This article was previously published in Network News Issue 1 Autumn 1994 and is transcribed from an interview with John Talbott.

I have always seen the Findhorn Community’s relationship with spirit and nature – the things that people associate with this centre like Eileen’s guidance and communication with the inner worlds of nature – as the two fundamental foundations of this place. Cooperation with nature and cooperation with spirit.

When I first came to live here in 1980 I felt that the original inspiration around these themes was still strong, but the way we expressed and worked with them had run out of steam, and we were asking what was next: how are we relevant for the 80s. That was when the idea for the “planetary village” landed. The term was first used by David Spangler as a generic term to express the concept of how we can live together in harmony with nature and with ourselves, having our needs met while not depleting the rest of the planet. It was a continuation of the theme that Dorothy Maclean started here, of forming a conscious link with nature and getting instruction on how to work cooperatively. After doing this in the garden and producing the forty pound cabbages, we eventually needed to see that the next step is to bring it home right where we live, in our daily lives, through our composting, energy consumption, the way our buildings look in the landscape, the beauty they create, and the way they are a part of the whole.

We did a conference called “Building a Planetary Village”. At that point in the 1980s we owed the bank half a million dollars, we didn’t own any of the land we were talking about building the village on, the community had dropped from 300 to 170 members in less than two years –  we were in the middle of a huge contraction, a crisis. Then we did the conference and it gave us the vision of where we needed to go. Now, thirteen years later, we’re doing it. We have become that vision.

Granted, we are still at the beginning stages of it, we have only built fifteen houses and put up one windmill, but we have also paid off the land and essentially have no more debt. We are at a point right now that is similar in some ways to where we were in the 80s. We are having a little bit of financial difficulty – by no means a crisis like it was in 80s when we all prayed in the Hall that we would make it through the winter! –  but we need now to take the next step, as we did then. At that time, instead of getting fearful, our vision got bigger and we went for it. I think that’s what we need to do now, to really reaffirm that the impulse of the vibrant garden is moving into being a vibrant village.

Dorothy herself says that the work she did at the beginning was only embryonic, only the beginning of what was possible. R Ogilvie Crombie (ROC) said too that when we do the work of linking with nature, anything is possible; nature will reach out with us. He was right. I experienced it with the windmill – in its first year we had 50% more wind!

The vision began to become reality in 1990 when we started to build seven houses. In October 1995 we will have a conference called “Eco-Villages: Models for Sustainable Living in the 21st Century” and we will have a special Open Day this autumn where we will be promoting the idea of eco-villages. Although we are just at the beginning, we already are an eco- village. The world looks at us and says, “Findhorn’s really doing it!”

When we first started to do the Bag End cluster of houses I thought people would be delighted to help it happen, but I think that often when dreams are finally there in physical form, it can be disappointing. When a dream is up in the sky we can dream about anything we like. But as it comes down to earth it has to become more focused and more do-able, something we can achieve. Some of the reactions to the Bag End houses, which are more conventionally designed – and done that way very consciously – is that they are not how people would have imagined them to be. They imagined them to be round, or weird or wonderful with totally new architecture.

I like these ordinary-looking buildings. The reason we decided to go with pitched roofs, rectangular design is that we had just built the first barrel and the Community Centre extension, both of which were round and took a very long time to build. We needed to find a system that was easier and faster to build, because at the rate we were going we would be finished building the village sometime in the next few hundred years. We knew caravans wouldn’t last that long. A surprise reaction to these houses has been that they are something ordinary people can relate to: “So that’s an ecological house, they’re really simple aren’t they, and attractive! I could live in one of those.” The “general public” love to look at the barrels and think they’re a fun idea, but don’t really relate or feel like they could live in one. So the Bag End houses have also acted as a bridge.

Our next steps are to set up a housing company. In the past, people who wanted to build here have not been able to get conventional mortgages and have had to gather all of the capital themselves. That situation has severely limited what we could do. The Foundation itself cannot afford to build the number of houses that are needed, so we need to find a way to help individuals to build houses here. The housing company will allow more people who have some income, but not necessarily the whole amount needed to build a house, to be able to go to the bank and get an ordinary mortgage.

There will be some conditions on building here, so that we tie in each house site with the whole development. Our aim is to have one real village and not be subdivided into a little suburban type of living arrangement. People who build here will have some connection to the Community. The housing company will be administered by NFD (New Findhorn Directions) and it will be the intention of the company to buy back the property when someone leaves so that we can have some control over who comes here to live. We don’t want to open it totally to a free market where someone with no connection to the Community can just come here to live. We are trying to balance individual freedom, creativity and the need for security with the need for harmony for the whole and the sense of shared community.

The next really big project we are working on is a natural sewage treatment plant. We will be working with John Todd, who is the founder of New Alchemy Institute which works with combining biology and alternative technology. He is the originator of the solar aquatic sewage treatment system and has visited the Community many times. It is important that we work on purifying the water of this planet, especially the water we make dirty. The system we want to use will actually make the water cleaner than it was before we used it.

The living machine system John has designed is a greenhouse that has been divided into sections which are actually mini- ecosystems brimming with bacteria, algae and plants. These act in different stages of the waste stream to purify the water. In the first sections there is a lot of anaerobic activity, bacteria breaking down the solids and the sewage to make it a more palatable nutrient for the next ecosystem that is a little higher and more refined. The plants thrive and grow and can then be used for composting while the toxic materials they have absorbed are dispersed, making them harmless. In the last part of the cycle the ecosystem can even include fish living in the water.

Our normal sewage water goes right into Findhorn Bay after passing through a treatment plant at Kinloss, but sometimes, for instance when there is a storm, raw sewage can pass directly into the bay. This is so important in this area because we have a dolphin population living in the Moray Firth—our dolphin population is one of only two sites in the UK. The conventional sewage treatment systems don’t work as well as we would like and conventional systems are very expensive, whereas “living machines” are far less expensive and more reliable. We would love to have our treatment plant up and running by the time our “Eco-Village” conference opens in October of 1995. Also, by the end of this year our windmill will have paid for itself through the money we have saved in electricity costs. Moya (the windmill) now provides 20% of our electricity and we would like to start raising the funds to buy another one.

Even if we have done just a small amount of building, it seems like a lot, especially when we consider how our Building Schools came into being and how our Building Department grew. The department is still fairly tenuous, not as solid an entity as some us would like it to be, but the houses we have produced are real miracles. They are miracles because of how we managed to build them – with love, trust, our limited skill level of voluntary labour. They are our “forty pound cabbages” of the 90s.

What we are doing is also inspiring for other people: we are walking our talk. All the houses, the windmill, the extensive recycling, the gardens that continue to be vibrant and alive, the sewage treatment plant that we plan to build are wonderful, but what is really exciting is that we are showing that all these things are do-able. If we can do them then anyone can.

Now seems to be a time when as a Community we need to remind ourselves of our deep connection with nature and remember why we are building these new buildings—it is not just because we would like to replace all our old caravans. We are not just building some nice houses when really we are an education centre. We are a teaching centre, and a spiritual centre, but that is much bigger than just a place that runs workshops and teaches people about meditation or how to live “spiritually”. What makes the Findhorn Community unique is its demonstration aspect. We practise a new consciousness by living it out every day and expressing it in our physical environment.

We have always had tension around the question: “Are we a community or an educational centre?” I think the answer is that we are a spiritual centre with a community around it and an education programme around it. The impulse here is towards developing a model for living in harmony with ourselves and with nature, with a new consciousness, in a way that really supports the planet and interferes less with the planet’s own life support systems. I think that as a community we are in the middle of a wake-up call, a remembrance that we have a higher purpose to fulfil.

“A surprise reaction to
 these houses has been
that they are something
ordinary people can relate to….”