art of fascination
yesterday was our art of fascination presentations. Matt and i went over to Cullerne and took one of the horses out of the pen and brought him over to the classroom. it was awesome to bring a horse to class! so matt presented about how he had learned about horse comfort with me, and basically stood there with this horse falling asleep next to him for ten minutes and successfully passed the presentation...
spiral dynamics and non violent communication!
today and yesterday were both lovely, yesterday i woke up at Diannes, hopped out of bed and started playing Nathans guitar. we had a guest speaker in davids class speaking about spiral dynamics. really really cool stuff! i loved it.
in the afternoon at Cullerne farm i put in posts and set up chickenwire for pea trellasing. today i woke up at park and had a fried egg before gill’s class on non-violent communication. Leo taugh us about the experience of using NVC and over all it was a lovely happy tear-inducing class. the afternoon at cullerne was taken up with planting baby lettuces. i really enjoyed working with Nelly, the Australian red head! last night bri taught us all how to do Huble excercises and that was pretty interesting. the group had some deep moments together. after huble i wrote a paper on the 5 rhythms and some poetry for Deborah and then went to dianes to play guitar. Tomorrow we have Deborah's art of fascination presentations.
the isle of erraid
we have arrived on erraid, beauty all around.
yesterday was beautiful!
we woke up and had breakfast and went over to the meditation sanctuary and had a lovely meditation. i felt myself rooting deeply into the earth and everytime i opened my eyes there was the blue sea and the rocky islands and the turning gulls flying throught the clear blue sky and the silence of wind and bird song and the roof creaking in the breeze. we picked angel cards and our group card for the week was tenderness. at 12 we all met to begin our walk and we walked up to the highest point on the island then down throug the bog and then across the valley to where seals lay sunbathing on the low rocks. we watched them and they watched us for a while and then we walked up to the steep cliffs over looking balfors bay to hanging rock. there we had lunch. i stole davids chocolates and spent the whole time being vaguely paranoid that someone would fall off the edge.
we all climbed down in to the bottom of the crevice and by shimmying down the rope and over the wet rocks we reached the entrance to a cave. i followed the boys and we used an old candle stub to light our way. we ended up all crowded against the back wall in the silence and flickering candle darkness and matt began a slow ommmm and everyone joined till the darkness was vibrating.when we climbed back out the sun was blinding and we all scrambled up the cliff and rolled in the fresh grass and ate wild mustard greens and then began the long climb over the top to balfors bay. when we reached the beach we all disrobed and ran into the frigid ocean, screaming and blissful. diving under was like a small death.i went under and opened my eyes and the cold drove all thoughts out of my mind except the color of pure blue and the white sand under my toes. it was heaven to rise to the surface and feel my skin burning and alive!
positive energy
on Friday our group cooked a huge dinner for the community. we made falafel's, pita bread, tsatsiki ( or however you spell that greek dish with cucumbers and yogurt), hummus, greek salad with tons of black olives and feta, and brownie cake to top it all off! it was delicious and we were all so pumped to have pulled it together with such team work in such tough circumstances and to have made such great food.
the weekend marked the beginning of "the positive energy conference" a huge week long event that brought 130 (ish) people from all over the world to attend the workshops, engaging in discussions and generally focus together on the issues of climate change, social sustainability, eco-villages, green architecture, and spiritual awareness. so far we've had Joanna Macey talking for two days about mother earth, the great turning, the future, and acknowledging our pain and anger so that we can move on to finding joyful solutions. Richard Olivier (the son of the famous Lawrence Olivier) had a workshop all day yesterday, that used the Shakespearean play "as you like it" to illustrate the archetypal mythological path of characters going from an old system, an old leadership and direction, into the nourishing forest that teaches all the things we have never tried and forces us to question the old way and think about a new way, and then leads us back into the future, well prepared to start a new system. it was really interesting, we even did a little bit of acting ourselves and talked a lot in groups about the characters and the stages of the play and how they relate to our personal lives and to the greater picture of the world as we approach this time of great change.
we will be getting back into our classes after this weekend, and then the week after next we will be leaving findhorn and going to the island of Erraid for a week, to live in the community there and see what kind of sustainability they have to offer. we are all very excited to be going on a group adventure, and can't wait to be a little less stressed out with all this mental activity!
quick update
it's snowing here, yesterday it hailed/snowed, it's funny that it's been so warm and then as soon as spring officially arrived it began to act like winter. the weather is so sporadic, before lunch it was glorious and sunny and we didn't need jackets, now suddenly it's snowing like crazy, probably in the next ten minutes that will stop and it will either be sunny again or start to pour. hah!
we only have 5 weeks left in the program, it seems like time has flown here. the rest of our time here is going to be very busy, with papers, projects and community events all coming to a conclusion at the end of may. meanwhile though, the weather is warming up, leaves are greening, flowers are blooming, birds are up till late at night and start singing at 3 a.m. and the ocean is getting warmer in tiny increments every day (still frigid though!) the community boutique has finally opened and so we all have a wide and wild variety of free clothing to dress up in and i have been taking full advantage of it.
more erraid
Erraid is on the west coast of scotland. it's about one mile square and is mostly comprised of rock, heather, bracken, shells and sheep. we lived in a small row of houses facing the east and the much larger isle of mull. while on Erraid I planted potatoes, cleaned pots and plates, painted window frames, climbed around on the hills and rocks, swam in the icy cold hebridean atlantic ocean, ate wild mustard, herded sheep, got sunburned and wind tussled, bathed in peat water, drank peat water, got drunk on mead made on the nearby Isle of Iona (from whence all of Christianity sprang) danced crazy Scottish dances, cried, laughed, sang, meditated, and watched the glorious sun sink into the ocean every night. on erraid the sky is so huge, i could see the horizon in all directions, there are no electric lights anywhere nearby for miles and miles as it is on the wild coast and there highland mountains and ocean all around, so the only light came from the moon and the stars. the sun goes behind the horizon at 8:30 but it doesn't completely get dark until 10:30 so there are several lovely long hours of greenish pinky twilight with the shadowy islands, the wide sky, the cool wind and the glowing ocean all around. it's so beautiful, hard to describe. i did alot of emotional and physical work on that island, grew and changed, recognized and took responsibility for myself in many ways.
find-tastic
classes have been good, my teachers are interesting, funny, passionate, slightly frustrating, very informative etc. i like them all. i got really excited by my plans for a research project for my eco/sustainability class, i'm planning to research ways in which the MV recycling/trash disposal/ composting process could be improved.
oh, news flash, i switched my work department from the kitchen to the farm, so yesterday and today i spent the afternoons on my hands and knees in the dirt wearing wellington boots and cutting away the rotten bits of green chard plants and giving them loving energy so that they will grow big and green again with the sun and the warmth of spring. i love it, being outside is fantastic (here at findhorn that word is: Find-tastic) .
dancing, reading, thinking, writing
Last week was full of getting to know our teachers, discussing our learning goals, our histories (educational history, personal history) and working out what we will be studying for the next 10 weeks.
. . . the rest of the weekend was devoted to reading our assigned books and writing the first three papers of the semester, short analysis/ opinion essays about the assigned books. that sucked up most of Sunday.
On Monday we had our "World views and Consciousness" class with David, and that was fantastic. on our Friday class with David we had spent half of the class meditating in the sanctuary just to get an introduction to different forms of meditation and on Monday we spent most of the class talking about what consciousness is and how it interacts with and is affected by our own personal world view, as well as how our world views were shaped and formed by our parents and how we think consciousness is related to spirituality.
in the afternoon on Monday we got our work assignments for the next 3 months. i had a strong pull to the gardens, and actually ended up standing on the name of the big food farm here called Cullerne garden, but there was another girl, Eliza, who felt a strong draw to that garden but she had ended up with park kitchen. i swapped with her because she had never worked on a farm or garden and i have. so yesterday afternoon after a morning class with Gill on group dynamics, i went to work in the kitchen slicing carrots, stuffing potatoes, grating cheese in the cheese grating machine (so cool!) and generally enjoying the interesting conversation among the women in the kitchen.
This morning and afternoon were devoted to our "Creativity/ 5 rhythms" class with Deborah. we gathered this morning and worked with movement as a means of expressing and directing our emotional, physical and mental states. she taught us the five rhythms dance form, which was created by a woman named Gabrielle Roth. this form is based on the premise that our movements (and temperaments) can be generally separated into five basic rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. she showed us what each of those look like, and then turned on music that goes with the five rhythms and let us dance our own dance and figure it out for ourselves.
i really really enjoyed this morning's dance, i haven't had a chance to enter fully into a chaotic state since august, and i was starting to feel stifled by my regular flowing pattern. it felt good to go out of my body and at the same time be so completely in my body. my mind was empty, i went through a physical, mental and emotional cleaning and got washed all the way out until i was empty and then filled up again by energy. ooh so good!
tonight i have to read six chapters of really dense material from Ken Wilber's book "A Brief History of Everything" and tomorrow i have to write about it for fridays "world views and consciousness" class. i am not overjoyed by this prospect since i have already tried to read some of his book and have found it incredibly hard to understand and absorb. oh well.
i have been realizing over the last few days that Findhorn isn't really an eco-village. it's a sustainable community in the social context, but as far as eco-sustainability goes, there is still a lot left to be desired. some of the members of the group are dissatisfied with the way this place and the academics of our classes have turned out and it has been interesting to hear what they are saying about it and then look at it from my loose perspective.
classes begin
we finally began our classes today, we had our ecovillage planning and sustainability class this morning with an interesting man named Jonathon who talked about ecological foot printing, the oil peak, ecovillages in general and how we fit into the broader picture of life on this planet.
a very good class with some interesting and thought provoking conversations.
All in all there are many wonderful things happening and we are all getting closer as a group all the time.
hello and more news from this windy peninsula of findhorn magic!
since i last wrote, many wonderful and beautiful things have happened. i will not attempt to remember everything, but here are some images for you (they are not really all in the order of their happening)
visiting Randolfs leap, a gorgeous gorge near findhorn that has a deep, fast brown river running through it, many tall and glorious huge old trees, lots of green moss everywhere and a feeling of magic in the rocks. we went as a group and spent the afternoon wondering around on our own, communing with nature and exploring in silence. i spent my time getting to know a few trees and having some lovely " conversations" with them. they each had advice and words of wisdom for me, from the perspective of a tree, but directed for human learning.
each night this week we've had a guest speaker come in and talk to us, one spoke about inner life and was very inspiring, another about nature and spirituality and she was very sweet and mysterious, a third spoke about management and the foundation structure of the management at findhorn and another spoke about group consensus and group building skills. all of them have been very interesting. one of the coolest things about this place is that at the beginning and end of every activity we attune to the group energy and the activity at hand by holding hands in a circle, closing our eyes and taking a moment to arrive where we are and leave behind whatever we were just doing. we also do alot of sharing, before work in the mornings we attune, and share about how we are feeling. before our group sessions and at the ends also we attune and share how our days have gone, what's happening internally and how we feel about everything. this process has been really invaluable because so often i forget that others are in different spaces than me and that they don't feel the same as i do. it's really nice to hear how everyone is doing on the inside.
today i went for a walk in the dunes, there is lots of gorse here, a moonscape of gorse bushes, very sharp and prickly and then i went into the dunes and stood on the top of the highest one and let the wind almost lift me off the ground with its force and the sand was flying all around me and the sky was sooo blue and high and all around and the sea was full of waves and the mountains in the distance across the ocean looked Mediterranean and i felt like i could fly! i wrote some poems today.
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art of fascination
yesterday was our art of fascination presentations. Matt and i went over to Cullerne and took one of the horses out of the pen and brought him over to the classroom. it was awesome to bring a horse to class! so matt presented about how he had learned about horse comfort with me, and basically stood there with this horse falling asleep next to him for ten minutes and successfully passed the presentation...
spiral dynamics and non violent communication!
today and yesterday were both lovely, yesterday i woke up at Diannes, hopped out of bed and started playing Nathans guitar. we had a guest speaker in davids class speaking about spiral dynamics. really really cool stuff! i loved it.
in the afternoon at Cullerne farm i put in posts and set up chickenwire for pea trellasing. today i woke up at park and had a fried egg before gill’s class on non-violent communication. Leo taugh us about the experience of using NVC and over all it was a lovely happy tear-inducing class. the afternoon at cullerne was taken up with planting baby lettuces. i really enjoyed working with Nelly, the Australian red head! last night bri taught us all how to do Huble excercises and that was pretty interesting. the group had some deep moments together. after huble i wrote a paper on the 5 rhythms and some poetry for Deborah and then went to dianes to play guitar. Tomorrow we have Deborah's art of fascination presentations.
the isle of erraid
we have arrived on erraid, beauty all around.
yesterday was beautiful!
we woke up and had breakfast and went over to the meditation sanctuary and had a lovely meditation. i felt myself rooting deeply into the earth and everytime i opened my eyes there was the blue sea and the rocky islands and the turning gulls flying throught the clear blue sky and the silence of wind and bird song and the roof creaking in the breeze. we picked angel cards and our group card for the week was tenderness. at 12 we all met to begin our walk and we walked up to the highest point on the island then down throug the bog and then across the valley to where seals lay sunbathing on the low rocks. we watched them and they watched us for a while and then we walked up to the steep cliffs over looking balfors bay to hanging rock. there we had lunch. i stole davids chocolates and spent the whole time being vaguely paranoid that someone would fall off the edge.
we all climbed down in to the bottom of the crevice and by shimmying down the rope and over the wet rocks we reached the entrance to a cave. i followed the boys and we used an old candle stub to light our way. we ended up all crowded against the back wall in the silence and flickering candle darkness and matt began a slow ommmm and everyone joined till the darkness was vibrating.when we climbed back out the sun was blinding and we all scrambled up the cliff and rolled in the fresh grass and ate wild mustard greens and then began the long climb over the top to balfors bay. when we reached the beach we all disrobed and ran into the frigid ocean, screaming and blissful. diving under was like a small death.i went under and opened my eyes and the cold drove all thoughts out of my mind except the color of pure blue and the white sand under my toes. it was heaven to rise to the surface and feel my skin burning and alive!
positive energy
on Friday our group cooked a huge dinner for the community. we made falafel's, pita bread, tsatsiki ( or however you spell that greek dish with cucumbers and yogurt), hummus, greek salad with tons of black olives and feta, and brownie cake to top it all off! it was delicious and we were all so pumped to have pulled it together with such team work in such tough circumstances and to have made such great food.
the weekend marked the beginning of "the positive energy conference" a huge week long event that brought 130 (ish) people from all over the world to attend the workshops, engaging in discussions and generally focus together on the issues of climate change, social sustainability, eco-villages, green architecture, and spiritual awareness. so far we've had Joanna Macey talking for two days about mother earth, the great turning, the future, and acknowledging our pain and anger so that we can move on to finding joyful solutions. Richard Olivier (the son of the famous Lawrence Olivier) had a workshop all day yesterday, that used the Shakespearean play "as you like it" to illustrate the archetypal mythological path of characters going from an old system, an old leadership and direction, into the nourishing forest that teaches all the things we have never tried and forces us to question the old way and think about a new way, and then leads us back into the future, well prepared to start a new system. it was really interesting, we even did a little bit of acting ourselves and talked a lot in groups about the characters and the stages of the play and how they relate to our personal lives and to the greater picture of the world as we approach this time of great change.
we will be getting back into our classes after this weekend, and then the week after next we will be leaving findhorn and going to the island of Erraid for a week, to live in the community there and see what kind of sustainability they have to offer. we are all very excited to be going on a group adventure, and can't wait to be a little less stressed out with all this mental activity!
quick update
it's snowing here, yesterday it hailed/snowed, it's funny that it's been so warm and then as soon as spring officially arrived it began to act like winter. the weather is so sporadic, before lunch it was glorious and sunny and we didn't need jackets, now suddenly it's snowing like crazy, probably in the next ten minutes that will stop and it will either be sunny again or start to pour. hah!
we only have 5 weeks left in the program, it seems like time has flown here. the rest of our time here is going to be very busy, with papers, projects and community events all coming to a conclusion at the end of may. meanwhile though, the weather is warming up, leaves are greening, flowers are blooming, birds are up till late at night and start singing at 3 a.m. and the ocean is getting warmer in tiny increments every day (still frigid though!) the community boutique has finally opened and so we all have a wide and wild variety of free clothing to dress up in and i have been taking full advantage of it.
more erraid
Erraid is on the west coast of scotland. it's about one mile square and is mostly comprised of rock, heather, bracken, shells and sheep. we lived in a small row of houses facing the east and the much larger isle of mull. while on Erraid I planted potatoes, cleaned pots and plates, painted window frames, climbed around on the hills and rocks, swam in the icy cold hebridean atlantic ocean, ate wild mustard, herded sheep, got sunburned and wind tussled, bathed in peat water, drank peat water, got drunk on mead made on the nearby Isle of Iona (from whence all of Christianity sprang) danced crazy Scottish dances, cried, laughed, sang, meditated, and watched the glorious sun sink into the ocean every night. on erraid the sky is so huge, i could see the horizon in all directions, there are no electric lights anywhere nearby for miles and miles as it is on the wild coast and there highland mountains and ocean all around, so the only light came from the moon and the stars. the sun goes behind the horizon at 8:30 but it doesn't completely get dark until 10:30 so there are several lovely long hours of greenish pinky twilight with the shadowy islands, the wide sky, the cool wind and the glowing ocean all around. it's so beautiful, hard to describe. i did alot of emotional and physical work on that island, grew and changed, recognized and took responsibility for myself in many ways.
find-tastic
classes have been good, my teachers are interesting, funny, passionate, slightly frustrating, very informative etc. i like them all. i got really excited by my plans for a research project for my eco/sustainability class, i'm planning to research ways in which the MV recycling/trash disposal/ composting process could be improved.
oh, news flash, i switched my work department from the kitchen to the farm, so yesterday and today i spent the afternoons on my hands and knees in the dirt wearing wellington boots and cutting away the rotten bits of green chard plants and giving them loving energy so that they will grow big and green again with the sun and the warmth of spring. i love it, being outside is fantastic (here at findhorn that word is: Find-tastic) .
dancing, reading, thinking, writing
Last week was full of getting to know our teachers, discussing our learning goals, our histories (educational history, personal history) and working out what we will be studying for the next 10 weeks.
. . . the rest of the weekend was devoted to reading our assigned books and writing the first three papers of the semester, short analysis/ opinion essays about the assigned books. that sucked up most of Sunday.
On Monday we had our "World views and Consciousness" class with David, and that was fantastic. on our Friday class with David we had spent half of the class meditating in the sanctuary just to get an introduction to different forms of meditation and on Monday we spent most of the class talking about what consciousness is and how it interacts with and is affected by our own personal world view, as well as how our world views were shaped and formed by our parents and how we think consciousness is related to spirituality.
in the afternoon on Monday we got our work assignments for the next 3 months. i had a strong pull to the gardens, and actually ended up standing on the name of the big food farm here called Cullerne garden, but there was another girl, Eliza, who felt a strong draw to that garden but she had ended up with park kitchen. i swapped with her because she had never worked on a farm or garden and i have. so yesterday afternoon after a morning class with Gill on group dynamics, i went to work in the kitchen slicing carrots, stuffing potatoes, grating cheese in the cheese grating machine (so cool!) and generally enjoying the interesting conversation among the women in the kitchen.
This morning and afternoon were devoted to our "Creativity/ 5 rhythms" class with Deborah. we gathered this morning and worked with movement as a means of expressing and directing our emotional, physical and mental states. she taught us the five rhythms dance form, which was created by a woman named Gabrielle Roth. this form is based on the premise that our movements (and temperaments) can be generally separated into five basic rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. she showed us what each of those look like, and then turned on music that goes with the five rhythms and let us dance our own dance and figure it out for ourselves.
i really really enjoyed this morning's dance, i haven't had a chance to enter fully into a chaotic state since august, and i was starting to feel stifled by my regular flowing pattern. it felt good to go out of my body and at the same time be so completely in my body. my mind was empty, i went through a physical, mental and emotional cleaning and got washed all the way out until i was empty and then filled up again by energy. ooh so good!
tonight i have to read six chapters of really dense material from Ken Wilber's book "A Brief History of Everything" and tomorrow i have to write about it for fridays "world views and consciousness" class. i am not overjoyed by this prospect since i have already tried to read some of his book and have found it incredibly hard to understand and absorb. oh well.
i have been realizing over the last few days that Findhorn isn't really an eco-village. it's a sustainable community in the social context, but as far as eco-sustainability goes, there is still a lot left to be desired. some of the members of the group are dissatisfied with the way this place and the academics of our classes have turned out and it has been interesting to hear what they are saying about it and then look at it from my loose perspective.
classes begin
we finally began our classes today, we had our ecovillage planning and sustainability class this morning with an interesting man named Jonathon who talked about ecological foot printing, the oil peak, ecovillages in general and how we fit into the broader picture of life on this planet.
a very good class with some interesting and thought provoking conversations.
All in all there are many wonderful things happening and we are all getting closer as a group all the time.
hello and more news from this windy peninsula of findhorn magic!
since i last wrote, many wonderful and beautiful things have happened. i will not attempt to remember everything, but here are some images for you (they are not really all in the order of their happening)
visiting Randolfs leap, a gorgeous gorge near findhorn that has a deep, fast brown river running through it, many tall and glorious huge old trees, lots of green moss everywhere and a feeling of magic in the rocks. we went as a group and spent the afternoon wondering around on our own, communing with nature and exploring in silence. i spent my time getting to know a few trees and having some lovely " conversations" with them. they each had advice and words of wisdom for me, from the perspective of a tree, but directed for human learning.
each night this week we've had a guest speaker come in and talk to us, one spoke about inner life and was very inspiring, another about nature and spirituality and she was very sweet and mysterious, a third spoke about management and the foundation structure of the management at findhorn and another spoke about group consensus and group building skills. all of them have been very interesting. one of the coolest things about this place is that at the beginning and end of every activity we attune to the group energy and the activity at hand by holding hands in a circle, closing our eyes and taking a moment to arrive where we are and leave behind whatever we were just doing. we also do alot of sharing, before work in the mornings we attune, and share about how we are feeling. before our group sessions and at the ends also we attune and share how our days have gone, what's happening internally and how we feel about everything. this process has been really invaluable because so often i forget that others are in different spaces than me and that they don't feel the same as i do. it's really nice to hear how everyone is doing on the inside.
today i went for a walk in the dunes, there is lots of gorse here, a moonscape of gorse bushes, very sharp and prickly and then i went into the dunes and stood on the top of the highest one and let the wind almost lift me off the ground with its force and the sand was flying all around me and the sky was sooo blue and high and all around and the sea was full of waves and the mountains in the distance across the ocean looked Mediterranean and i felt like i could fly! i wrote some poems today.
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