Mahalo Nomads & Beachcombers, Castaways, Drifters & Dreamers...

Face Beside the Fire is a forbidden island in the mind where conformity and dogma receive no neural berth.

Here the frenetic pace of modern life is but a distant memory and the natural world beckons you to indulge the primitive, the sensuous and sublime.

It is a place as timeless as infinity and infinite as imagination.

17 April 2008

One of Natures Boys

"I am the wind, the sea, the evening star, I am every one, any one, no one." - eden ahbez
eden ahbez (April 15, 1908 – March 4, 1995), born George Alexander Aberle in Brooklyn, New York and adopted by a Kansas family and raised under the name George McGrew, was a songwriter and recording artist from the 1940s-1960s, whose lifestyle in California was influential on the hippie movement. He was known to his friends as "ahbe" and he refused to use capital letters to spell his name.

In 1947 Eden published Nature Boy. The song tells a fantasy of a "strange enchanted boy... who wandered very far" only to learn that "the greatest thing... was just to love and be loved in return".

The content of the song is based on a 1940s Los Angeles-based group of beatniks called "Nature Boys", of which Ahbez himself was part of. They wore long hair and beards, maintaining vegetarian diets and living according to Nature’s Laws.

Ahbez lived a bucolic life. From at least as early as the 1940s, he traveled in sandals and wore shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles, studied Oriental mysticism, and claimed to live on three dollars a week, sleeping outdoors with his family, and eating vegetables, fruits, and nuts.

For further reading and contemplation try Gordon Kennedy's excellent book "Children of the Sun".


Full Moon - from Edens Island

The Wanderer - from Edens Island



Edens 1948 Hit "Nature Boy" performed by Nat King Cole

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