring Change Review
Chasing Karma, by Ronald Schulz, the continuing narrative in the Memoirs of a 1960s Hippie series, is a window into a culture and time that we may never see again. The 1960s cultural movement, where young people broke from long established conventions, the Woodstock counter-establishment movement, was a social experiment of the time. Teens, such as the author, followed a different star, resisting the mediocracy, refusing to abide by rules which they saw as restrictive and oppressive, where free love, communal living, an abject refusal to glorify wealth and possessions and instead, preaching both love and resistance to the authorities of the time, makes this story compelling and informative. We don't see this cultural zeitgeist in modern times. It was a one-up, a movement sparked by a generation that grew up in post World War II, who saw the fragility of a society that went to war once again in Vietnam, a world conflicted with the insanity of Cold War nuclear threats between nations, economic upheavals, and the introduction of psychotropic drugs. They called themselves, Hippies. Society, especially law enforcement, regarded them as social outcasts and problematic to the "system", but these young people followed a path that started dominos falling in ways which would affect the future - probably more than they realized, as they helped to shift the mental paradigm.
Review by International Writers Inspiring Change
Born in Chicago in 1952, Ronald grew up in Wood Dale. At fifteen he ran away to New Orleans, where he lived on Skid Row until betrayed by a priest. As a disaffected seventeen-year-old high school dropout in 1969, Ronald took LSD while hitchhiking into the western American counterculture. He also became involved in radical movements in New York and Chicago, including the SDS Days of Rage. Arrested and subjected to several months in a mental hospital, he made the most of it, later joining a Wisconsin commune, which remained his home throughout the 1970s. In 1975 he hitchhiked across North Africa and the Middle East, spent time on a kibbutz, and worked at a copper mine in Israel’s Negev desert. Then on to India and Nepal, where he spent nine months studying Buddhism under Lama Yeshe. His life has been full of adventure, travel, and different jobs, including teaching English classes in Tokyo, construction work in Los Angeles, and mining in South Dakota and Colorado. Ronald has a BA in political science from the University of Washington, as well as certificates in memoir writing and teaching English as a second language. He has been to every continent and lives in Seattle, writing a series of honest memoirs: Chicago Rage, Home at the Edge, Party at the Edge of the Rainbow, Teenage Runaway, and Chasing Karma, with many more to follow.
Visit author at Amazon HERE
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