The power of community

I still remember the very deep breath I took, that day in March 2020, when I effectively closed myself off from the outside world – locked in by a combination of Covid-19 and my extreme health problems.

A serious back injury nine months earlier had left me unable to walk more than a few paces and the path to my garden seemed long and challenging.

I was entirely alone, communicating with the outside world by email, Facebook, telephone and a type of semaphore used by friends and neighbours outside my front window. I became accustomed to silence, to my own thoughts and almost resented the intrusiveness of well-meaning phone calls.

In the street outside my window, masked villagers went about their restricted daily tasks. Empty buses continued to run their route.

When I closed the door, I had no idea how I would live my life, how I would fill my time. I wondered how others were coping and especially how my friends at Findhorn were adapting to something so life changing.

Clicking onto the Findhorn Foundation website, I happened upon the first of what are now called Nature Walks (or ‘lovestreams’). I shouldn’t have been surprised that community members saw the need, and the way, to reach out to the wider community – to those of us who were, and to some extent still are, cut off from physical contact with those they knew and loved.

So, about three weeks into my isolation, ‘I’ became ‘we’. I became a ‘walker’ – part of a huge group of Findhorn exiles who, for a magical half hour each day followed first Michael, later Yvonne, as they livestreamed beautiful and interesting walks from around the Findhorn area.