Finding Findhorn

Here I am. Standing in a circle, holding hands, with 16 strangers. Right palm up, left palm down. A candle stands in a flower-laden holder in the center of us. We all have our eyes closed or fixed on this flame. Our ‘focalizer’, who has not told us all her name yet, speaks in short quiet sentences. There is a long pause between each phrase.

Let us bring ourselves fully present…Feel the breath coming in and going out…Feel your two feet on the ground…Feel the two hands holding your hands…Now expand you awareness to this circle you are now a part of…Bring to your consciousness your expectations for the week…Now try to let them go…Let us invoke the Angel of Findhorn to guide our experience this week…(now even more quietly) Thank you.

A squeeze of palms circulated as we release each other and return to the more familiar communion of fleeting glances and grins.

The next day we stood in a circle again, slightly less strange to each other, all of us either in socks or bare feet. Our focalizers this time were David, with a soft voice and a graying beard, and Rona, a younger woman with a Brazilian accent and a large warm smile. They directed the 16 of us into 2 circles of 8. One circle was inside the other with the people facing out, so that each person was facing a partner in the other circle. The asked us to close our eyes, and then they rotated the outer circle.

Please keep your eyes closed. Please remain silent and try not to do anything that will expose your identity to the person across from you. Please put your hands in front of you and slowly move them until you find the hands of the person across from you. When you find them, just hold them for a time.

The directions continued, and they asked us to express different emotions to our unidentified partner, using only our hands. Curiosity: our fingers clambering over each other’s. Sadness: holding each other in a firm clasp, soothing with slow thumb-strokes over back of hand. Playfulness: our hands dancing, flapping, clapping in a blind game of paddycake. Love: I cannot describe what our hands did. But because of our hands, I thought of my father and when I embraced my father under the stars the night before I left and all the unsung songs of that ineffable bond pulsed through me and my hands and I felt warm unbidden tears flow down into my beard and I thought of my father’s beard and somehow sent that love through my hands. And I let myself be loved.

When you are ready you may open your eyes and, if you wish, speak with your partner.

Across from me I found the face of Charles Bentley, a tall man with a completely bald head and kind eyes sparkling down at me from under tired and heavy brows. Our hands remained joined as we smiled at each other. He spoke first.

Wow.

Thanks, Charles.

They say hands are the window to the soul.

The next day found Charles and I working together in the laundry room. Stephen, an exceedingly gentle Irishman with a great curly mop of salt and pepper hair, taught us the proper way to fold each of the four different kinds of sheets that were used at the Findhorn guesthouse. Stephen gave each piece of fabric precise care and attention as he carefully folded it. After Charles and I had learned the process, Stephen moved to the other side of the room to work at another task, folding napkins. Charles and I conversed while we worked, but Stephen remained mostly silent. Despite his silence, he was not withdrawn or being unsocial. When we asked him a question or when he had something to say, he would stop what he was doing and walk a few steps across the room to talk with us. For three hours we folded sheets, towels, and pillowcases. When our time in the laundry room had ended, we joined the six others in the home care team. We shared how we were feeling after the afternoon’s tasks with each other. Some people related joys, pleasures, and satisfactions; some people related difficulties and preoccupations that distracted them from being focused on their efforts during the afternoon. We ended the afternoon the way we began, sitting in a circle around a candle, holding hands.

Charles and I both found the attitude and practice of work that we experienced extraordinary. Caring attention was given to both people and the tasks. As the week continued, I tried with varying degrees of success to emulate the loving focus that Stephen gave to the sheets. One significant moment, as strange as it may sound, was when I was vacuuming with Amadeus (that was the name of the vacuum cleaner). I had been singing or humming some song to myself while I was moving Amadeus over and across the carpet. It occurred to me that I was not focusing on my task. I stopped singing and attended to my task. But I still wanted to sing. I started to hum again, a single tone, the same pitch as Amadeus. I varied my pitch, harmonizing with Amadeus in a third, then a fifth, and then a simple melody in the key that Amadeus determined.

My mind had wandered again from the task, focusing instead on the music. I had not really emulated Stephen, but after humming with Amadeus, I thought about how a simple thing such as singing or carrying out a conversation can potentially devalue the task at hand. Stephen, and others that I worked with at Findhorn, saw dusting and sweeping, mopping and making beds as more than a boring chore to be finished quickly. They saw these housekeeping tasks as important, each containing its own energy, and the energy and attitude with which we engaged with these tasks mattered. The people I worked with spoke of energies occupying spaces; as we worked, our service to our selves and to the community occupying these spaces was to cleanse these spaces of tired and negative energies, to refresh and rejuvenate these spaces. As such, each action and attitude applied in our task-making influenced the well-being of the whole community.

Three people living in a permanent RV-park founded Findhorn. One of these three people, while meditating in the garden in they kept, received communication from the spirits of plants in the garden, beings she called devas. She shared these communications with the other two, and they applied what they received to the care of their garden. Their garden flourished (think 40-pound cabbages), and as word spread of this magical garden growth, interested people began to come. Some people came and joined the three and the community grew, population fluctuating and flowing as people came and left, contributing to sometimes amorphous but always intentional relationships among the people and this place they occupied. Forty odd years later, Findhorn is composed of two main parts. One is a mix of an eco-village where people live permanently in homes designed to work with the natural and spiritual energies of this sand flat near the sea. The other is a conference and retreat center where people can do introductory programs like the one I did, and further programs, spanning months or more, that draw people deeper into Findhorn and its way of life.

As lovely as this may all sound, I was somewhat skeptical. But Findhorn hounded me. One practice I found quite intriguing was when we went into a garden kept near the guesthouse. Our focalizer (this is the word they use a Findhorn for the leader of a group, if that has not become clear yet), a young woman named Erin with a quiet voice who spoke slowly and always seemed on the edge of a mild smile, asked us to find a ripe vegetable that we wished to each, and to go sit, stand, or squat near it. We each found a green bean pod, a spinach leaf, or a parsley sprig. I stood next to a tomato plant, my eyes on a certain red fruit. Erin asked us to focus on the fruit or leaf we had found and to ask its permission to pick and eat it. She said whenever we felt it was appropriate, we could proceed with picking and, in process, eating. I felt a bit funny, but not silly, as I solemnly squatted next to the tomato plant. I touched a fuzzy leaf, feeling it between my finger and my thumb. I smelled that rich, tangy and earthy smell particular to tomatoes. I humbly requested permission to pluck that tomato. I paused for a moment. Feeling that I wouldn’t feel more appropriate if I waited any longer, I pinched the stem between my forefinger and thumbnail. I was conscious of cutting something umbilical. I rolled this round red fruit around in my palm, sensing its firm smooth skin, interrupted only by its recently severed stem, which leaked a small bit of fragrant and bitter fluid on my fingers. I looked around. Some people were smiling, eating. I smiled, and turned back to this plump fruit I held in my hand. I asked its permission to eat it; I am not sure if my lips moved. It seemed like it wanted to be eaten. I consented and complied, raising the tomato to my lips. My teeth met the its skin, which resisted for a significant moment before bursting, yielding a sweet, succulent, tart flood into and around my mouth.

I am not sure if I can call this a spiritual experience. I cannot say that I had some communication with a tomato spirit. But I did have some communion with a tomato. I must say that after that prelude, a foreplay of the lesser senses with this fruit, the full object of my attention, the communion I experienced via lips, tongue and teeth was most intimate, significant, and satisfying. I still don’t know whether to call that spiritual.

Throughout the week, I continued to learn with my hands, and to feel with my heart. These things became things to ponder with my head, but I first experienced them with my hands and my heart. I know that sounds a bit trite, but so did the substance of a lot of little rituals that we did during the first part of my week at Findhorn. For instance, on the second day, we sat in a circle with a candle in the middle (yes, this was quite a common situation). An unusual deck of cards was opened out around the candle, face down. One of our focalizers explained to us that these were angel cards. Each card had on it one angel, and each angel was a quality or a virtue such as understanding, healing, joy, efficiency, or discernment.

When you feel called by or drawn to one of the cards, please retrieve it and look at it. Don’t show it to anyone else yet.

My impression was that the whole angel charade was a bit corny and even contrived was confirmed when I picked up my angel card. My angel was depth. On my card was a little cartoon illustration of a winged fair-haired woman in a robe on the edge of a pool of water. This angel was wearing scuba gear. I considered this card.

You’ve got to be kidding me, right? I mean, a cartoon angel in a diving outfit? Give me a break.

Fortunately, I kept these smarmy thoughts to myself at the time. Depth turned out to be just the right angel for me to continue to consider throughout the week. After the experiences with my hands that I have told you about, and many others that I have not shared with you, I came to appreciate the emotional, spiritual, and even physical significance that the rituals of Findhorn can have. Once I got a little bit past my uncomfort and cynicism, though I must admit these garments are not easy to discard, the rituals did not seem simply quirky and contrived, or at least not much more so that any of the conventions that I have followed in other communities. These rituals were actually an essential strand in the common bond that united this community. Once I began to join in this community by participating in the rituals, I realized how lonely I was after traveling by myself for almost a month. The way that Findhorn met my loneliness is what will stay with me, more so even than my thoughts about their spiritually special gardens.

One of the several 50-something-year-old women in my group told me that she had noticed that at the beginning of the week my hands had been very cold. It was raining and a bit chilly the day when I arrived. As the week progressed, this woman, along with the others, was like a mother to me, sharing sympathetic smiles and hugs with me. The weather also warmed as the sun shone almost everyday (a rare week in the Scottish Highlands). On the day that I left Findhorn, it was cold and rainy again, but my hands were warm, warmed by the family I had found at Findhorn.