In 1983 in a lesbian bar in Munich I listened to a friend who had just returned from Findhorn. Despite it being a ‘straight’ community she’d had a wonderful experience. I came away with a strong sense of needing to visit this place, not knowing why – or when. My girlfriend had a dog, so travelling to Scotland was not an option for us due to the quarantine regulations. When she left me in November 1986 and drove away for the last time from my house, I felt a deep sadness yet there was the thought, loud and clear, ‘now I can go to Findhorn!’.

In July 1987, when I was 28, I arrived at The Park. I stayed on the caravan site as there hadn’t been space in the Experience Week for me. I did the short-term guest programme and worked in the Apothecary, one of the first ‘independent’ businesses. It was located in the toilet block where Eileen used to meditate. I learned about the Community expanding around the Findhorn Foundation and sensed the pain caused by a lack of integration between the Community and the Foundation. In miraculous ways a space opened up for me in Experience Week and I moved to Cluny for the week – and it felt like coming home.

After a wonderful Summer, not only in the Community but also on a short road trip through the Highlands, I came away with a deep sense of gratitude of having found ‘It’. I had been searching for ‘It’ for many years, in many ways, without knowing what ‘It’ really was. Now I knew, ‘It’ was experiencing Spirit in community, a life of living a shared spirituality on a daily basis.

Healing the Cause 1987 photo Findhorn Foundation

Healing the Cause 1987 photo Findhorn Foundation

The last workshop I attended was Healing the Cause with Michael Dawson and Karin Werner. It was a powerful experience which bridged my vocation as medical doctor to the spiritual dimensions of healing. I was deeply grateful for this sense of wholeness in an area of my life which was so central to my identity. I was ready to go back home.

I went back to Germany to complete the final requirements to be able to work as a GP. I had found a post in a wonderful practice. After a short time, I was offered to join the practice as a partner. It represented everything I had dreamt of for years. However, throughout the few months there, I often walked the corridors of Cluny in my dreams. In the evening when I relaxed by the fire knitting a colourful woollen coat I found myself asking the question ‘Will I wear this in Findhorn?’. The call was strong and I put it to the test in many different ways. After all, I was in the perfect situation to fulfil the vocation I had been guided to and worked hard for, since I was 10 years old. I had a sense of abundance, being spoilt for choice with two ‘golden’ paths ahead of me. I chose Findhorn, because of the great joy of having found ‘It’, living a life where spirit is expressed openly with others, in all ways big and small. I saw myself doing the 2-year membership programme and then coming back to Germany to work as a GP.

1988 Orientation group photo Findhorn Foundation

1988 Orientation group photo Findhorn Foundation

I returned to Cluny in February 1988, worked in the garden, did Orientation and became a Member, working in Cluny kitchen. I enjoyed the intensity and simplicity of a life that felt almost monastic to me. After the first year, other members would ask me “What would make you stay?”, and the answer that arose was “If I find a work situation where all my gifts can be expressed, or if I have a child.” Within weeks of having said this, I was offered to focalise the Health and Wholeness department at Cluny, and I started a relationship with Alan Watson, with whom I eventually had the joy of creating a family with Kevin, our son.

Alan and I left Cluny and moved to The Park in 1990 and my work with Health and Wholeness continued to expand. I had the joy of working in a wonderful team.

In 1992 the Findhorn Foundation’s leadership made the decision to limit their focus to adult education and asked several departments to ‘go independent’. This included Alan’s work with Trees for Life and mine with holistic health care. I personally was saddened by this move as I saw the gap, a sense of ‘them and us’, between the Foundation and the Community. I made a passionate plea to the Foundation leadership and members to remember that they had asked me to ‘go independent’, stating that I continued to feel as ‘one of us’. Sadly within a year I felt treated like ‘one of them’ and over the years the lack of integration of the Foundation in the Community continued despite passionate appeals from many, including Eileen Caddy who always called for unity.

In the early 1990s it was still normal in our international spiritual working community that members would leave, if they couldn’t ‘pull their weight’. When some of our wonderful elders went back to their families/countries I felt the loss acutely on a personal level yet also sensed that the Community was losing out by not embracing the whole spectrum of life, from cradle to grave. Soon we were presented with opportunities to grow into this, starting with Eileen Caddy’s decisive wish to look after her best friend Joanie Hartnell-Beavis in the last months of her life in 1996. In the Holistic Health Centre (as it was now called) we set up a strong team of volunteers to look after Joanie. When the time came and we had to pay for professional nursing services at home, Eileen sent an appeal to the worldwide community. She raised so much money, that there was some left over which seeded the Community Care Fund. This fund continues to this day to support looking after our own in the Community. Over the years we as a community developed many skills and infrastructures which support people in all stages of life. This includes the Caring Community Circle with its coordinator (a paid post since 2020) and volunteers, strong rituals to mark the different passages of life, and a Green Burial Ground on the Hinterland.

For myself, the vision of living in a community that supported the whole spectrum of life expressed itself in different ways over the decades.

In the 90s, the integration of health care in the Community with the services provided by the NHS and social care was a major focus, as well as the partnership between orthodox and complementary medicine. I was part of a team organising international conferences at Findhorn around the theme of Medical Marriage, the Healing Power of Community and Conscious Living Conscious Dying. Also a group of complementary practitioners formed and started working together in different ways. This included creating a Code of Ethics and Practice for therapists in the Community as well as setting up a multidisciplinary complementary health centre, HealthWorks in Forres.

At the same time, I supported Alan with his work in Trees for Life and was nourished by our strong connection to nature and the land, both in our garden at home, as well as out in the Caledonian forest, and of course through our wonderful travels to many wilderness areas on our beautiful planet.

Through raising Kevin we were engaged initially in the Moray Steiner School and then in the local state school system. The joy, privilege, and profound challenge of being a parent was another powerful course in the mystery school. A primary school teacher who met Kevin when he was 4, walking the 65km Overland Track in Tasmania, said “I have met many children who were loved by their family, but this child is different, he knows that he is loved by many.” This summarised beautifully my sense that it takes a village to raise a child, and that the Community had given Kevin and us that support.

Then there came the inner call that I was to ‘go back to practicing medicine’. I always had hoped that I could be the GP for the Community, but that was not to be, as it was too big a stretch for the local health centre to employ one of the ‘hippies’. Instead I had the joy of being part of two NHS practices, initially in Lossiemouth and later on as a partner in Nairn. After 10 years, this was cut short by my developing ‘post viral syndrome’ after a ‘flu.

I came to understand that I was given a ‘second incarnation in the same body’ and another chapter in the mystery school unfolded. I had the pleasure of being a fulltime mum for Kevin during his last 4 years at home before leaving to go to university. It also allowed me to look after my mother in Munich during her end-of-life journey. In all this I had to find a different way of operating, as certain limitations meant that I could no longer rely on powering my way through challenges.

The theme of a whole spectrum community led me to being involved in developing affordable housing at The Park. Providing housing for families, elders and members of the Community who serve often with only minimum wage, is crucial for a greater social sustainability. Initially I was involved with Duneland Ltd who had bought the Wilkie Estate in 1997, and later on with the Park Ecovillage Trust that looks after community-owned affordable homes. During an event in 2015 I found myself saying that I was working to help create the community I wanted to live and die in. This indeed summarises the drive behind all my different endeavours over the past 3+ decades.

In 2015/6 I went on a sabbatical and lived for five months in the Adelaide Hills. I was really open to leaving the Community and finding a new calling. I had a wonderful time, living on the site of a budding co-housing project (Miller’s Corner in Mt Barker) and researching a couple of ecovillages (Christie Walk and Aldinga Arts Ecovillage), finding my voice in a choir and making lots of friends, many with links to the Community here at Findhorn. I could have settled there, until one morning I got the clear message: a friend had posted this video by Dougie Maclean on Facebook – and it called me home – to Caledonia, to the Community, to Scotland.

Sylvia and Cornelia photo by Katherine Collis

Now I live with my new wife, Sylvia, in a beautifully remodelled Caledonia which we co-created as our joint home, suitable for us to age-in-place. We continue to volunteer in the Caring Community Circle, and support people with end-of-life planning to get their ‘house in order’, so that they can get on with enjoying life to the full.

Since the murder of George Floyd our eyes have been opened to the need to expand the whole spectrum of life beyond our white-centred comfort zone. I feel once again at the entry level of yet another course in the mystery school.

The call to live spirituality in community on a daily basis is still the same one but the scale changes as I start to understand that my personal practice is relevant on so many levels. These levels not only include the local and global ones, but also the subtle levels where I recognise that my community reaches way beyond the present and the seen.

This is a time of crisis, not only because of the pandemic, the economic repercussions, the social injustice, the collapse of our biodiversity and the climate emergency – it is a crisis caused by our delusion of being separate – separate from each other, separate from nature, separate from God/the Divine/Spirit.

To answer the call of our times, I continue to actualise my part in making a difference, of bringing ‘Heaven to Earth’. The place where I can see myself doing this best is as part of One Incredible Family, where shared spirituality is normal daily fare, where the pain of exclusion is met with reverent inclusion, where togetherness is valued above agreement.

As I write this, Pupak, Alan’s new wife, is making a stain glass window for our entrance door at Caledonia. The defining symbol Sylvia and I have chosen is the vesica pisces – the two overlapping circles where in the middle the new emerges, where heaven and earth meet. At the same time Kevin gets ready to move to Munich to take up a post in an inspiring electric vehicle company where he wants to be part of the solution rather than the problem. Circles within circles … what a wonderful life … the mystery school continues.

Cornelia Featherstone (2022)