An Evening of Effective Democracy
A mid-week meeting is called. The subject is planning — specifically, how we are going to develop the new stretch of land in behind the Universal Hall that is likely to gain planning permission in the next year.
On the surface, hardly the stuff that wild nights out are made of!
In the event, 70 people cram into the community centre — before the meeting has begun, there is floor-sitting space only. We begin with a rousing song. There follow four short presentations from community members. A number of significant differences in perspective and approach are evident.
Questions at this stage are limited to those seeking clarification.
A ‘heart-keeper’ has been appointed to hold awareness of the quality of communication and attention. Every once in a while, as we begin to get lost in the heady discussions, she sounds a meditation gong and we take a minute or so of silence. Some close their eyes, others look as though they are processing new ideas and insights — the aim is to create a space in which to relax, breathe and remember that all is well.
We break into small groups to give everyone a chance to speak their thoughts and then we reconvene in the full circle for debate. The key fault-lines and challenges are now becoming clear.
Will decisions about development be made by the 90 or so community members who have bought shares in the company that owns the land or by the community as a whole? How could a community of 500 or so engage in decision-making at this level without slowing the whole process to a crawl as we seek for a high level of consensus?
Should the housing development be undertaken by the Community Development Company that has recently been formed — i.e. by the collective body — or by individuals or groups who would be invited to buy the plots?
What mechanisms could we use to ensure that a good proportion of the housing units are affordable to rent or to buy? Could housing cooperative or housing association models work for us?
Perhaps most important of all, how can we ensure that a good proportion of the escalating property values remain within the community (that collectively makes this such a desirable place to live) rather than with those who are able to afford to build their own homes? What would this mean for those selling up and relocating to somewhere else where property prices have also increased?
Arguments and counter arguments flow. Communication is clear and direct. Assumptions are questioned and assertions challenged. The meditation bell brings moments of silence. There are murmurs of approval for one woman who suggests that we recognise that most of us, to greater or lesser extents, carry most of the voices being aired within us: ‘Not much value in creating beautiful houses if we treat each other like shit’.
This is the kind of evening that effective democracy is made of. I have seen countless meetings like this in rural Africa, with villagers sat round a fire in the evening discussing community affairs. Here is where communities move way beyond neat principles of justice and equity to explore the messy business of applying these principles to the imperfect and compromised world in which we live.
In so doing, we develop muscles — of patience, of quality listening and of compromise. We also develop the practice of grappling with tough ethical questions rather than leaving these to the ‘professionals’.
Television, of course, has put paid to mass participatory democracy of this sort in the West.
I am a profoundly political being and have always voted in elections — indeed, I have been an active canvasser in many of those. However, democracy at the community scale feels more real somehow.
My wish is that as we head down the energy descent curve, locally-based decision-making structures along the lines we have kept alive here will re-emerge as people truly engage in empowered self-governance.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
May 2007
Manifesto for Truly Sustainable Communities
Raising the standard in ecovillages
Two things caught my eye in the New Statesman over the last week. The first was the emphatic thumbs-down by Sian Berry, UK Green Party speaker, to Gordon Brown’s new ‘ecovillages’ idea — the proposed pilot projects that will inform the design of five new ‘eco-towns’. She imagined they would “end up as sought-after, trendy developments whose residents, in practice, commute miles to work, shop in supermarkets and rarely walk or use the bus”.
The second was the policy advice given by a series of progressive think tanks and individuals to our prime minister in waiting.
Since I live in an ecovillage that goes a long way towards meeting the government’s carbon-reduction targets — we have the lowest footprint of any community in the UK that has been scientifically measured at around one half of the national average — it feels worth exploring why our reality is so different from Sian’s (entirely legitimate) fears and what policy guidance might emerge from our experience.
So, here goes!
Per capita car mileage in the Findhorn ecovillage was found by our ecological footprint study to be just six per cent of the national average. This is primarily because we generate so much employment on site — in the region of 200 jobs — that very little commuting is necessary. In addition, the community runs a fleet of small buses to ferry residents and guests between the two community campuses — that are around five miles apart – and there are many informal car-sharing schemes.
Policy implications? Promote mixed-use planning zones that integrate the residential with the commercial and industrial in a convivial mix, thus reducing the need to commute and provide advice and incentives for car-pooling.
Our ‘Home and heating’ footprint is 21 per cent of the national average — partly because our four wind turbines make us net exporters of electricity and partly because of the highly energy-efficient design of many of the houses. My near neighbour, John Willoner, had a total heating bill of £48 for calendar year 2006.
Policy implications? Encourage small-scale, community-based generation of electricity. This will involve greatly simplifying the regulations, assessments and studies required for small-scale projects that are currently broadly in line with those required for creating large wind farms: our pre-planning costs were in the region of £100,000 — far in excess of the cost of the actual turbines!
A predominantly vegetarian diet based primarily on local and seasonal produce gives us a food footprint 32 per cent of the national average. Policies to promote local procurement of food for schools, hospitals and other local government facilities could do much to promote a low food-mile diet, with extra employment generated in the agricultural sector.
Finally, an important reason why our community economy is relatively strong and able to generate so much employment is that we have our own community currency — Ekos. These, necessarily, keep purchasing power local, since the notes can only be spent in businesses in the community as well as several in the neighbouring village. In this sense, they are ‘un-travellers’ cheques’!
The promotion of community currencies to run parallel to national currencies would do much to regenerate local economies, enabling people to walk or cycle to work and school. As with the wind turbines, significant simplification of the regulations is required: much our largest item of expenditure in launching the Eko was lawyers’ fees.
None of this is rocket science. It is all sufficiently simple that we have been able to manage it with a minimum of official assistance.
Now, it may be said — in fact, all too often it is — that all of this is of little relevance since ecovillages like ours are so different from how most people live. Ours, after all, is a predominantly urban society. However, this is to miss the point. We have chosen to work on a small scale in a rural context since this makes it considerably easier to develop and prove the models. Having done so, the trick is to scale them up.
This is being done nationwide with gusto and imagination. We are seeing a proliferation of CSAs (community-supported agriculture box schemes) linking up cities with neighbouring farmers, urban carpools, community currencies and even, as in Dundee for example, some city-based, community-owned wind farms.
What is lacking is a clear vision and strategy at governmental level. Weaving cities back into the fabric of their bioregions and reviving local economies is both achievable and necessary if we are to meet our carbon-reduction targets. But, there will be commercial interests to face down.
The challenge facing our prime minister in waiting is not that of identifying policies to create truly sustainable communities — these are already out there in abundance — but the political will and imagination to champion and implement them.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
June 2007
From Megacity to Ecovillage
Learning Brazilian style, with a little bit of song and dance thrown in for good measure....
Very exciting developments in the ecovillage movement in Brasil. As part of an Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) course I am here in Sao Paolo teaching sustainable economy to around one hundred eager participants. This is a programme of Gaia Education, whose director, May East, herself a Brazilian, lives in Findhorn.
It is already very encouraging that 100 urbanites from one of the world’s great megacities should be so interested in the ecovillage model (in fact, far more were turned away than could be accepted — there were over 430 applications for the course).
Even more striking is the fact that it is the municipal administration that is hosting the course, in the recently established University of the Environment and Peace Culture (UMAPAZ) in conjunction with several nascent ecovillage developments in the city. The city administration is also paying expenses and airfares for the teaching staff, including three of us who have come from Findhorn.
The truth is that the ecovillage concept appears to be striking a deep chord here. It does not take long to get a sense of why this should be so. This is a culture that is unashamedly expressive and fun-loving. Singing and dancing come easily and men and women alike hug freely.
One gets the impression that Brazilians have a healthy understanding of the limitations of the technical dimensions of sustainability — the kind of stuff that we northern Europeans tend to be so focused on, like wind turbines, hybrid cars and the like.
For sure, these things are important. But without a vibrant human community at the centre, these machines begin to look like little more than a lifeless shell. Who wants to belong to any revolution that does not dance? — samba, by preference. The participants in the Sao Paulo EDE are in search of a path with heart and the ecovillage model is providing just that.
This is not to say that these are not serious students. Classes are generally in the evenings and the bulk of the students roll in from their day jobs hungry for engagement. Attention is focused and questions intelligent, right up until the final song and dance at 10.30pm.
This is applied learning: periodically, we break into 10 working groups where the participants explore how course concepts can be applied to their case studies. These are real life projects working with the landless, creating community schools and other sustainability initiatives in and around the city that many of the participants are personally engaged with.
Further confirmation of the easy marriage between the Brazilian way of being and the creative, holistic ecovillage model comes from another recent initiative.
La Caravana is a ‘mobile ecovillage’, an itinerant community of dancers, singers, poets and assorted performers that has been travelling around Latin America in a small fleet of multi-coloured trucks for the last decade.
Its core work, dressed up in the outfit of a clown, is the serious business of teaching about permaculture and sustainability through the medium of the arts.
Two years ago, Brazil’s minister of culture, the internationally-acclaimed singer, Gilberto Gil, described La Caravana as "the most original socio-cultural project in Latin America". Today, La Caravana is funded by the Ministry of Culture to travel the country, mobilising and empowering a network of more than 500 ‘Living Culture’ projects (community-based cultural organisations) established by the Ministry in 2003.
At the heart of the ecovillage concept is the truth that the journey towards sustainability is at least as much about creative expression within human-scale communities as it is about technical fixes. Is it really any surprise that the Brazilians are finding this so easy to grasp?
Jonathan Dawson
Brazil
June 2007
We Refuse to be Enemies
How 100 people are making the world a better place
Freshly back in Findhorn after a couple of weeks of gatherings of the European ecovillage family in Italy. Still getting used to the heavy, grey-green light and the leaden skies after the light, blue airiness of the Mediterranean.
Every year at our General Assembly, GEN-Europe (the Global Ecovillage Network) presents the Ecovillage Excellence Award to one of our members on the basis of specific achievements over the previous 12 months. This gives us an annual opportunity to celebrate one of our number and to get a little press coverage for the ecovillage family as a whole.
This year’s winner, the ecovillage of Tamera in southern Portugal, deserves a special mention. The community has a strong focus on peace work and is highly internationalist in nature. Community members have organised peace pilgrimages in various conflict zones, most notably Israel and Palestine. Several years ago community members undertook a pilgrimage in the Holy Land in cooperation with both Jews and Palestinians and put on several performances of a theatrical piece they had created — We Refuse to be Enemies.
Over the last couple of years, Tamera has also developed a close working relationship with the Colombian ‘peace village’ of San Jose de Apartado. In the face of pressure from both government and insurgent forces in Colombia’s bitter civil war, San Jose has declared itself a neutral zone dedicated to peaceful development and has refused to collaborate with either side.
Tamera has developed technologies that collectively it describes as comprising a Solar Village and it is helping transfer many of these to San Jose. Plans are now afoot for the creation of a global peace campus, with training and demonstration sites worldwide, including San Jose and various initiatives in Palestine and Israel.
Back at the community base in southern Portugal, the Monte Cerro project — a three-year experiment in creating sustainable and peaceful community and involving an international group of over one hundred people — has entered its second year. Tamera has also planted tens of thousands of trees over the last several years — and kept most of them alive through Portugal’s worst ever drought.
This is a prodigious (if still incomplete) list of achievements for a community of around one hundred people. I remember last year discussing with one of the numerous young people who are in senior management positions in the community about the various projects that were in the pipeline at Tamera. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked her where the financing was coming from. ‘Oh, we have no idea’, she replied cheerfully: "But it will certainly come!"
Ecovillages are becoming progressively more difficult to create and grow. A combination of rapidly rising land prices, more restrictive planning regulations and an ever more individualistic society simply make the process that much more challenging. Would it have been possible to create the Findhorn community had we started the process in the last ten years? I have my doubts.
In the face of these constraints, the ecovillage initiatives that make it through to maturity tend, like Tamera, to be those that are rooted in deep vision and commitment. It is as if those involved simply have no choice in the matter. They are prepared to endure the challenges and sacrifices involved because their vision is simply too powerful to be abandoned.
Given the nature of the challenges that face us as we move into a world framed by the twin threats of Climate Change and Peak Oil, the news from Tamera is encouraging. Fired by strong vision and deep commitment, people are capable of achieving the most remarkable feats.
In the words of anthropologist, Margaret Mead, we should “never doubt that a small, committed group of people can change the world … indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
July 2007
Sprats and Mackerels
Are poverty alleviation and human rights work worth the carbon cost?
Just back from a return visit to Sierra Leone. I was working once again with MAPCO, the indigenous organisation engaged in poverty alleviation and human rights work that I spent time with in March. This time, I was helping them develop efficient monitoring and evaluation systems, to better enable them to track the impact of their work.
This feels like good and valuable work. And yet, how does this kind of activity sit with the whole carbon crisis? I pondered this on the flight out, while pouring over Mark Lynas’ excellent piece (http://www.newstatesman.com) on the protest camp at Heathrow (In fact, when I had first seen the dates of my trip to Sierra Leone, I had been excited at the prospect of spending time at the camp. However, the more I read about the camp, the more difficult I realised it could be to move freely in and out — so, having signed a contract for the work, I prioritised the trip).
I have far more questions than answers on this whole question. Work like that I was up to in Sierra Leone is about building the capacity of pro-poor organisations and helping them develop tools for promoting the economic wellbeing and resilience of the poor through small enterprise development. I am one of many to have made a career out of this kind of work.
In addition, I am one of a number of people from within the global ecovillage family to have created a sustainability curriculum drawn from ecovillage experience — what we have called the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE). This training programme, that has been embraced by UNESCO as part of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, transfers life skills that will be of the essence as we head down the energy descent curve.
At present, the core EDE faculty finds itself doing a fair amount of international travel as we build the capacity of trainers in different places to deliver this educational programme. ‘Using a sprat to catch a mackerel’ is the analogy I have heard used to justify the use of carbon in this way to leverage a greater long-term benefit.
The issue of air travel poses a major dilemma to the ecovillage movement as a whole — certainly to the Findhorn ecovillage. On the one hand, a significant portion of our income derives from participants coming on our courses. The proportion of those coming from the UK has risen steadily over the years and now stands at about 50 percent. Sill, a good number of those continue to come through Inverness airport.
The sprat-mackerel analogy, however, still holds good here; many leave transformed, refreshed and better equipped to get stuck into good community development work of many shades and varieties when they get back home.
On the other hand, we are a highly international community. At any one time, between 15 and 25 nationalities are represented in our resident community. This generates a lot of what George Monbiot has memorably called ‘love miles’ — travel to meet up with friends and family on other continents. My wife is a New Yorker — I understand the dilemma.
The Findhorn community’s ecological footprint analysis gave us record low scores on most consumption categories (food 32 percent of the national average, home and heating 21 percent, car mileage six percent and so on). In one category alone, air travel, did we exceed the national average — by a factor of two and a half.
It is clear that government policy needs to change: a halt to new airport development; removal of taxes on aviation fuel and other externalities associated with flying; inclusion of air travel emissions in greenhouse gas emissions targets. Our top priority needs to be campaigns towards these ends. The time is rapidly approaching for us to decide where we want to call home and to sink our roots there.
In the meantime, as we effectively use our sprats to catch mackerels, is there not a case for continuing to undertake strategic international work — made possible by air travel — to strengthen the capacity, spread the skills and build the networks we will all need in the low-carbon world that is opening up before us?
The world of business shows little inclination to restrain its appetite for air travel. In this context, should those of us engaged in sustainability and global justice work unilaterally forgo the many advantages that continuing (at least in the short-term) access to air travel provides?
As I said at the beginning, more questions than answers.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
August 2007
Getting Creative at the Wind Park
My observation as an educator is that we generally need to engage physically and through ritual to facilitate this kind of deep transformative learning
 There’ve been creative goings-on down at the Wind Park. This comprises our four wind turbines at the edge of the community that enable us to generate and sell about 40 per cent more electricity than we use at the Park, our main campus.
Mural artist, Lisa Shaw, was down there last week with young people who came to Findhorn on a course, using the base of the turbines as great canvases to paint upon. She has been doing this with various groups of young people, including local primary school children, over the last year or so. Now, three of the four turbines are covered in beautiful painted images relating to various sustainability-related themes.
Is this of any more than incidental importance? Does it represent anything more than an ephemeral beautification of our machines?
I am persuaded that it emphatically does.
I teach students in various classes in the community, up to undergraduate level. We always include a visit to the Wind Park. I remember the first time this was suggested to me some years ago, my first reaction was to dismiss the idea: ‘sure can’t the students see them perfectly well from here in the classroom — why would we waste a round trip of 45 minutes or so just to see them from close up?’
 And yet, when I relented and agreed to the visit, the effect on the students of seeing them up close was clear and obvious. Quite simply, they ‘got it’ in a way that sitting in a classroom discussing renewable energy technologies had not allowed. Somehow, the effect of being really up close, feeling just how tall and elegant are the turbines, hearing the swish of the blades cutting through the air, just touching and holding them had a profound effect.
I spent some time working with a meditation teacher in India. One of the many gems she shared that has really stuck with me was the observation that in her tradition, they use the verb ‘to understand’ to denote not new conceptual learning, but only when that learning has been integrated and has effected a change in how the learner sees and acts in the world.
My observation as an educator is that we generally need to engage physically and through ritual to facilitate this kind of deep transformative learning. I work a lot on sustainability and global justice issues where we cover many disturbing subjects such as mass extinctions, poverty and malnutrition and the growing impacts of climate change.
 When the learning is limited to intellectual engagement, I see that while the students are present and alert, the problems remain strangely abstract and removed from their experience. Somehow, the learning does not quite stick.
However, when I set up the learning in a more experiential way — have them, for example, speak imaginatively of the ecological havoc being wreaked in the voice of another species directly affected or that of a human being not yet born — the difference is often electrifying. The empathetic heart opens and they become deeply engaged and transformed.
This is the work that Lisa is doing with her murals. She is helping people here and in other projects she is involved with in Russia, Bolivia and India to engage in a direct and physical way with the world around them. By helping them embed experiences of beauty and sustainability in the very cells of their bodies, she is helping the young people she works with to deeply understand their place as threads in the web of life.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
September 2007
Shut Up About the Deckchairs!
In his latest entry, Jonathan Dawson stresses on the need for a collective 'peak moment'...
One of the ports of call during the last two weeks that I have been away was the 6th international conference of ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) in Cork. This is the body, founded by former oil geologist Dr Colin Campbell, which more than any other has brought to public consciousness the imminent peaking in the availability of cheap fossil fuels.
'Fun' was hardly the word for it, but it was good to be in the company of people who have clearly understood the pivotal role of cheap energy in creating the highly abnormal and completely unsustainable global society in which we live today. Unsustainable precisely because the cheap energy on which the whole edifice is built is getting more expensive by the month — and is set, bar the odd blip, to do so indefinitely.
Within the peak oil community, the experience of realising this very simple but paradigm-altering truth is coming to be called ‘peak moments’. People at the conference were exchanging stories about their own peak moments, when their focal point suddenly shifted from the pattern of the deckchairs on the fore-deck (the stuff of political and philosophical discourse over the last couple of centuries) to the iceberg of resource (and especially energy) depletion towering over the ship.
It is within the context of this radically altered understanding of what the current moment of history is all about that the eco-village phenomenon comes to make sense. It is lovely to arrive back in Findhorn to see the wind turbines cheerfully twirling to the tune of the brisk, autumnal northerlies; the vegetables being taken from the gardens to kitchens, passing the food-scraps from the last meal making the reverse journey; self-builders working away on their energy-efficient homes; hand-carts coming in from the forest laden with logs being put in for the winter.
However, the point is that these are not primarily the cute and eccentric behaviours of over-privileged urbanites who have chosen to escape the grind of the cities (though there may just be a touch of that as well!)
Rather, the whole experience — here and in a growing number of eco-villages around the world — can only be understood as a profoundly sane response to the imminent energy crisis. (Of course, it is not only eco-villages that have got the message. I return from Cork with serious and intelligent energy descent plans from, among others, the cities of Brisbane and Portland, Oregon and the town of Kinsale in County Cork.)
I chose to travel to and from Ireland over land (and sea) which, apart from being enormously more agreeable than flying, also gave lots of uninterrupted time for comfortable reading. On the return journey, I read ‘Making Globalisation Work’ by former World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz.
Now there is a man, if ever I saw one, who is in need of a peak moment. The book is full of admirable — sometimes inspired – proposals for tweaking the current system to make trade work better for the planet’s poor. However, there is no recognition that the energy needed to continue to ship stuff around the world might not be available — or could be spent without climate-changing emissions.
I have been struck on recent working visits to Sierra Leone and Senegal by just how few private motor vehicles were on the road. The answer soon became clear: the governments were purchasing much of the diminishing oil imports (diminishing because of increasing prices) just to keep the lights on, if only sporadically. Meanwhile, the spark that ignites the flames in Burma is……….yes, a doubling in the price of oil.
As a civilisation, we are in big need of a collective peak moment. Let us embrace the inevitability of expensive energy and use it to our advantage, creating more decentralised and human-scale communities that live well within their means.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
September 2007
A Life Devoted to Children
Jonathan Dawson reports on the Russian eco-village which has made it its mission to look after orphaned children...
A great thing about living here is the steady stream of seriously cool people passing through. This week, among our guests — as participants on a one-week course — are two wonderful young women from the Kitezh/Orion foster family ecovillages in [ http://www.kitezh.org/ ]Russia, the two Marias — Krivenkova and Shibaeva. Their stories are quite extraordinary as are those of their home communities.
In the early 1990s, well-known Russian television presenter Dmitri Morozov was a man with a mission. Fired by a vision to create a new community-based model for caring for orphans, he left his fashionable and comfortable life in Moscow for the remote countryside — much to the horror of his colleagues and friends.
He succeeded in enthusing a small band of like-minded friends and headed off into the wilds of rural Kaluga district, about 300 kilometres south of Moscow. There, they set up camp in a primitive three-bedroomed cottage, with no indoor toilet — six people including two orphans. One of these, for part of the first winter, was Liza Hollingshead whose Ecologia Youth Trust, based here in the Findhorn community, has since acted as a conduit for funding, expertise and friendship between our two communities.
To say that the odds were stacked against them would be to vastly understate the scale of the challenge they faced. Yet today, Kitezh is a thriving community comprising nine families, including 24 children, most of whom are orphans or from backgrounds of severe abuse. They eat in a communal dining room, teach and learn in their state-accredited community school and live in beautiful, if somewhat eccentric large wooden houses. All of the buildings have been constructed by the community members themselves with support from friends and volunteers.
Not satisfied with touching the lives of the orphans and other young people within its care, the Kitezh community has the wider aim of influencing policy on orphan care nationwide. Supported by a grant from the UK Big Lottery Fund, over the last three years Kitezh members have been travelling far and wide in Russia, talking to university staff and students, management and staff of orphanages, politicians, educators, foster parents — all who would listen — about the importance of providing a humane and loving environment for orphaned and abused young people.
Meanwhile, Kitezh has been developing substantial theoretical as well as practical expertise as a centre of excellence in the care of orphans. It now provides training to orphanage staff and foster parents from Kaluga region and beyond.
The community’s profile within Russia has risen with astonishing speed. Dmitri Morasov has been awarded the Order of Honour (equivalent to an MBE in Britain) and two other foster parents have been recognised with awards made by the Kaluga regional government. Television cameras are often about the place shooting footage for news items and films.
Then, three years ago, the Kaluga regional government helped the community find and buy land close to Moscow for a second community — Orion. Watching home videos of the building of Orion — around ten buildings have so far been erected — is deeply moving. There are gangs of young people, many of them orphans from Kitezh, some of whom have now moved to Moscow to work or study, working together with huge zest and enthusiasm. Among them is a small team of people from Findhorn (among whom Lisa Shaw, who featured in a previous blog - Getting creative at the Wind Park) providing expertise on the building of a biological waste-water treatment system.
In fact, this footage reminds me of nothing more than similar images from the pioneering, heroic days of the building of the Findhorn community. The same great work-teams, the same joy on the faces, the same conviction that they were creating a place of power and beauty.
Prominent among the young people in this footage is Maria Shibaeva (or Masha as I know her, her nickname.) I first met Masha when she was a student on an ecovillage training programme I taught here three or four years ago. I remember her as being young, shy, tongue-tied and very prone to blushing.
Today, Masha, at the ripe old age of 22, is the manager of the Orion community. She is in the final stages of studying for her psychology degree, goes on speaking tours around Russian universities and has over the last couple of years adopted three young orphans. Oh, and she still finds time to go out with hammer and nails to help erect the new buildings.
Maria Krivenkova meanwhile, is a veteran of 24 who has chosen to live in the Kitezh community where she is a teacher and mother of one young orphan boy. What is so impressive about these young people, and all the many others like them at Kitezh and Orion, is that they have chosen to move beyond the life of 9-to-5 carers to integrate life and work, natural child and orphan, home, school and community into the rich and seamless tapestry that is Kitezh and Orion. This is truly an awesome act of love and service. It also, clearly, makes them very happy!
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
5 October, 2007
Sex and the Ecovillage
Jonathan Dawson continues to reveal what it's like to live in an ecovillage discussing the thorny issue of communal sex and other issues...
There is an amusing mismatch between the perceptions that many people have of life in an ecovillage and the actual day-to-day reality. This is reflected in the kinds of questions that communards tend to get asked when out in more mainstream society.
‘Don’t you mostly all sleep in dormitories (or yurts!)? I don’t think I could handle that.’ ‘How do you manage with so little personal space?’ ‘How much pocket-money are you given?’
And there are often questions that delicately and circuitously seek to gain insights into sexual life in communities — questions that often hint at fevered imaginings of what communal sexuality as a lifestyle might look like.
Sorry to disappoint. In many respects, Findhorn feels not so different from many other villages. There are some shared living spaces, but no-one lives in dormitories. Most people have a reasonable amount of private space and any shortage in this department is more than compensated for by an abundance of community spaces — theatre, craft workshops, community centre, saunas, hot tubs and so on.
Everyone earns salaries, many of which admittedly are not generous, but reflect what I suspect may be approximating long-term sustainable levels of purchasing power if we are to live within the planet’s means.
Most interesting of all (once again, sorry for the let-down), I am not sure I have ever lived in a place that is more sexually restrained. This, I think, is for two reasons. First, sexual energy is powerful and explosive, capable of generating both joy and suffering. In our conscious efforts to create a community of love and compassion, I suspect that most people here choose not to engage in casual sex at least in part out of a desire not to contribute to the suffering of others. They tend generally to leap after having had a long and considered look.
The second reason for restraint is altogether more down to earth. Relationship breakdown and its aftermath can be messy and painful, as former partners develop new liaisons while still living nearby and in view. This breeds caution.
However, whether their reasons are based in reality or not, it seems unlikely in the foreseeable future that most people will choose to live in ecovillages such as Findhorn. As a sustainability practitioner, this opens up the question for me as to how ecovillages can be of most service and relevance to the wider sustainability movement of which we form part. If, as seems likely, ecovillages will remain a minority, if not marginal, pursuit as a lifestyle choice, how are we to remain a vibrant resource to the growing surge of sustainability initiatives sweeping the country?
This last week, I went in pursuit of some answers to this question. A speaking engagement in Hereford, and just two days later the Schumacher Society lectures in Bristol, gave me a structure around which to plan a week of visits to sustainability initiatives involving government, business and civil society.
To explore the various themes that emerged during this last week deserves more space than I have here, so I will return to it in next week’s blog. However, I want leave you with an image that came to me during the week as I explored the astonishing wave of imagination and creativity that is building.
The image is of the waters of globalised economic activity dropping (in the face of steadily rising energy prices) to reveal initially isolated islands but eventually whole archipelagos of islands of sustainable models that currently lie just below the water-line. These are the community-owned agriculture and renewables schemes, the farmers’ markets, the alternative currency systems, the earth-based eco-education centres, the closed-loop waste-recycling businesses and so on that folk are currently working on up and down the country.
This is a time not for despondency about powerlessness in the face of the prevailing ugliness and waste — but for excitement at the shape of the new emerging from below the waves.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
15 October, 2007
Peripheral Anomalies or Centres of Inspiration?
As recently as four or five years ago, my undergraduate students and I devised a game as a way of keeping ourselves cheerful. We created our own newspapers, filled with stories that we wrote ourselves, reflecting the kind of material that we wished was covered in the press. It was a way of grounding our visions of a more ecologically conscious and engaged world.
At least in terms of content, these colourful and creative clipped-together newsletters bear an uncanny resemblance to what you can buy today at the newsagents. Apparently out of the blue, our papers (not all, for sure) are presenting us daily with intelligent, joined-up thinking and writing, linking disturbing events in far-off places with their root causes in the over-consuming West. And, just occasionally, as in our own self-created newsletters, there are reports of inspirational models and of community mobilisation in the pursuit of wiser and happier ways of living our lives and providing for our needs.
It is easy to forget just how quickly things have turned around, the urgency with which the serious media are suddenly engaging in the sustainability debate, reflecting rapid shifts in perspectives in society as a whole.
Superficially, all this seems to be great news for the ecovillage movement. After all, so many of the things that we have been banging on about for years — renewable energy, carbon footprints, downsizing and the merits of simpler, more community-based lifestyles — are suddenly grabbing the headlines.
The truth, however, is more complex. For, while as little as ten years ago ecovillages were clear ‘market leaders’, albeit in a marginal niche in which competition was almost non-existent, today sustainable community initiatives in more mainstream contexts abound.
In parallel, a combination of factors — rising land prices, tighter planning regulations and a more individualistic society — are closing off the conventional route to ecovillage formation. Almost all of the well-established ecovillages such as Findhorn were created twenty or more years ago.
In business parlance (paradoxically, given the fact that in terms of foreseeing how society would evolve, we very much backed the right horse), the ecovillage brand is finding itself squeezed.
The question we face now is, given the difficulties inherent in creating new ecovillages and recognising that no more than a small minority of people are likely to choose to live in those that already exist, what in today’s changed world are ecovillages for?
Are we peripheral anomalies in a society that is increasingly mobilising in the face of the challenges ahead or do we retain some distinctive contribution to offer the greater cause?
Last week, a speaking engagement in Hereford afforded me the opportunity to undertake a tour of sustainable community initiatives in the south-west of England in pursuit of some answers to these questions.
The first and lasting impression was of the sheer range, diversity and vitality of initiatives that are sprouting up and of the new and sometimes unexpected alliances that are pushing them forward. The levels of excitement made me wonder whether someone has perhaps recently slipped something into the south-west’s water supply!
Too many fascinating initiatives to describe in any detail, but here are some of the highlights of my week. The Bulmer Foundation http://www.bulmerfoundation.org.uk established by the west country cider firm, is engaged in a coherent and well-put-together programme to promote sustainability in Herefordshire, including local food production, sustainable land management and a first-rate educational programme.
In Totnes, Stroud and far beyond, the Transition Towns movement http://www.transitiontowns.org is emerging as a model that is mobilising communities in the design and implementation of strategies for a low carbon future.
The emergence of a UK co-housing network http://www.cohousing.org.uk — I had the good fortune to spend time at the Stroud co-housing project, one of the movement’s UK pioneers.
The wonderful Thistledown environmental education centre near Stroud that combines beautiful sculpture with nature walks and educational materials on traditional, local farming practices http://www.thistledown.org.uk
The Association of Sustainability Practitioners http://www.asp-online.org representing a hub for clusters of wide-ranging sustainability initiatives in Bristol and beyond.
Perhaps most surprising and inspiring of all was a presentation at the Bristol Schumacher Lectures by Nicky Gavron, Deputy Mayor of London, describing the astonishing range of carbon-cutting achievements already recorded in the capital and the scale of ambition for the future, including a commitment to reduce emissions to 40 per cent of current levels by 2025.
Answers to my questions are still in gestation, but I do return inspired and confident that places like Findhorn still have much to offer.
At present, I see our distinctiveness residing in three broad areas. First, to a society that still tends to look first and most easily to technological solutions to the challenges we face, ecovillages assert the primary importance of strong communities and relationships (both among humans and between humans and the natural world).
Second, ecovillages represent the apogee of citizens taking power into their own hands. There exists a can-do mentality that is likely to be important as we move into uncharted waters ahead where the state may be less able to provide for our needs.
Finally, places like Findhorn are simply incomparable as classrooms. Within these living microcosms of sustainability, with their closed loops and happy synergies, students simply ‘get it’ in a way I have never experienced before.
The interdependent nature, both of our challenges and of the role of ecological design principles in helping us transcend them become clear, tangible and exciting.
It is as centres of inspiration and education, and also perhaps as occasional refuges, that our gift resides.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
22 October, 2007
Web of Life
So, we have come full circle. In my first blog, almost exactly a year ago, I began by looking up into the northern skies to watch the geese fly in from the Arctic to their over-wintering grounds. Now, they are back, lacing the high blue autumnal skies in exquisite sweeping arcs, filling the air with the wildness of their cries.
I made it clear in that first blog that I was making a conscious choice to begin my exploration of what it is to live in an ecovillage not with the visible hardware of sustainability — the wind turbines, eco-housing, waste management facilities and so on — but rather with the quality of our relationships, with other people and with the rest of creation.
The primacy of relationships and of community — the software of sustainability — seems even more paramount to me today. As I look back at over a year’s output of blogs, I can see that the researching and writing of these weekly vignettes has helped me come more awake to the richness and diversity of life within the community and to the multiplicity of ways in which it seeks to serve.
When travelling, representing Findhorn or the Global Ecovillage Network, I am often asked what is ‘Findhorn’s position’ on this or that issue or question. I almost always reply that, in truth, there is no one single position — that the Findhorn community is hugely diverse and one could often find as many views on questions of importance as there are members of the community.
This is a huge strength. Reflecting on almost all of the various initiatives that I have referred to over the last year — the green burial ground, the EarthShare organic CSA box scheme, the recently-opened Moray Arts Centre, the Living Routes educational programme that brings undergraduates from US universities here to study, the wind turbines, the Eko community currency, the link with the Kitezh orphan’s ecovillage in Russia, the cluster of ‘whisky barrel houses and so on — almost none can in any sense be said to have been created by the Findhorn community as an entity.
Rather, pretty much all of these initiatives have been the brainchild of individuals or small groups of individuals within the community. There is no master plan! Inspired, anarchic creativity comes closer to the mark. In this sense, the Findhorn community can be seen as a yin holding vessel that permits the proliferation of yang programmes and projects.
I think that this has been key to our continuing vitality. This is always a challenge for mature organisations; as operations become larger, more complex and inevitably more bureaucratic, how to retain freshness and inspiration? The way I see it, what is happening here is that while some of the more mature organisations within the community are passing into dignified middle-age, the raft of new, visionary initiatives being born keeps alive the spirit of vitality and inspiration.
I would argue that the aliveness and robust good health of the community lies close to the heart of this proliferation of new initiatives. Over and over again, I note that the dominant response to increasingly serious challenges, especially on the climate change and peak oil fronts, is one of determined (and often even optimistic) engagement. This comes so much more easily to a community built around a core of shared values that consciously seeks to be of service to something larger than itself.
So, another year has turned. Another intake of Living Routes students dazzles us with their creativity and sweetness. Another group of 30 or so social and environmental activists from various parts of the world — including Burma, Gambia, Chile, Argentina, India and Nepal — has joined us for our annual month-long Ecovillage Design Education programme.
And, high up in the skies, the geese sing to us of the long, slow turning of the Earth, whose children we all are. The pulse that sends them down to Findhorn Bay in their clamorous throngs every autumn is the same pulse that ties us all in to the web of life.
In the words of Mary Oliver:
“Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
30 October, 2007
Divine Guidance in Public Toilets
Jonathan Dawson explores the mysterious and unconventional origins of Findhorn.
A sure sign that we are indeed becoming a village is that the community has its own weekly newspaper, the Rainbow Bridge (named after the bridge linking mortals and the gods in Norse mythology).
 ‘The Bridge’ is a 50-odd page compilation of reflections, dialogue, letters, information and advertisements for upcoming courses, job adverts, houses to let — the usual kind of stuff you would expect to find in any local paper.
However, the inside front page is unmistakably and distinctively Findhorn. Here, every week, we have ‘Guidance Through Eileen’ and a short inspirational piece drawn from the writings of Dorothy Maclean. Dorothy and Eileen (Caddy) were two of our founding elders.
This week’s pieces are on the subject of love: ‘Love is the key that opens all doors. Love is the light that lightens all darkness’, Eileen’s piece begins. At this point, we seem to be deviating from the staple fare of the weekly village paper.
The weekly guidance in The Bridge forms a very direct and tangible link with our roots. For the first wayward seed that was to blossom into today’s community blew up on this windswept stretch of Scottish coastline in response to divine guidance channelled through Eileen.
Eileen had strong and clear access to ‘the still, small voice’ of God and the early years of the nascent community were strongly driven by the guidance she received, implemented with some rigour by her husband, former military man, Peter.
(In a comic twist and as if to dispel any possibility of spiritual preciousness arising, Eileen was by now meditating and seeking guidance in the caravan park’s public toilets, where she retreated to get some peace from the noisy caravan she shared with her young family.)
 In fact, in those early years, the founders had not even conceived of the idea of creating a community. This emerged only over time by way of guidance received by Eileen, such as they should build a community centre capable of feeding 200 people.
Since hands were few, financial resources scarce and no-one could imagine the logic behind such guidance, this seemed like an unlikely venture to embark on.
However, so sure was the founding group’s conviction that Eileen’s guidance was divinely inspired that they set to work at once. Miraculously and against all the odds, the right people with the right skills arrived on cue and the necessary money poured in.
One of my own pivotal moments in deciding to come to live here was looking at the ‘before and after’ photos that compare the Findhorn Bay caravan park in the early 60s and the early 70s. The first set of shots shows little more than a few isolated caravans on sandy duneland leaning disconsolately into the apparently unrelenting wind.
A decade later and the same landscape had been transformed into a riot of flowers, bushes and trees, framing a series of elegant wooden bungalows. In between, pictures of great gangs of happy-looking people digging trenches, building houses, planting trees.
A decisive moment in the community’s history arrived in the early 70s with Eileen returning from a meditation with the guidance — ‘no more guidance, you each have to access your own’.
 This was wise guidance indeed, for it enabled the community to make the transition gracefully beyond dependence on powerful founding figures into a more mature and self-governing body. (This transition is a rock upon which many young communities and other initiatives of all kinds have foundered.)
Guidance remains central to our decision-making processes. The community was built on deep faith in an intelligence beyond the mind to which we all have access.
So it is that to this day, after issues of import have been considered, discussed and pondered, we enter a silent meditative space, allowing ourselves to open to a wisdom that is not accessible to the rational mind.
In my experience, this is a most useful thing to do on every level. It slows us down, softens the tendency of the mind to polarise and to see things in black and white, opens up possibilities of both/and where only either/or had previously been apparent, creates softness, defuses conflict.
But what happens when people of good faith seek guidance and emerge with different — and apparently incompatible — answers?
Of more urgent and practical importance, how does a community based on the primacy of guidance over the humdrum rules of the marketplace respond when the figures do not add up and it begins to slip heavily into the red?
This is no hypothetical question, for by 2000, the Findhorn Foundation found itself almost a million pounds in debt, with its bankers twitching nervously.
The competing claims of guidance and the need for financial solvency played out — and continue to play out — in the most fascinating way. I will return to tell this story in next week’s blog.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
7 November, 2007
Economic Worries and Divine Intervention
Jonathon Dawson discusses the financial problems at Findhorn and the village's unique way of dealing with them.
 So, last week, I left the Findhorn Foundation dangling over the edge of a cliff (in the form of an £800,000 debt) and torn between divine guidance and economic discipline as escape strategies, with its bankers getting twitchy. In fact — I am afraid it is always thus with cliff-hanging episode-enders — the camera angle made the situation look more perilous than it actually was.
Though by 2000 the Foundation had run five straight years of deficits, a good chunk of this debt was incurred in one single necessary expenditure — the rewiring of its one of its two campuses, Cluny Hill College in the neighbouring town of Forres. Moreover, the Foundation had several million pounds worth of property assets and was never in any serious danger of going under.
Nonetheless, the very real liquidity crisis and the string of operating losses did raise important issues that went right to the heart of the community’s self-definition.
As explained in last week’s blog, guidance has always been core to the community’s decision-making processes. This has led us on many merry adventures that we would have been most unlikely to have embarked upon had we been governed by left-brain rationality and economic logic alone.
For some, this colourful and cavalier history appears to be seen as proof that we are, in fact, exempt from the humdrum rules of the market. A number of senior members of the community, for example, left in protest when in the mid-70s the Foundation bought the hotel that now houses Cluny Hill College because it took out a bank loan to do so.
Such a course, so the argument went, was proof of a lack of faith in the community’s ability to manifest the cash necessary for the purchase. Since the decision to buy had been the result of guidance, so the logic went, we should have trusted that the cash would come in.
Similarly, by the late 90s, there was a voice within the community that the path out of our financial difficulties was by way of guidance and manifestation rather than self-imposed economic discipline. The former was presented as representing ‘abundance’ as opposed to ‘fear-driven’ thinking.
 The then head of the Foundation’s management team, Mari Hollander, sees the period as an important turning point in the development of the community. Accounting systems and practices were improved, with each of the Foundation’s departments becoming more like cost-centres, with awareness for balancing costs and income. The Foundation received a few generous donations and sold several substantial property assets to members and supporters of the community.
Meanwhile, Foundation members rallied to the cause. A good number tithed and, where they could, deferred payment of their income to ease the squeeze.
In parallel, detailed decision-making, which had previously been in the hands of all the Foundation’s co-workers, was mandated to a management team — where it remains to this day. This team consults with a council of co-workers that sets strategic priorities on all key issues.
A five-year plan to get back into the black was designed. The goal was achieved in two years and the Foundation has made operating profits for each of the last five years.
Mari took a no-nonsense approach to the need for greater efficiency and financial savvy: “If we are to manifest our needs, we need to know what they are. If we are subsidising departments, we need to know.”
This is a down to earth wisdom that allows for the possibility that the divine may be found in the balance sheets as well as in the meditation sanctuary. That economic rigour and guidance allied with manifestation may be bed-fellows rather than in competition.
The trick, it seems to me, is to be aware of the financial bottom line but not necessarily to be driven by it. To leave space for the miraculous to happen, and to see economic intelligence not with suspicion but as a potential tool in facilitating the process. Do we have the balance right? Who knows? This is an ongoing and lively debate within an ever-evolving community.
An old traditional story has it that as the storm waters rose ever higher, a house-owner climbed up onto the roof of his house to escape the flood. Three times, rowing boats passed offering to take him to safety. Each time he refused to jump on board, declaring his faith in the Lord who he knew would come to save him. He drowned and went to Heaven where he asked God why He had let him down.
“I tried three times!”, God replies.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
16 November 2007
Marathon Man
Jonathon Dawson discusses the financial problems at Findhorn and the village's unique way of dealing with them.
 Jonathan relishes a life away from the fast lane — well until he runs the London Marathon
It was with a happy thud that a package landed on my doormat this week providing me with the news that my application to run the London marathon next spring has been successful. (Applications outnumber places available so heavily that it is possible to wait for years to get the thumbs us. This is just my second year in the queue and I am well chuffed.)
So, I am set for a winter of pounding out the miles. Oh, but what a training ground I have in the six miles of sandy beach arching round to Burghead at the opposite end of the bay. With the snow-covered peaks of the Highlands to the north glistening in the clear winter sunlight, this feels more like play than work.
One of the attractions of ecovillage living, in theory at least, is that it provides an opportunity for downshifting, living more simply, working less and leaving more time for the pleasures of life. The theory is great — and that, I guess, is the way it works out for some folk here.
Personally, I have never worked harder or put in more hours in my life than over the last four or five years. Yet, only rarely do I feel anything that could remotely be described as stress or burn out. I do sometimes wonder how both these observations could be true — but true they both do seem to be.
Several factors appear to be at work. First is the sheer diversity of work that I, in common with most people here, are engaged in. You know the dreaded dinner-party question — ‘What do you do?’. A strong sub-text to this question is ‘one-word answers only are accepted. Doctor, nurse, teacher, plumber ... that’s the kind of answer we’re looking for.’
This is symptomatic of the professional monoculture imposed by our current profit-oriented economy. Each of us has a multitude of gifts that would enrich our communities — being funny, a good listener, a great reader of stories, having the gift of music, playing with kids, a wonderful cook, having great hands for shoulder massage, green fingers ... the list of our talents for generating real wealth is almost endless. But rarely, in the modern world, is there space and time for such an economy of reciprocity to flourish.
Here, this is a garden that we seek to nurture. People generally define themselves more widely than in main street and derive income from a range of different activities. Moreover, volunteering is rampant. An important step in the process of becoming a long-term member of the community is ‘learning to say no’. Such is the pleasure taken in simply serving and being recognised as a willing and valuable member of the community, that the habit can become addictive, irrespective of the lack of financial reward.
 A second factor is that most people here have to greater or lesser extents found a way of aligning their values and their lifestyle. Ethical dilemmas, of course, continue to abound as for everyone else in our society. In a world where ethically-sourced products that deplete neither natural nor social capital are consistently more expensive than those that do, this is bound to be so — especially when earnings are so low for most in our community.
Nonetheless, there is relatively high job satisfaction as most find their work to be meaningful and of value. As a result, the lines between work and play get blurred and it becomes ever more difficult to classify one’s activities as one or the other. Is spending time with my students out of class, some of it spent discussing their research projects, work?
What about giving a talk on ecovillages to a group of visiting dignitaries, or taking a turn leading one of the Sunday afternoon tours of visitors who just want to find out what we are about? What about helping to move rocks from the roof of the Universal Hall so that maintenance work can be undertaken? Truly, if this kind of activity really constitutes work, bring more of it on, that’s what I say!
One final and very practical factor that explains why we can comfortably fit so much into our days is the lack of commuting. With most able to move between home and work on foot or by cycle, great swathes of time that many others spend in traffic jams become liberated for meditation, singing, networking, gardening, designing and organising conferences, cutting logs, running on the beach — whatever is one’s work/play of choice.
Indeed, ‘traffic jam’ time is my own preferred moment for running on the beach. When the tide is low in the early morning, and the beach is empty save for the occasional seal or dolphin or the odd flock of sea-wading birds, work feels like an alien concept.
By the way, I will be running to raise funds for the Global Ecovillage Network that does splendid work in bringing the ecovillage experience to a wider public audience on an entirely voluntary basis. If you would like to sponsor me, do please get in touch by email: http://www.jonathan@gen-europe.org
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
29 November 2007
Returning to Findhorn
The Findhorn eco-village has had to work hard to avoid becoming a 'New Age old people's home', but it seems to have paid off
 Let me introduce you to Michael. Now in his early 30s, Michael spent the first 18 years of his life here in Findhorn before heading off to the US to seek his fortune and see how the world might look when viewed through different lenses.
Barely a day passed, however, when he did not think about the community where he grew up. And, in early 2002, just in time for the Findhorn community’s 40th birthday and the launch of his mother’s book, ‘In Search of the Magic of Findhorn’, he came back — and decided to stay.
Michael’s journey runs parallel to that of a good number of his peers and now, a happy group of the generation of children he grew up with here has moved back and today plays a variety of important roles in the community.
Michael notes two significant changes in the community compared to the one he left in the mid-90s. First, as it had grown in size and complexity over the previous decade, it had become easier for young people to stay on and find a niche for themselves in the community. Several of our enterprises — notably the shop, bakery and Bakehouse restaurant — actually favour young people in their employment policy.
On the other hand, and also part of the process of enlargement and diversification, the body at the heart of the community, the Findhorn Foundation, had shrunk back to its area of core expertise, namely the provision of educational services.
In the process, many activities that the Foundation used to finance and manage had been shed, delegated or sold off into private or cooperative community enterprises. One of the activities thus shed was the funding of a coordinator for the Youth Project, the core focus for youth activities in the community and also often attracting children and young people from neighbouring communities.
 As a result, on his return Michael found that young people were less consciously held by the community than previously and that intergenerational conflict and misunderstanding were on the rise. He also noted a strong demographic imbalance, with a large gap in the community’s population between the ages of around 18 and 40.
This was symptomatic of wider trends in the community as a whole. For, with the Foundation clearly defining its remit in terms of the performance of its core educational business and the welfare of its hundred or so employees, it became ever clearer that we were lacking an overarching governance body for the entire community, a majority of which did not and never had worked for the Foundation.
The Youth Project was just one of a number of areas of areas of activity that were in danger of falling between the cracks. Who was responsible for recycling, for care of the elderly, for decision-making and conflict facilitation outside of the community of Foundation employees? Who, in short, was to manage the community’s welfare state?
As you would expect in this place, necessity became the occasion for a fresh bout of creativity and the New Findhorn Association was born with membership open to and encouraged for all members of the community. Michael was one of a number of young people who got involved in helping to steer the NFA in the direction of more actively holding the young people and giving them a greater voice in community affairs.
 Today, the NFA funds two part-time youth positions — one a project worker, the other a youth advocate who sits on the NFA council. There is a growing range of youth-oriented cultural and educational programmes. Findhorn is one of the core nodes of NextGEN, the Youth Council of the Global Ecovillage Network. And, if we are still not demographically representative of the population as a whole, the 20 – 40 year-old age group is no longer as sadly sparse as it has been.
Work, of course, remains to be done, a key challenge being that of providing reasonably well-paid and responsible jobs for our youth. But a corner seems to have been turned. One of the community’s pioneering figures suggested years ago that a real challenge facing us was to avoid the trap of becoming a ‘New-Age old people’s home’. If we have succeeded in at least postponing that dread fate for the time being, we have much to be thankful for to Michael and the other young people who have been so active over the last five years or so.
And the latest news from Michael? Well, he has recently come back from the most recent gathering of the Young Scotland Programme, a week of debates and presentations on themes of importance to Scotland’s youth. And, on the back of a keenly and passionately argued speech on the potential for renewable energy to transform our society for the better, he has returned glorying in the title of Young Scottish Thinker of the Year.
Bravo.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
10 December 2007
Christmas at Findhorn
As the temperature at the Findhorn eco-village drops to double-digit negatives, the residents prepare for carol-singing, parties and a dip in the North Sea.
In my seven years here, I don’t remember it being as cold as it has been this last week. The temperature has dropped into double-digit negative and the ice-sheets extend way out into Findhorn Bay. At night the shifting ice sets up a creaking, cracking cacophony out in the darkness of the bay while the over-wintering geese rail and keen in response. A wild and eerie winter soundscape. The short days are cloudless, with the world fair sparkling in the diamond light.
If I could be here in Findhorn just once in the year, it would be at this time. It is the one period when the guests on programmes and courses, never entirely absent, drop to a trickle and we reclaim the community centre as our own. This year, we have taken out the tables from the centre of the dining area and replaced them with a circle of sofas — an oasis of comfort and intimacy appropriately located at the very heart of the community.
There is a host of rituals that mark this turning point in the year as no other. The season began last weekend with the Winter Gathering, an annual concert of story-telling, dancing and carol-singing that we organise and offer to our friends in the neighbouring towns and villages.
Also already under way is Angels and Mortals, a game wherein each of the players is assigned one mortal to look after for the ten days up to Christmas Eve, anonymously showering them with little gifts and blessings. Each one is both giver (angel) and receiver (mortal), with the anticipation growing up to the denouement of the identity of the angels on Christmas Eve.
This weekend for the Solstice, the Hall will be decked out with candles and on the floor, a great spiral made up of branches cut from our pine forest. We will each have an opportunity to walk the spiral, reflecting on the year gone and considering that to come. Then comes the drawing of angel cards, one for each of us and one for the community as a whole. Each of these cards carries a quality — love, patience, wholeness, synthesis and so on — that may be of help in our journey through the year ahead.
Then the excitement of Christmas Day, one of only two occasions in the year (the other being Rabbie Burns day) when meat is served in the community centre. Rabbie, of course, is celebrated in haggis — Christmas with a big fat local turkey. On Boxing Day, a sizeable group of us walk up in the Cairngorms, thawing out in the evening over thick turkey soup.
Then there will be the Polar Bear run, a speedy dip in the North Sea on New Year’s morning followed by a sauna.
All the while and in-between, a host of gatherings, meals, parties, evenings of games, long walks on the beach and up the Findhorn river, carol singing, meditations and vigils. And barely a television in sight.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
20 December 2007
What was the first ecovillage?
Pondering the beginnings of communitarian living
 The whole holiday period seems, on reflection, to glow in the illumination of candle-light. This far north, the nights are long and dark and a deeply intimate energy settles over the community during the solstice period — all lit with the magical light of bonfires and candles.
On the solstice itself, each of us walked a spiral, candle in hand, walking our way out of the old year into the new and drawing an angel card for the year. The angel drawn for the community as a whole was Awakening.
A highly creative group of people here on a programme over the New Year wove us into a theatre piece they had created tracing the turning seasons of the year, performed in magnificent costumes up in the woodland and illuminated with great home-made lanterns.
 Occasional forays up into the mountains cut short by the dying of the light not long after lunchtime. Great bonfires beating back the evening’s biting cold. And everywhere, singing, games and conversation in the intimate glow of candle-light.
This is a fitting image for the ecovillage ethic, which has always been about the lighting of candles as an alternative to cursing the darkness. Moving beyond the politics of protest to model a positive vision of the ideal society.
Not long ago, I was asked at a public meeting “Which was the first ecovillage?” My initial impulse was to name Sólheimar, the celebrated Icelandic community created in 1931. However, I allowed my mind to soften, to release the specificity of the modern connotations associated with the word ecovillage and to look for something older. What was the first community, I asked myself, which would have called itself an ecovillage had the term then existed?
Eventually, after reflecting on various communitarian initiatives at different moments in history, I plumped for the Celtic Christian monasteries of the sixth and seventh centuries off the west coast of Ireland and Scotland. Iona, Skellig Michael and the like. These were small, decentralised, generally mixed-gender communities, only occasionally celibate, and dedicated to loving the land, celebrating the sacred and keeping alive the candle of love and learning in a time of profound darkness across Europe.
(I have since learned from reading the intentional communities scholar, Bill Metcalf, that the lineage goes back much further, until at least Pythagoras’s community in Crotone in the fifth century BC.)
This image of keeping alive the candle of love and learning in a period of gathering darkness does not feel to me too fanciful.
Beyond all such reflections, this is the season — with daylight hours shrunk and the mercury tumbling — that tests the resolve of the would-be marathon runner. Yesterday evening, I ran through the gathering twilight, throwing up a slushy spray as I went. So far, so good. I find my appetite undimmed.
Jonathan Dawson
Findhorn
7 January 2008
Guiding the Game
Standing in for Jonathan Dawson, Rhiannon Hanfman tells us about a game that has become an important part of Findhorn
When Jonathan asked me to fill in for him again, I had just come out of a workshop called The Game of Transformation.
This workshop is possibly the most imaginative and original workshops offered by the Findhorn Foundation.
 The Game of Transformation is just that — a game. Dice are rolled, pieces are moved, and players move towards an objective. The difference between this and other games is that the objective is not to win but to increase awareness and gain self-knowledge.
The idea of a game facilitating spiritual development is not new. I remember stories like Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, where mysterious monks in remote monasteries play games with incredibly complex and arcane rules. This is something like that but it’s a lot more fun.
Nevertheless, there are complex and arcane rules so every game has five players and two facilitators or guides. The guides are known as Game Overall Directors, or G.O.D. I am one of them. One guide writes everything that happens down in a chronicle for the players and the other facilitates the process.
The game was the brainchild of Joy Drake, who lived at Findhorn in the 70s. She thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a game that we could play on long winter evenings, like Monopoly but with more consciousness. She worked on the idea and, with the input of many others in the community, something began to emerge.
The process was creative and experimental. Different things were tried. Some worked, some didn’t. In the beginning it was a light-hearted exercise but it soon became apparent that something deeper was going on. The game seemed to develop a spirit of it’s own. This presence or energy became known as the Game Deva.
The Game Deva is mercurial, humourous, one minute frivolous, the next profound. It’s a bit of a trickster that leads you down some awful road and only at the end can you see why you had to go that way. It is a joyous, life-loving spirit. At least that is how I experience it.
The Monopoly analogy fits but rather than acquiring property and wealth, players acquire self-knowledge and self-acceptance. The game symbolically re-enacts the journey of life and each player enters the game with a purpose or intention. They are ‘born’, and are gifted with free will and intuition with which they can create their game. On their life path, they experience insights and setbacks; miracles and dark nights of the soul; opportunities to serve, appreciations and nature experiences, pain and joy.
 How can a game, however complex, facilitate spiritual development and personal growth? I think it is this: we play games in much the same way as we live our lives. We react in the same way and make decisions in the same way. In our real lives much of this may be unconscious but in the structured environment of the game, patterns become apparent and what we do is reflected back to us very clearly. This can be a real eye opener.
The game in its various forms has been part of the life of Findhorn since its inception. In addition to the original version we use in workshops for guests, there is an abbreviated version, the Box Game, that is frequently played by departments within the Foundation to clarify their issues and by individuals for any number of reasons. The Angel Cards that are used ubiquitously here came from the game.
The game absorbed me completely last week as it tends to do and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love guiding the game and feel it’s a privilege to see my five players blossom and change so profoundly in such a short space of time.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
15 January 2008
The Whiskey Barrel House
Rhiannon Hanfman explores a sustainable house and garden like no other
In this community of varied and unusual dwellings, my favourite is the house of my friend, Craig Gibsone. Craig; an artist, potter and Ecovillage trainer has lived at Findhorn since the 60s. He started building his house sometime around 1986 and been has constantly adding to it ever since. It's still not finished. Maybe never will be.
This house is one of the cluster of barrel houses that has received national recognition as an example of innovative building. These houses are made from very large whiskey vats, hence the name. Moray is malt whiskey country and these huge wooden vats discarded by the distillers are perfect for making round hobbit-like houses. Within the cluster there are simple one-barrel houses and more elaborate two-storey barrels. Craig’s is the most interesting and is comprised of two barrels held together by an octagonal structure. It is a warren of rooms and passages and a sense of barrels within barrels. Built to no specific plan it has grown organically as Craig has extended and added bits. It feels larger than it is due to unexpected rooms leading from other rooms and various nooks and crannies. If asked how many rooms it has, I really couldn’t say. The place defies anything as precise as counting.
 In addition to the whiskey barrels, almost every other part of the building was once something else. Craig believes that it is composed of around 73% recycled materials. All furnishings are 100% recycled. Nothing new has been bought. This house is not only eco, it is also very beautiful in a funky kind of way and has a unique character. It is heated by solar and wood with electricity backup if needed. So far it hasn‘t been needed. Though we all complain about the weather here, it is really very mild compared to other parts of Scotland. Rainwater is collected for various uses.
Craig has an artist’s eye for finding beauty and value in things other people might consider rubbish. A badly painted mirror that someone had put on a skip caught his eye. He cleaned it up and found a beautiful 19th or possibly 18th century mirror. The place is full of stuff like that.
The sense of one area leading in another continues into the garden. There one really can get lost. It’s a permaculture garden and to an eye accustomed to well-weeded, tidy rows of flowers or vegetables, it’s a mess. It is, however, a mess with purpose. The philosophy of permaculture is to let nature do most of the work. Once plants are established they take care of themselves. The garden becomes self-seeding, self-composting and self-sustaining, just as in nature. The yield is as good, if not better than a conventionally maintained vegetable garden. Chickens help keep the ground clear and weeded. When they have cleared one patch they get move to another.
I love this house for its originality and the way it blends with nature rather than impose on it. It is a unique expression of the aesthetic and individuality of its creator. I couldn’t reproduce it and I wouldn’t want to, but it does inspire me to want to create a dwelling that is as eco-friendly and as reflective of my individuality as this one is of Craig’s.
Rhiannon Hanfman
Findhorn
22 January 2008
Blazing a Trail
Approaches to leadership evolve, and one man's vision for an art centre enriches the whole community
In recent weeks there has been a series of meetings organised by the Foundation and the New Findhorn Association (NFA), on community building. The theme of the latest was Leadership. I did not go to this meeting, so I will not write about it — but it has got me thinking about leadership in the community and how it’s perceived.
Leadership is a word that comes up often here. It features in the titles of workshops and meetings — and is generally a topic of interest. This is perhaps not surprising as we don‘t have really have leaders in the generally understood sense of the word. The Foundation has a management group who make decisions about budgets and policy and so on. Their function is basically administrative which is not the same thing as leadership. This is not to say that members of Management aren’t leaders, but it doesn’t necessarily go with the territory. In any case, Management’s writ does not run outside the Foundation and the majority in the community are not Foundation staff members.
In the early days, leadership was very straightforward. Peter and Eileen Caddy with Dorothy Maclean founded the community through following divine guidance. Eileen got the guidance from a higher source and Peter, to whom God did not speak but who had utter faith in the validity of what came through Eileen, carried out whatever that guidance suggested. The style was autocratic but appropriate for the time. Without Peter’s intense focus, the community might never have been built.
This changed when Eileen received guidance that she should no longer give guidance to the community. Her inspirational messages could be found in her books but she no longer gave practical directions to the community. It was now on its own and had to experiment with new forms of leadership.
Today the concept of leadership has evolved into the idea that anyone can be a leader. It is not dependant on position or popularity or divine authority although inner authority is a necessary part. For me, leadership is demonstrated when someone has a clear vision that they firmly believe in and then take the necessary steps to bring it into being. If the vision is a good one and the timing is right, support will naturally follow.
 A good example of this is the Moray Art Centre. Until very recently the arts at Findhorn were housed in a few shabby pre-fabricated bungalows, which apart from the pottery, were little used. Randy Klinger, a painter who lives here had a vision for a proper art centre, one that would serve not only the Findhorn community but also all of Moray. There would be studios, exhibition space and room for craft shows, classes and lectures. It would be a focal point for the arts in the area. It would not be cheap.
Randy had no money |
