Home.
Yes, there is indeed more light here in New York. Possibly more than an hour.
Thanks to the jetlag, I find myself operating on “Wesley Time,” going to sleep around 10 or 11 and waking up before 8 in the morning.
The transition from the Park to home has been interesting. I left Findhorn in a sleepy state, on the 9:29 bus with Rae and Emma Saturday morning, December 9th. I was so tired it was hard to believe that I may never be returning to Findhorn. But who really knows?
Rae, Emma and I spent 24 hours in Inverness. We walked around a lot and took a boat tour of Loch Ness. Unfortunately, we didn’t see “Nessie,” the Loch Ness Monster.
Sunday afternoon, Rae and I said “good-bye” to Emma at the train station and went down to Edinburgh, where our flights left from.
More...
Completions...
Wow! It's December already and we're wrapping things up here at Findhorn. Part of me feels like I have been here for a really long time, but another part wonders how the semester could possible be ending already.
We finished working in our work departments last Tuesday afternoon and then had a "completion" with members of the department. In the Park Garden completion, Michelle and I sat around drinking tea with our awesome garden buddies Christian, Thomas, Kathleen and Adriana and talked about our insights from working in the gardens and what we will be taking away from the experience. I talked about the day when Adriana and I went to spruce up the patio and small garden outside one of the guest bungalows. It wasn't really apparent what we ought to do, but she said that if we worked there for the afternoon, our attention and love would lift the space's energy. So I raked a few leaves, swept the patio, clipped off a few dying flowers and she did some weeding. After just doing little things like that for two and a half hours we stood back and looked at the patio before leaving. I felt an amazing shift in its energy from the love that we had put into it. That taught me that you don't really have to know what you're going to do. If you feel like something needs to be changed, just get involved any way that you can. You have to start somewhere.
More...
Finally! Photos!
In this installment:
+My new room and our group presentation to the community
+Findhorn’s 44th Birthday Party
+The election seen from Scotland
+Wrapping up the semester
+Photos from Erraid
My new room and our group presentation to the community
Since I have last posted, I’ve gotten my new room set up nicely. The new challenge is actually LEAVING my room and being social. But I have been getting lots of homework done in there, including a series of 5 weavings representing Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms that weave together many of the things I have learned in the four classes. They will be on display for the public in the Universal Hall Foyer tomorrow after brunch. Our program is hosting this presentation as a way of giving something back to the community. Each student has been working on a portfolio of visual and/or performance art for the presentation (save Ariele who has been mentally preparing for an improvised piece). The portfolios and presentation will be a big part of our assessments in Deborah’s creative expression class.
More...
Changes.
Yesterday I went through a crazy mood swing. It felt a shame to have that going on while my dad was visiting from New York. But I was stressed out about all the projects that I will be doing in the next five weeks, changing dynamics with different people, and the departure of some new friends who just finished a month long Eco-village Design Education program here. Resuming class Monday morning reminded me of all of the projects that I need to be working on. It was especially stressful this Monday because we had Group Dynamics and broke up into our bungalow groups to discuss issues in our houses and how we could resolve them. Lots of issues came up for me; things that I hadn’t even been consciously thinking about, like how the mess in the bathroom bothers me, or the noise in the living room that sometimes makes it impossible for me to study or sleep in my bedroom (which is right off of the living room).
More...
...Like a Rolling Stone
Like a rolling stone, I am trying to keep on rolling. In these first few days back from Erraid, I have been resuming work on my long list of assignments. Most of the time I feel like if I just keep up the motivation, keep on working and avoid traps like the internet and my bed that suck me in for hours, that I will slowly but surely get everything done in time. I know if I lose the motivation, I will have a hard time starting to roll again.
More...
Home from a magnificent week on the Isle of Erraid.
Oh man, back into “the grind.” I wrote a lovely blog entry last Saturday around 3 in the morning. I was finishing a stressful week and getting ready to leave for the wonderful Isle of Erraid on a 5 AM bus. I wrote a few pages about that transition, and just as I was ready to click “submit,” my computer froze and I lost the entry. As writing that had been a break from drafting the proposal for my senior project at College of the Atlantic (COA) which was due Monday, I did not have time to go back and rewrite it. Frankly I was too upset by my computer to even post a short entry letting everyone know that we were going to Erraid for a week and that there would be no internet access there. It’s likely my computer’s battery was dead too, because it doesn’t last very long and my UK to US adapter broke a few weeks ago so I’m always having to borrow other people’s. At the moment, we have 2 adapters in a house of 4 students, so I’m having to use my computer less. I can buy a new adapter in Forres, but with my senior project proposal, a now-late Human Ecology Essay, which is a graduation requirement at my school; work for classes here and getting ready for our trip to Erraid, I had no spare time that week. It felt like the infamous “Week 10” at COA--the final week of each trimester, during which stress infects student and teachers like a disease, and all-nighters are a common occurrence (at least for me; there never seem to be enough hours in a day). I was trying to avoid doing that here; ironically, my all-nighter Friday was when I was working on my project proposal for COA. The bus left at 5 AM too, so I would have had to go to sleep at 9 PM to get a full night’s sleep anyway.
Luckily, I was able to sleep a bit on the bus as we drove to the west coast. As an American from the east coast, when I hear someone talk about driving to the west coast, I automatically think of a multi-day journey. The drive cross-country is much shorter in Scotland; it was about six hours including two short ferry rides. We drove through some amazing mountains, some barren, some being reforested. There were lots of cows and sheep roaming around. On the way back to the Park this morning, we even had to pull off the road so that a herd of long-haired highland cows could get by.
More...
Reading, thinking and sweating.
Wow! We’re already halfway through October without an entry! October started with a ton of reading assignments. It seemed that we were just sitting around in the living room or our bedrooms reading a lot of the time. I found some of the reading, like Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy, to be really interesting. That was a book I would always look forward to opening. We’re using it for Deborah’s class in creative expression and the five rhythms dancing. It goes well beyond the meditative dancing though, and is basically a self-help book that focuses on healing wounds from the past--wounds from our childhood, relationships, and those that are self-inflicted.
Other books, like philosopher Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything, are less my cup of tea, so to say. It’s interesting that David, who assigned the book, isn’t entirely into Wilber either. Still he considers it an important book to read. I’m behind on the reading at this point, so I figure if I can get myself to finish the assignment, I will get to practice discipline, which is something I really need to practice :-) The book isn’t entirely bad. Every now and then I come across something that resonates with me. Some of the students in the group really like the book, others are celebrating the completion of the assignment and never having to go near the book again. One student wanted to burn the book in the fire we had at our sweat lodge last night, but I didn’t see him do that.
Here we are sitting in the sweat lodge frame before
putting blankets over it and hot rocks inside.
More...
Harvest Festival, Dancing, Recycling and Painting a Windmill.
Even though I haven't updated you in a week, there is still a lot going on. Everyday we are learning new things and having interesting experiences.
In this installment:
+Harvest Festival
+5 Rhythms Dancing
+Visit to Moray WasteBuster's recycling centre
+Painting Joy, one of the new windmills
Harvest Festival
Last Friday after I finished writing the blog entry I joined in the Harvest Festival at Cullerne Garden. I didn’t realize it had begun an hour earlier (and that’s when the actual harvesting took place); I got there just in time to join the circle, hold hands, dance and celebrate the harvest.
I didn’t get my hands dirty, but found the afternoon enjoyable nonetheless. We had a little procession with the vegetables, bringing them from the garden to the Community Centre.
More...
Worldviews & Consciousness
This is what David, our Worldviews & Consciousness teacher, has to say about the class thus far:
"In our second 'Worldviews & Consciousness' class yesterday, we had what I think was a great session, talking about 'what do we mean by consciousness, anyway?' and what this course has to do with Jonathan's class on 'Applied Sustainability,' for example. We began by sharing in pairs and then into the whole group. Lots of animated conversation. I think everyone spoke, and articulately and with interest. Everyone keen to see the importance of shifting consciousness to making the world really sustainable. No disagreements, all felt aligned with the vision of deeper transformation. It was inspiring. The whole group thinks deeply and offers wonderful ideas! Then, onto talking about what, in fact, consciousness MEANS. A brief talk from me about possibilities--the materialist neurophysiological perspective, to the philsophical and cognitive science perspective, Chalmers and 'the hard question,' finally to Ken Wilber and the question of: 'what if consciousness is actually seeking to know itself through OUR becoming more deeeply self-aware???' One of those conversation stopper/ponder on this kind of questions! More fun conversation with lots of participation. After tea, the issue of what is the difference between consciousness and spirituality?. Is there one? And, what about the relationship between spirituality and religion? LOTS of ideas and conversation.
More...
International Peace Day, Classes and Life.
Whenever I sit down to blog., I find there are so many things to write about that I just don’t know what to say. I think it would help to blog more often, but for now, I will make this kind of like a newsletter, with lots of little articles. You can read one per sitting if you’d like. I don’t want you to be sedentary and restless. So read at your own pace, but know that I wrote and am posting this all because I thought each part would be interesting.
Included in this issue:
+International Peace Day Celebration
+The place of ecovillages in the world
+Our first two days of Applied Sustainability
+Nonviolent Communication workshop
International Peace Day Celebration
Yesterday was International Peace Day. We participated in a unique event here to mark the occasion. At 3:45 PM our group and other members of the Findhorn community gathered in the Universal Hall, where we had a video conference with the California Institute of Integral Studies and Auroville ecovillage in India (all in very different time zones). Each group of people broadcast a special peace celebration for the others to watch on a big projection screen. While the technology was not flawless, it was pretty cool to know that there were people gathered all over the planet for peace simultaneously.
More...
NEXT page
Home.
Yes, there is indeed more light here in New York. Possibly more than an hour.
Thanks to the jetlag, I find myself operating on “Wesley Time,” going to sleep around 10 or 11 and waking up before 8 in the morning.
The transition from the Park to home has been interesting. I left Findhorn in a sleepy state, on the 9:29 bus with Rae and Emma Saturday morning, December 9th. I was so tired it was hard to believe that I may never be returning to Findhorn. But who really knows?
Rae, Emma and I spent 24 hours in Inverness. We walked around a lot and took a boat tour of Loch Ness. Unfortunately, we didn’t see “Nessie,” the Loch Ness Monster.
Sunday afternoon, Rae and I said “good-bye” to Emma at the train station and went down to Edinburgh, where our flights left from.
More...
Completions...
Wow! It's December already and we're wrapping things up here at Findhorn. Part of me feels like I have been here for a really long time, but another part wonders how the semester could possible be ending already.
We finished working in our work departments last Tuesday afternoon and then had a "completion" with members of the department. In the Park Garden completion, Michelle and I sat around drinking tea with our awesome garden buddies Christian, Thomas, Kathleen and Adriana and talked about our insights from working in the gardens and what we will be taking away from the experience. I talked about the day when Adriana and I went to spruce up the patio and small garden outside one of the guest bungalows. It wasn't really apparent what we ought to do, but she said that if we worked there for the afternoon, our attention and love would lift the space's energy. So I raked a few leaves, swept the patio, clipped off a few dying flowers and she did some weeding. After just doing little things like that for two and a half hours we stood back and looked at the patio before leaving. I felt an amazing shift in its energy from the love that we had put into it. That taught me that you don't really have to know what you're going to do. If you feel like something needs to be changed, just get involved any way that you can. You have to start somewhere.
More...
Finally! Photos!
In this installment:
+My new room and our group presentation to the community
+Findhorn’s 44th Birthday Party
+The election seen from Scotland
+Wrapping up the semester
+Photos from Erraid
My new room and our group presentation to the community
Since I have last posted, I’ve gotten my new room set up nicely. The new challenge is actually LEAVING my room and being social. But I have been getting lots of homework done in there, including a series of 5 weavings representing Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms that weave together many of the things I have learned in the four classes. They will be on display for the public in the Universal Hall Foyer tomorrow after brunch. Our program is hosting this presentation as a way of giving something back to the community. Each student has been working on a portfolio of visual and/or performance art for the presentation (save Ariele who has been mentally preparing for an improvised piece). The portfolios and presentation will be a big part of our assessments in Deborah’s creative expression class.
More...
Changes.
Yesterday I went through a crazy mood swing. It felt a shame to have that going on while my dad was visiting from New York. But I was stressed out about all the projects that I will be doing in the next five weeks, changing dynamics with different people, and the departure of some new friends who just finished a month long Eco-village Design Education program here. Resuming class Monday morning reminded me of all of the projects that I need to be working on. It was especially stressful this Monday because we had Group Dynamics and broke up into our bungalow groups to discuss issues in our houses and how we could resolve them. Lots of issues came up for me; things that I hadn’t even been consciously thinking about, like how the mess in the bathroom bothers me, or the noise in the living room that sometimes makes it impossible for me to study or sleep in my bedroom (which is right off of the living room). More...
...Like a Rolling Stone
Like a rolling stone, I am trying to keep on rolling. In these first few days back from Erraid, I have been resuming work on my long list of assignments. Most of the time I feel like if I just keep up the motivation, keep on working and avoid traps like the internet and my bed that suck me in for hours, that I will slowly but surely get everything done in time. I know if I lose the motivation, I will have a hard time starting to roll again. More...
Home from a magnificent week on the Isle of Erraid.
Oh man, back into “the grind.” I wrote a lovely blog entry last Saturday around 3 in the morning. I was finishing a stressful week and getting ready to leave for the wonderful Isle of Erraid on a 5 AM bus. I wrote a few pages about that transition, and just as I was ready to click “submit,” my computer froze and I lost the entry. As writing that had been a break from drafting the proposal for my senior project at College of the Atlantic (COA) which was due Monday, I did not have time to go back and rewrite it. Frankly I was too upset by my computer to even post a short entry letting everyone know that we were going to Erraid for a week and that there would be no internet access there. It’s likely my computer’s battery was dead too, because it doesn’t last very long and my UK to US adapter broke a few weeks ago so I’m always having to borrow other people’s. At the moment, we have 2 adapters in a house of 4 students, so I’m having to use my computer less. I can buy a new adapter in Forres, but with my senior project proposal, a now-late Human Ecology Essay, which is a graduation requirement at my school; work for classes here and getting ready for our trip to Erraid, I had no spare time that week. It felt like the infamous “Week 10” at COA--the final week of each trimester, during which stress infects student and teachers like a disease, and all-nighters are a common occurrence (at least for me; there never seem to be enough hours in a day). I was trying to avoid doing that here; ironically, my all-nighter Friday was when I was working on my project proposal for COA. The bus left at 5 AM too, so I would have had to go to sleep at 9 PM to get a full night’s sleep anyway.
Luckily, I was able to sleep a bit on the bus as we drove to the west coast. As an American from the east coast, when I hear someone talk about driving to the west coast, I automatically think of a multi-day journey. The drive cross-country is much shorter in Scotland; it was about six hours including two short ferry rides. We drove through some amazing mountains, some barren, some being reforested. There were lots of cows and sheep roaming around. On the way back to the Park this morning, we even had to pull off the road so that a herd of long-haired highland cows could get by.
More...
Reading, thinking and sweating.
Wow! We’re already halfway through October without an entry! October started with a ton of reading assignments. It seemed that we were just sitting around in the living room or our bedrooms reading a lot of the time. I found some of the reading, like Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy, to be really interesting. That was a book I would always look forward to opening. We’re using it for Deborah’s class in creative expression and the five rhythms dancing. It goes well beyond the meditative dancing though, and is basically a self-help book that focuses on healing wounds from the past--wounds from our childhood, relationships, and those that are self-inflicted.
Other books, like philosopher Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything, are less my cup of tea, so to say. It’s interesting that David, who assigned the book, isn’t entirely into Wilber either. Still he considers it an important book to read. I’m behind on the reading at this point, so I figure if I can get myself to finish the assignment, I will get to practice discipline, which is something I really need to practice :-) The book isn’t entirely bad. Every now and then I come across something that resonates with me. Some of the students in the group really like the book, others are celebrating the completion of the assignment and never having to go near the book again. One student wanted to burn the book in the fire we had at our sweat lodge last night, but I didn’t see him do that.
Here we are sitting in the sweat lodge frame before
putting blankets over it and hot rocks inside.
More...
Harvest Festival, Dancing, Recycling and Painting a Windmill.
Even though I haven't updated you in a week, there is still a lot going on. Everyday we are learning new things and having interesting experiences.
In this installment:
+Harvest Festival
+5 Rhythms Dancing
+Visit to Moray WasteBuster's recycling centre
+Painting Joy, one of the new windmills
Harvest Festival
Last Friday after I finished writing the blog entry I joined in the Harvest Festival at Cullerne Garden. I didn’t realize it had begun an hour earlier (and that’s when the actual harvesting took place); I got there just in time to join the circle, hold hands, dance and celebrate the harvest.
I didn’t get my hands dirty, but found the afternoon enjoyable nonetheless. We had a little procession with the vegetables, bringing them from the garden to the Community Centre.
More...
Worldviews & Consciousness
This is what David, our Worldviews & Consciousness teacher, has to say about the class thus far:
"In our second 'Worldviews & Consciousness' class yesterday, we had what I think was a great session, talking about 'what do we mean by consciousness, anyway?' and what this course has to do with Jonathan's class on 'Applied Sustainability,' for example. We began by sharing in pairs and then into the whole group. Lots of animated conversation. I think everyone spoke, and articulately and with interest. Everyone keen to see the importance of shifting consciousness to making the world really sustainable. No disagreements, all felt aligned with the vision of deeper transformation. It was inspiring. The whole group thinks deeply and offers wonderful ideas! Then, onto talking about what, in fact, consciousness MEANS. A brief talk from me about possibilities--the materialist neurophysiological perspective, to the philsophical and cognitive science perspective, Chalmers and 'the hard question,' finally to Ken Wilber and the question of: 'what if consciousness is actually seeking to know itself through OUR becoming more deeeply self-aware???' One of those conversation stopper/ponder on this kind of questions! More fun conversation with lots of participation. After tea, the issue of what is the difference between consciousness and spirituality?. Is there one? And, what about the relationship between spirituality and religion? LOTS of ideas and conversation.
More...
International Peace Day, Classes and Life.
Whenever I sit down to blog., I find there are so many things to write about that I just don’t know what to say. I think it would help to blog more often, but for now, I will make this kind of like a newsletter, with lots of little articles. You can read one per sitting if you’d like. I don’t want you to be sedentary and restless. So read at your own pace, but know that I wrote and am posting this all because I thought each part would be interesting.
Included in this issue:
+International Peace Day Celebration
+The place of ecovillages in the world
+Our first two days of Applied Sustainability
+Nonviolent Communication workshop
International Peace Day Celebration
Yesterday was International Peace Day. We participated in a unique event here to mark the occasion. At 3:45 PM our group and other members of the Findhorn community gathered in the Universal Hall, where we had a video conference with the California Institute of Integral Studies and Auroville ecovillage in India (all in very different time zones). Each group of people broadcast a special peace celebration for the others to watch on a big projection screen. While the technology was not flawless, it was pretty cool to know that there were people gathered all over the planet for peace simultaneously.
More...
NEXT page |
