After Findhorn...
My time at Findhorn in the spring of 2003 was quite amazing, but it seems that since then there has been very little opportunity for drawing upon the group practices that I developed while living there. Now, I want to connect with more young people who have had experience with eco-villages or holistic educational practices. It would be good to keep a current network of young people who are interested in this work or who have been part of a Living Routes program. This website is an opportunity to share our current reflections and some potential opportunities to further our eco-village educations once we leave the eco-village and enter the world. I think that keeping in touch with and maintaining these connections is an important part of holding communities together. I find it hard on this website to get access to information about who lives close to where I live. I know that it is up to individuals to post what they are up to and share info about potential opportunities, so I will try to do my part.
More...
The First Month at Findhorn! better late then never!
Hi! My name is Abby. I am a third year student at the University of Vermont. I am an environmental studies major with an art minor. I heard about Findhorn and the living routes program through a class I took my sophomore year. It was a student taught class, taught by two women that had gone to Auroville with the living routes program. At first, that class made me uncomfortable, because I am not really used to a strong community life. Yet, during that class I saw such growth in myself I wanted to pursue it, so I decided to come to Findhorn. It has been wonderful---I will try to add more about myself after I get back from Erraid, as for right now I have posted as much as I can about the last four weeks. Also, check out my photos at the link below! i will start added them to this blog once i get that figured out, probably after Erraid--- (p.s. i am a very bad speller! sorry in advance!)
CHECK OUT MY PHOTO ALBUM! Link: http://community.webshots.com/user/abbyt110
Saturday, 2/4/06
I left Friday and spent the whole night on the plane. We didn’t crash! Yay! The plane wasn’t very full so I got two seats to myself which was great. The seats had individual TVs. I was “yours, mine and ours” . it was horrible. I don’t recommend it. As the arrived in London the sun was rising and it was an amazing sight. The sky was dark with splotches of pink. I caught the shuttle between Heathrow and Gatwick with no problem. When I got to my second flight I met another girl that was on the program with me. Her name is Lee. That plane was pretty small. At first I was sitting next to these two guys that would at the air base that is right next to the Findhorn foundation (where I am living). They were really nice. Gave me some good tips.
After we arrived in Inverness (which is the tiniest airport ever) we caught a cab into the Inverness and took the train to Forres. Only after we had gotten half way to Inverness, the can driver told us it would have been just as cheap to take a cab right to Forres. But I enjoyed being able to see Inverness and I also enjoyed the train ride. So after the train we caught another cab to Cluny Hill college which is part of Findhorn.
There are two “campuses” of Findhorn. There is Cluny Hill College and The Park. The park I will describe a little later on.
CLUNY HILL is where most of the workshops that are associated with Findhorn take place. Most well know of these is Experience Week. If you are familiar with Findhorn you have probably heard of this. The building itself is an old hotel. It is an amazing building. The founders of Findhorn had worked at this hotel before it went out of business, and later the community decided to purchase it as a place to house guests that are there for workshops. Some members of the community also live there. We stayed at Cluny for the first week while we had Experience Week. Most people that come to Findhorn start off with Experience Week. It is suppose to be a life changing experience. I am still trying to decide what change, if any, I have noticed in myself. I have to say it was a really intense experience.
Sunday, 2/05/06
Started off the day with “sacred dance”. which basically involves holding hands and doing a variety of circle dances. I have to admit I was dreading it the night before, but it didn’t end up being that bad. The man that was teaching or “focalizing” (what they call it here). Was wearing a kilt. That was fun. Haha.
After lunch we had an “angel meditation” which is when we pick angel cards for the experience week. (if you are not familiar with these, they are cards that have words on them that represent a angel that is looking over you). My angel was birth. The angel for the group was balance.
After that we went to THE PARK for the first time. The park is where I am currently living and will be living for the rest of the semester. This is where most of the permanent Findhorn community lives. It is much larger then I thought it would be. It used to be a trailer park actually, which is pretty funny. There are still some trailers or “caravans” left, but there are also a lot of other buildings being built. A big project for the community right now is there ecovillage, which consists of a bunch of houses which are being built to be ecologically sustainable.
So we were given a tour of the park. It is really an amazing place. We were shown where the founders first parked their caravan, where the famous large cabbages were grown, etc etc. The ecovillage is a growing project at the moment. People have the opportunity to purchase bits of land in the park with the intention to build an ecologically sustainable house. There are also 4 windmills at the park.
For those of you that have heard of the “magic of Findhorn” in regards to large cabbages, I am sorry to report that I have not learned that much about the phenomenon. What I have heard is that it is true that very large cabbages did grow at Findhorn at one time. The story is that on of the founding members meditated with all the plants in the garden, and channeled the devas of these organisms. That is how the story goes…
I have decided not to go over every day of experience week because I am writing this like 2 weeks after the fact and I don’t remember all of it. Plus, I think the aspect of the surprise is part of the experience. But I will say that the highlights were: we went to the Findhorn river and it was amazing. You will see lots of pictures of it in my photo album. We played some group bonding games which, same as the dances, we not that horribly bad. I worked at the garden and dug holes for rose bushes and flattened mole hills which was difficult but fulfilling work. And more and more stuff. So here’s the rest my time in bits and pieces.
click on "more" to bring you further up to date on the last month at Findhorn!!
More...
and in the beginning...
Hi! I'm Sarah, and Abby and I are working together on the weblog of Findhorn Spring 2006.
Welcome!!!
A little bit about me...
I grew up in New Hampshire, spent my freshman year studying journalism at the University of King's College in Nova Scotia, and am currently taking this year off to explore my options and refresh my mind. I spent the fall doing conservation work in Arizona, and chose to come to Findhorn this spring ultimately because of the amazing opportunity it offered for personal growth. I was excited by the chance to be in Scotland (mmmm haggis) with a group of fellow travelers, living and learning about sustainability, spirituality, and above all--ourselves.
That's the short version, anyway.
We're leaving Monday for a week on the island of Erraid (we were originally leaving at 5:30 this morning, but our trip got postponed because of the unlikely event of---snow, snow and more snow! earlier today a group of people got together to make The Biggest Snowman Findhorn's Ever Seen), but we'll post more soon. We're hoping to make this blog a fun place to visit where you can see pictures, poetry, artwork etc. and get a better what Findhorn is really like. If anyone has any questions, or specific things you'd like to hear about, please let us know...
More later!
update and week on Erraid!!!
Happy (two days after) St. Patrick's Day everyone!!!
We've been back at the Findhorn Foundation for a little over a week. I (and as I've heard, most of the group) really enjoyed our time on the island of Erraid. It was a timely change of scene from life at Findhorn--while there are several hundred people at Findhorn, the isle of Erraid is home to roughly 10 permanent residents. The island itself is beautiful, surrounded by rocks and beach, and there are lovely hikes for those willing to brave the (frequent) rain and mud. The community has one main road, which passes in front of the connected houses where residents and guests live.
Our days at Erraid were spent mostly in the work departments, supporting the close-knit community in whatever needed to be done at the time, for us mostly: Erraid garden, kitchen, wood chopping, and candle studio. Yeah, candle studio. Candles are one of Erraid's source of income, the candles are shipped to Findhorn to be sold to the wider community. I made my first ever candle! How many people can say that?
Anyway...after work departments in the morning and afternoon, we had the chance to take part in optional evening meditation and taize singing. I had never gone to the taize singing here at Findhorn (mainly because it's before class at 9 and I try to avoid getting up any earlier than I have to) but I decided to try because I like to sing. It was a lot of fun, altho the songs were catchy and got stuck in our heads and we ended up singing them all week (gopala, anyone?). I also enjoyed working in the kitchen, one afternoon we got to pick brusselsprout leaves from the Erraid garden and use them in our cooking, and see them feed the community, an example of closing the gap between producer and consumer as we've been talking about this week in our Applied Sustainability class.
As the week went on, I felt more like I was really living in the community-- I figured out how to actually start a fire in our wood stove, and get milk for our kitchen. On Friday we danced, a Scotsman (well, Scotswoman) tried to teach us some traditional Scottish dancing...(the key word being 'tried.' oh well, we had fun). On Wednesday some of us explored the isle of Iona, where we visited the abbey and the ruins of an old nunnery. I went for a hike through the mud and drizzling rain up the highest hill in Iona, to an amazing view, down to one of the beaches. It was truly invigorating...almost as invigorating as a dip in the cold but invigorating ocean (which I have yet to try, along with the haggis). There were a lot of firsts on Iona that day: we went to the local pub for lunch, where one student had fish for the first time, and another had ketchup for the first time. Amazing, huh? Well, that's what happens at Findhorn Community Semester. Lots of firsts.
More later...
Sarah
photos of Erraid trip
life back at Findhorn...apologies for the delay!
My apologies for not updating earlier. Time has a strange way of moving at Findhorn. It's hard to say whether it's because things move so fast or so slow.
After Erraid, we had three solid weeks of class. That said, our class schedule wasn't actually that packed. We had a couple cool sessions in our Creative Expression class working with different artists, we made our own mandalas (don't know what a mandala is? I recommend looking it up), we also spent an afternoon with a poet writing and sharing our own poetry.
We've been learning a lot about Group Dynamics. The class is especially helpful because whether we're aware of it or not, we're involved in group dynamics in our every day lives, well, every day. In this semester, the ten of us students have spent so much time together as a group, getting to know how we interact, it really feels like our most developed identity here is as a group. Learning about group dynamics gives us a better understanding of what's going on in our interactions, and gives us a vocabulary for talking about it. We've been joking about what it will be like when we go home and start using these terms no one understands:
"I notice you're blushing. Is that an edge for you?"
"A what???"
As a Findhorn Community Semester project, we spent a day and a half taking down an old, worn out fence around the tree nursery and putting up a new one. We started by bringing logs to the work site, scraping off the bark, and blackening the end of the logs over the fire to keep out insects/moisture. After that, we placed each log in a hole we'd dug, then filled and packed the hole with dirt. Voila! Fenceposts. Finally, the group put up chicken wire between the posts, as well as a working on a beautiful wooden gateway in the middle of the fence. We're planning for this to be our contribution to the Findhorn community that's here even after we're gone.
This past Saturday the group left for Ullapool--a week of sleeping in sleeping bags in a barn, horseback riding, beatuiful landscapes, no indoor bathroom or kitchen, learning how to make and cook from earth stoves...
I can't say too much about it, tho, because I'm still here at Findhorn. I had a cold/sore throat the past couple days and was losing my voice the night before Ullapool, so I chose to stay here, rest, recover and get some work done before my parents come to visit...next week!
A few other students weren't feeling well as well, and decided the cold weather at Ullapool (apparently the worst they've had in years!) wasn't doing it for them so they came back to Findhorn today.
Just briefly...some of us went to Edinburgh last weekend, unfortunately we only had about 24 hours there, but from that short time it seems like a beautiful city (a bit of a change from Findhorn!). I'd love to spend more time there and explore in the future.
This weekend while I was here for a couple days without everyone I took some long walks by the ocean. The sun came out and we had blue skies (tho it's true here what they say about Scottish weather--it was hailing within a couple hours). I was continually amazed at how blue the water was, a deep, intense blue I don't associate with the ocean where I live in New Hampshire.
And one nice thing about the constantly changing weather... I've seen a couple rainbows, one by the ocean, one right outside the Community Center where we eat our meals.
As I write this, it's hard to believe that we only have a little over a month left. Final projects and papers are coming up, so we have to deal with a steadily rising stress level. Even with that, I hope we can get the most out of our time here together!
~Sarah
last few weeks
Hi, its Abby, haven’t updated in a while. Its been kind of busy here. We have a lot of papers due now that the semester is wrapping up. It is kind of weird to have papers due because the setting here is so different then the academic atmosphere that I am used to. So it has been interesting. Just a review of the last few weeks since Sarah updated last:
We had a group project that entailed building a fence. that’s was lots of fun. We went into the woods and got some fallen down trees, striped the bark, burned the bottoms so the bugs wouldn’t get in and then planted them in the group. We also make a cool gateway; we are actually still working on that.
Ullapool was, um, interesting. It would have been a lot better if it hadn’t been so cold. People there were saying it was the coldest it had been in years at the time we were there. It was beautiful though. I would really like to go back sometime when I can actually enjoy it. I ended up leaving early. However, I did get to experience some of the highlights of the trip. There were two horses and a pony. A dog named wolf and a rambunctious five year old named Storm.
This past week we had assessments for Deborah’s class, the art class. On Thursday we presented our “art of fascination” project. During the semester we hooked up with someone that practiced an art form that we would like to learn more about. I learned collage from Sara G. Other people did dance, voice, creative writing, knitting, etc. We also had a discussion about how “Maps to Ecstasy” effected our learning this semester. That is the book we were asked to read for that class. On Friday we presented our portfolios. Mine consisted on photos and my sketch book. That went pretty well.
The weekend was pretty low key, everyone is kind of stressed about getting work done on time. Yesterday it was pretty warm and I decided to jump into the ocean. It was awesome; it was also very cold. But now I can brag about doing it. Wooooo! I just finished my “internship” I.e. work department in maintenance. I moved sinks and toilets from one room to another. Thrilling. Not exactly what I anticipated.
So, overall, the last few weeks have been good. I can’t believe we only have three weeks left. It went by so fast. I almost don’t want to leave.
photos
Michelle You are beautiful!
Hi Michelle,
You look great!! I just found out about this website. We are praying for your happiness and safety.
It looks so gorgeous there! We are doing great! Love You!!
Uncle Barry, Aunt Kim & Lindsay!
After Findhorn...
My time at Findhorn in the spring of 2003 was quite amazing, but it seems that since then there has been very little opportunity for drawing upon the group practices that I developed while living there. Now, I want to connect with more young people who have had experience with eco-villages or holistic educational practices. It would be good to keep a current network of young people who are interested in this work or who have been part of a Living Routes program. This website is an opportunity to share our current reflections and some potential opportunities to further our eco-village educations once we leave the eco-village and enter the world. I think that keeping in touch with and maintaining these connections is an important part of holding communities together. I find it hard on this website to get access to information about who lives close to where I live. I know that it is up to individuals to post what they are up to and share info about potential opportunities, so I will try to do my part. More...
The First Month at Findhorn! better late then never!
Hi! My name is Abby. I am a third year student at the University of Vermont. I am an environmental studies major with an art minor. I heard about Findhorn and the living routes program through a class I took my sophomore year. It was a student taught class, taught by two women that had gone to Auroville with the living routes program. At first, that class made me uncomfortable, because I am not really used to a strong community life. Yet, during that class I saw such growth in myself I wanted to pursue it, so I decided to come to Findhorn. It has been wonderful---I will try to add more about myself after I get back from Erraid, as for right now I have posted as much as I can about the last four weeks. Also, check out my photos at the link below! i will start added them to this blog once i get that figured out, probably after Erraid--- (p.s. i am a very bad speller! sorry in advance!)
CHECK OUT MY PHOTO ALBUM! Link: http://community.webshots.com/user/abbyt110
Saturday, 2/4/06
I left Friday and spent the whole night on the plane. We didn’t crash! Yay! The plane wasn’t very full so I got two seats to myself which was great. The seats had individual TVs. I was “yours, mine and ours” . it was horrible. I don’t recommend it. As the arrived in London the sun was rising and it was an amazing sight. The sky was dark with splotches of pink. I caught the shuttle between Heathrow and Gatwick with no problem. When I got to my second flight I met another girl that was on the program with me. Her name is Lee. That plane was pretty small. At first I was sitting next to these two guys that would at the air base that is right next to the Findhorn foundation (where I am living). They were really nice. Gave me some good tips.
After we arrived in Inverness (which is the tiniest airport ever) we caught a cab into the Inverness and took the train to Forres. Only after we had gotten half way to Inverness, the can driver told us it would have been just as cheap to take a cab right to Forres. But I enjoyed being able to see Inverness and I also enjoyed the train ride. So after the train we caught another cab to Cluny Hill college which is part of Findhorn.
There are two “campuses” of Findhorn. There is Cluny Hill College and The Park. The park I will describe a little later on.
CLUNY HILL is where most of the workshops that are associated with Findhorn take place. Most well know of these is Experience Week. If you are familiar with Findhorn you have probably heard of this. The building itself is an old hotel. It is an amazing building. The founders of Findhorn had worked at this hotel before it went out of business, and later the community decided to purchase it as a place to house guests that are there for workshops. Some members of the community also live there. We stayed at Cluny for the first week while we had Experience Week. Most people that come to Findhorn start off with Experience Week. It is suppose to be a life changing experience. I am still trying to decide what change, if any, I have noticed in myself. I have to say it was a really intense experience.
Sunday, 2/05/06
Started off the day with “sacred dance”. which basically involves holding hands and doing a variety of circle dances. I have to admit I was dreading it the night before, but it didn’t end up being that bad. The man that was teaching or “focalizing” (what they call it here). Was wearing a kilt. That was fun. Haha.
After lunch we had an “angel meditation” which is when we pick angel cards for the experience week. (if you are not familiar with these, they are cards that have words on them that represent a angel that is looking over you). My angel was birth. The angel for the group was balance.
After that we went to THE PARK for the first time. The park is where I am currently living and will be living for the rest of the semester. This is where most of the permanent Findhorn community lives. It is much larger then I thought it would be. It used to be a trailer park actually, which is pretty funny. There are still some trailers or “caravans” left, but there are also a lot of other buildings being built. A big project for the community right now is there ecovillage, which consists of a bunch of houses which are being built to be ecologically sustainable.
So we were given a tour of the park. It is really an amazing place. We were shown where the founders first parked their caravan, where the famous large cabbages were grown, etc etc. The ecovillage is a growing project at the moment. People have the opportunity to purchase bits of land in the park with the intention to build an ecologically sustainable house. There are also 4 windmills at the park.
For those of you that have heard of the “magic of Findhorn” in regards to large cabbages, I am sorry to report that I have not learned that much about the phenomenon. What I have heard is that it is true that very large cabbages did grow at Findhorn at one time. The story is that on of the founding members meditated with all the plants in the garden, and channeled the devas of these organisms. That is how the story goes…
I have decided not to go over every day of experience week because I am writing this like 2 weeks after the fact and I don’t remember all of it. Plus, I think the aspect of the surprise is part of the experience. But I will say that the highlights were: we went to the Findhorn river and it was amazing. You will see lots of pictures of it in my photo album. We played some group bonding games which, same as the dances, we not that horribly bad. I worked at the garden and dug holes for rose bushes and flattened mole hills which was difficult but fulfilling work. And more and more stuff. So here’s the rest my time in bits and pieces.
click on "more" to bring you further up to date on the last month at Findhorn!!
More...
and in the beginning...
Hi! I'm Sarah, and Abby and I are working together on the weblog of Findhorn Spring 2006.
Welcome!!!
A little bit about me...
I grew up in New Hampshire, spent my freshman year studying journalism at the University of King's College in Nova Scotia, and am currently taking this year off to explore my options and refresh my mind. I spent the fall doing conservation work in Arizona, and chose to come to Findhorn this spring ultimately because of the amazing opportunity it offered for personal growth. I was excited by the chance to be in Scotland (mmmm haggis) with a group of fellow travelers, living and learning about sustainability, spirituality, and above all--ourselves.
That's the short version, anyway.
We're leaving Monday for a week on the island of Erraid (we were originally leaving at 5:30 this morning, but our trip got postponed because of the unlikely event of---snow, snow and more snow! earlier today a group of people got together to make The Biggest Snowman Findhorn's Ever Seen), but we'll post more soon. We're hoping to make this blog a fun place to visit where you can see pictures, poetry, artwork etc. and get a better what Findhorn is really like. If anyone has any questions, or specific things you'd like to hear about, please let us know...
More later!
update and week on Erraid!!!
Happy (two days after) St. Patrick's Day everyone!!!
We've been back at the Findhorn Foundation for a little over a week. I (and as I've heard, most of the group) really enjoyed our time on the island of Erraid. It was a timely change of scene from life at Findhorn--while there are several hundred people at Findhorn, the isle of Erraid is home to roughly 10 permanent residents. The island itself is beautiful, surrounded by rocks and beach, and there are lovely hikes for those willing to brave the (frequent) rain and mud. The community has one main road, which passes in front of the connected houses where residents and guests live.
Our days at Erraid were spent mostly in the work departments, supporting the close-knit community in whatever needed to be done at the time, for us mostly: Erraid garden, kitchen, wood chopping, and candle studio. Yeah, candle studio. Candles are one of Erraid's source of income, the candles are shipped to Findhorn to be sold to the wider community. I made my first ever candle! How many people can say that?
Anyway...after work departments in the morning and afternoon, we had the chance to take part in optional evening meditation and taize singing. I had never gone to the taize singing here at Findhorn (mainly because it's before class at 9 and I try to avoid getting up any earlier than I have to) but I decided to try because I like to sing. It was a lot of fun, altho the songs were catchy and got stuck in our heads and we ended up singing them all week (gopala, anyone?). I also enjoyed working in the kitchen, one afternoon we got to pick brusselsprout leaves from the Erraid garden and use them in our cooking, and see them feed the community, an example of closing the gap between producer and consumer as we've been talking about this week in our Applied Sustainability class.
As the week went on, I felt more like I was really living in the community-- I figured out how to actually start a fire in our wood stove, and get milk for our kitchen. On Friday we danced, a Scotsman (well, Scotswoman) tried to teach us some traditional Scottish dancing...(the key word being 'tried.' oh well, we had fun). On Wednesday some of us explored the isle of Iona, where we visited the abbey and the ruins of an old nunnery. I went for a hike through the mud and drizzling rain up the highest hill in Iona, to an amazing view, down to one of the beaches. It was truly invigorating...almost as invigorating as a dip in the cold but invigorating ocean (which I have yet to try, along with the haggis). There were a lot of firsts on Iona that day: we went to the local pub for lunch, where one student had fish for the first time, and another had ketchup for the first time. Amazing, huh? Well, that's what happens at Findhorn Community Semester. Lots of firsts.
More later...
Sarah
photos of Erraid trip
life back at Findhorn...apologies for the delay!
My apologies for not updating earlier. Time has a strange way of moving at Findhorn. It's hard to say whether it's because things move so fast or so slow.
After Erraid, we had three solid weeks of class. That said, our class schedule wasn't actually that packed. We had a couple cool sessions in our Creative Expression class working with different artists, we made our own mandalas (don't know what a mandala is? I recommend looking it up), we also spent an afternoon with a poet writing and sharing our own poetry.
We've been learning a lot about Group Dynamics. The class is especially helpful because whether we're aware of it or not, we're involved in group dynamics in our every day lives, well, every day. In this semester, the ten of us students have spent so much time together as a group, getting to know how we interact, it really feels like our most developed identity here is as a group. Learning about group dynamics gives us a better understanding of what's going on in our interactions, and gives us a vocabulary for talking about it. We've been joking about what it will be like when we go home and start using these terms no one understands:
"I notice you're blushing. Is that an edge for you?"
"A what???"
As a Findhorn Community Semester project, we spent a day and a half taking down an old, worn out fence around the tree nursery and putting up a new one. We started by bringing logs to the work site, scraping off the bark, and blackening the end of the logs over the fire to keep out insects/moisture. After that, we placed each log in a hole we'd dug, then filled and packed the hole with dirt. Voila! Fenceposts. Finally, the group put up chicken wire between the posts, as well as a working on a beautiful wooden gateway in the middle of the fence. We're planning for this to be our contribution to the Findhorn community that's here even after we're gone.
This past Saturday the group left for Ullapool--a week of sleeping in sleeping bags in a barn, horseback riding, beatuiful landscapes, no indoor bathroom or kitchen, learning how to make and cook from earth stoves...
I can't say too much about it, tho, because I'm still here at Findhorn. I had a cold/sore throat the past couple days and was losing my voice the night before Ullapool, so I chose to stay here, rest, recover and get some work done before my parents come to visit...next week!
A few other students weren't feeling well as well, and decided the cold weather at Ullapool (apparently the worst they've had in years!) wasn't doing it for them so they came back to Findhorn today.
Just briefly...some of us went to Edinburgh last weekend, unfortunately we only had about 24 hours there, but from that short time it seems like a beautiful city (a bit of a change from Findhorn!). I'd love to spend more time there and explore in the future.
This weekend while I was here for a couple days without everyone I took some long walks by the ocean. The sun came out and we had blue skies (tho it's true here what they say about Scottish weather--it was hailing within a couple hours). I was continually amazed at how blue the water was, a deep, intense blue I don't associate with the ocean where I live in New Hampshire.
And one nice thing about the constantly changing weather... I've seen a couple rainbows, one by the ocean, one right outside the Community Center where we eat our meals.
As I write this, it's hard to believe that we only have a little over a month left. Final projects and papers are coming up, so we have to deal with a steadily rising stress level. Even with that, I hope we can get the most out of our time here together!
~Sarah
last few weeks
Hi, its Abby, haven’t updated in a while. Its been kind of busy here. We have a lot of papers due now that the semester is wrapping up. It is kind of weird to have papers due because the setting here is so different then the academic atmosphere that I am used to. So it has been interesting. Just a review of the last few weeks since Sarah updated last:
We had a group project that entailed building a fence. that’s was lots of fun. We went into the woods and got some fallen down trees, striped the bark, burned the bottoms so the bugs wouldn’t get in and then planted them in the group. We also make a cool gateway; we are actually still working on that.
Ullapool was, um, interesting. It would have been a lot better if it hadn’t been so cold. People there were saying it was the coldest it had been in years at the time we were there. It was beautiful though. I would really like to go back sometime when I can actually enjoy it. I ended up leaving early. However, I did get to experience some of the highlights of the trip. There were two horses and a pony. A dog named wolf and a rambunctious five year old named Storm.
This past week we had assessments for Deborah’s class, the art class. On Thursday we presented our “art of fascination” project. During the semester we hooked up with someone that practiced an art form that we would like to learn more about. I learned collage from Sara G. Other people did dance, voice, creative writing, knitting, etc. We also had a discussion about how “Maps to Ecstasy” effected our learning this semester. That is the book we were asked to read for that class. On Friday we presented our portfolios. Mine consisted on photos and my sketch book. That went pretty well.
The weekend was pretty low key, everyone is kind of stressed about getting work done on time. Yesterday it was pretty warm and I decided to jump into the ocean. It was awesome; it was also very cold. But now I can brag about doing it. Wooooo! I just finished my “internship” I.e. work department in maintenance. I moved sinks and toilets from one room to another. Thrilling. Not exactly what I anticipated.
So, overall, the last few weeks have been good. I can’t believe we only have three weeks left. It went by so fast. I almost don’t want to leave.
photos
Michelle You are beautiful!
Hi Michelle,
You look great!! I just found out about this website. We are praying for your happiness and safety.
It looks so gorgeous there! We are doing great! Love You!!
Uncle Barry, Aunt Kim & Lindsay!
