When I arrived at Findhorn in the late summer of 1970, two things were immediately apparent. The first was that something powerful and significant was taking place on the sandy soil sandwiched between Findhorn Bay and the Moray Firth and between an RAF base and a fishing village.  I could feel the energy of the place, and it felt vital and creative, like no place I had been before.

Feeling this led to the second thing.  Before I had left the United States, where I had been lecturing and teaching since 1965, I had been told by my subtle colleague, “John,” that my next cycle of work would be outside the country, working with an energy field that I would recognize when I saw it.  Indeed, he showed me exactly what this energy field would look like and feel like when I encountered it.  This was the equivalent in physical terms like being told to look for the place where two rivers flow together.  You don’t know just where that place is, but you’ll know it when you see it.

When Peter Caddy drove me into the community from the Forres train station that first day, I knew it when I saw it.

The creative and inspirational energy I felt at Findhorn the first week I was there was unique, shaped by the place and its history, but behind it was a larger field with which I was very familiar.  Although I had felt it now and again throughout my childhood, it presented itself to me in a direct way when I was seventeen. I knew then that my life’s work would be involved with this energy field in some manner.  I also knew that I was not the only one so involved. I was taking part in an invisible community of people around the globe who were also serving this planetary field of spiritual energy.

Although people have given many names to this planetary field depending on their background and tradition—the New Age, Christ Consciousness, the Buddhafield, the emerging Gaian Consciousness, and so on—I have always thought of it simply as a spiritual impulse seeking to awaken humanity to its (and the world’s) sacred nature and to empower partnership between the invisible and visible worlds to bring a more holistic and harmonious world into being.

It’s the Big Loving Mojo.

My first week at Findhorn, I recognized that, with its emphasis on partnership with the angelic and Devic realms of nature as well as with the nature spirits, and its striving to create a nondenominational and spirit-enhancing community based on love in action, Findhorn was at the cutting edge of this impulse.

I still feel this today, fifty-three years later.

This brings me to what is happening now with the Foundation and the Community, both of which have grown out of the efforts so many people over the sixty-plus years since the Caddys and Dorothy Maclean pulled their caravan into the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park.

When I heard that the Findhorn Foundation was closing down and ceasing its educational and other activities due to financial circumstances, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.  There was an acute sense of loss and bewilderment. Although I’ve not participated much in the Community’s or the Foundation’s activities in recent years, I’ve always felt a deep, familial tie to Findhorn (not to mention that many of my ancestors are Scottish, as well).  It was part of my life.  Now, it seemed at first, it no longer was.  I grieved.  I wandered around the house (no one else was here at the time), not quite sure what to do next.  So, I did a very British thing: I sat down with a hot cup of tea!  I just let the feelings of loss move through me without obstruction or denial, remembering and celebrating in my heart the Findhorn that I knew when I lived there and knew over the years when Julie and I and our children visited.

I calmed down.

I opened up to that inner space of spirit that is always there in each of us, a place of stillness and poise…and love.

In that place, I knew that, in spite of the news or surface appearances, nothing had changed.  To quote a voice familiar to all “Findhornians,” all was “very, very well.”

To explain this, I need to go back to my story of the planetary energy I felt overlighting Findhorn when I arrived, an energy I had felt overlighting my own work in California before I made the trip to Scotland.  There is an angelic quality to this energy, not tied down to place or person but free to manifest in a variety of ways appropriate to many different people and different places.  When I arrived at Findhorn, it was like here, in this specific place, there was a specific portal being created through which this angelic, spiritual, sacred energy could flow into humanity and into the world at large.

I attended a conference once back in the Sixties that was very draining on all of us who were speakers.  I forget now why this was so, but what I remember clearly was a medical doctor giving all of us who wished it a vitamin shot to give us a quick burst of energy.  In a way, that’s what I felt about Findhorn in the beginning: it was a slim, sharp needle through which a potent dose of spiritual energy could be injected into the collective body of humanity.  As such, it was a powerful and effective tool, but its point of entry was tiny.

However, getting one’s vitamins through a needle is both limiting and not very holistic!  At some point, the vitamins need to enter our body through a wide variety of means, such as through our diets, our lifestyles, and so on.  Our body needs a steady foundation of vitamins, not just a shot now and then.
The same is true for the collective body of humanity.  Having an injection of holistic spiritual energy of the kind Findhorn initially provided is good for what it is, but ultimately, it’s insufficient.  Something broader and more supportive is needed.  And this is exactly what Findhorn has been creating over the years through all the people who came to the community, absorbed its energies, and then became sources of that spiritual impulse in their own corners of the world in their own unique ways.

Findhorn has created a global community.  Findhorn is as much a spirit, a way of understanding and being in the world, as it is a place, important as that place has been and will continue to be.  What started as a needle prick in an obscure corner of Scotland is now present as a vitamin-rich food source present around the world in the lives of thousands, perhaps millions, of people.  The angelic impulse has spread itself out so that the Earth can be its place, humanity its emerging community.

The Foundation has been the syringe (to exhaust this metaphor!), but it is not and never has been the actual source of vitamins.  It’s been a wonderful delivery system, but what it delivers is larger and grander, and more universal than it can ever be, even if it were functioning at optimal financial and organizational health.  The transition of the Foundation into something new doesn’t change the reality that the spirit of Findhorn is still present and still emerging.  It does so in the lives of all who understand the kind of person that the Findhorn spirit tells us we are and who embody that understanding in their own engagements with the world.

Once I had drunk my tea and the initial wave of grief had passed, I could clearly see that from the perspective of the subtle worlds, the angel of Findhorn, the spirit of Findhorn, is alive, well, and as dynamic and eager as ever to be a change agent in the world.  Yes, the loss of the Foundation is going to further disrupt people’s lives and livelihood, just as the fires and the pandemic have done; on a human level, this is tragic. There is hardship.  As Terry said in his letter and in his talk to the community, this is a time for compassion and helping hands.  Change is rarely easy and often comes at a cost. We are all living in a time when resilience and mutual assistance are becoming vital human skills, as surely as they are in the subtle realms where love is the guiding principle.

Findhorn was a thriving, exciting, inspirational, and creative community before the Foundation came into existence, and it is the same now. It possesses the same ability to respond to spirit and to forge meaningful ways of expressing its vision appropriate to its changing nature and the changing conditions of the world.

The planetary spirit of hope and new vision, of love and partnership with the world, is still part of the community.  But now, it has spread out in blessing from this tiny bit of sandy duneland on the bank of the Findhorn Bay.  The world is enriched by it.  Findhorn has been a resounding success.  It will continue to be so as long as those who embody its vision choose to make it so.

Let the word go forth:  Findhorn Strong!

Blessings,
David