Actor Peter Coyote suggested we meet for this interview at his home north of San Francisco. Nicknamed “the Treehouse,” it has a striking view of Mount Tamalpais and is close to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. It is a long way from Hollywood, where Coyote has worked since 1980, appearing in more than ninety films and television programs. He says that he is “a Zen Buddhist student first, an actor second.” He will be ordained as a Zen priest in August.
Coyote has had an eclectic life, having done everything from farming to being a stockbroker. A self-described “socialist radical hippie anarchist environmentalist,” he’s seldom without an opinion on an issue and never one to hold back his views. Born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon in New York City in 1941, Coyote took his stage name from an experience he had while taking peyote in the Southwest. He has been socially and politically engaged since the age of fourteen, when he volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in Englewood, New Jersey. Coyote’s passion for progressive reform continued at Grinnell College in Iowa, where, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he helped organize a group of twelve students to travel to Washington, D.C., and protest nuclear testing. They fasted for three days outside the White House before President John F. Kennedy invited them in to talk with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
After college Coyote joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a guerrilla street-theater group still in existence today. He and some of his fellows from the mime troupe went on to form the Diggers, an anarchist group that “acted out” its ideas of what culture should be, questioning the core values of capitalism and distributing free food to runaways in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, sometimes feeding hundreds of people a day. They also ran a Free Store, a Free Clinic, and even (briefly) a Free Bank. The Diggers evolved into the Free Family, a network of communes around the country pursuing an alternative economy and culture.
Coyote is the author of the memoir Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle, a portion of which won a Pushcart Prize. A new book, about what he calls the “present mass hypnosis afoot,” is currently in revision. More
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