New Age Hippies

New Age jam band Option 22 mixes music, mysticism

The Princeton-based world beat and jam band Option 22 will help provide the score of the eco-fable "Saint Stephen's Dream: A Space Opera" at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation beginning Thursday. Then, starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, it will perform as part of the first FestivALL International Music and Food Dad at Haddad Riverfront Park. Gathered around a café table, none of them drinking anything, the members of Option 22 look like an odd bunch and definitely not what you'd expect from a hippie jam band. The Princeton-based world beat and jam band is made up of four people who look as different as a basket of mismatched socks.

The projects the group is involved with for FestivALL are varied as well. Beginning Thursday, it will help provide the score of the eco-fable "Saint Stephen's Dream: A Space Opera" at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Then, starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, it will perform as part of the first FestivALL International Music and Food Dad at Haddad Riverfront Park.

The group's de facto spokesperson is singer/songwriter and New Age devotee Lori McKinney. She talks in gushes while her husband, multi-instrumentalist Robert Blankenship, looks on, content to say as little as possible, though at times he seems absolutely in awe of her while he rubs the tattooed wedding band on his ring finger.

He gets a word in here and there.

"I wasn't really into music until Lori and her friends had that open mic," he says. "That was it for me."

Blankenship says he'd picked up a guitar here and there -- just never took it seriously. "I just plucked around."

After he met McKinney things changed.

"The music just flowed out of him," she adds. "And he's so good. He's always picking up stuff. Last summer, I think, we were at a festival and he was really into Xavier Rudd and the didgeridoo."

 So, now Blankenship plays the didgeridoo, an Australian wind instrument with a droning sound that is often made from a hollowed out log.

Blankenship seems more comfortable with playing than talking, which also seems to be true of bass player Brandon Dunn. Dunn recently joined the band to replace Blankenship's brother Clayton, who left after the birth of a child.

"Brandon is an amazing bass player," McKinney says.

When he's not playing music, Dunn is studying to be a machinist. He calls the members of Option 22 cool people and says he's glad to be involved with the group.

God is a New Age Hippie « The Weaver's Loom

There is a lot of buzz in the modern self-help and new age fields about manifesting and creating your reality.  The tune may be a little different from place to place, but the lyrics are the same:  whatever you want from the universe, you can bring it into being.  The universe will mirror back to you what you put out there.  Want to attract more of something?  Put it out there.  If you’re negative, you’ll attract negative vibrations and so if you want to only attract the positive, then only put positive vibrations out there.

This causes some people to react with raised eyebrows.  It’s fluffy, feel good, hippie b.s., they might say to themselves – or to others around them.   But what if is isn’t hippie b.s.?  What if it isn’t even new age, but goes back a really, really long way?

If this stuff about putting out into the universe what you want to get back is new age hippie stuff, then God was the first new age hippie.  That’s right: my hypothesis is that The Eternal himself was the first one on this bandwagon.  God was our model…it just took us a really long time to catch on.

Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?  How does the Torah (or Bible, if you prefer) relate the story of creation?  Was there a great battle of gods?  Nope.  Did God sneeze, making the creation the equivalent of divine snot?  Nope.  So how did God do it?  Ah….that’s right….God spoke creation into being.  God put it out there, and the universe was the mirror of that.  Hmmm….

We are co-creaters with God.  We all have the spark of the Divine within us.  Or, depending on your worldview, there is nothing outside of God and therefore we are also God.  Any way you slice it, we have a connection with that Divine Something.  And if that Divine Something manifested a certain reality, then so can we.  Probably not on as grand a scale – I can’t even manage a small planet, myself – but on a microscale, we have the power.

What kind of reality do you want to create?  Do you want love, peace, compassion, healing?  Then put it out there.  Speak it into being, and let the universe mirror it back to you.

Let there be light….