“The Art of dance is a symbol for the law that everything passes. When the dance is over you have nothing to hold onto except what remains in your memory in your body and mind.”
Bernard Wosien.
Craig, Peter Christmas dinner cooks
Around this time, the late middle ’70s as our work had taken on a good bit of polish and professionalism, Peter suggested the core group of Performing Arts go on the road for a tour of Europe, promoting the work of the community by giving talks, workshops, slide shows and performances. So began an exciting and intense time of rehearsing and planning a month-long tour of France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Holland ending in Naarden at a lovely Conference Centre with three hundred participants. We had the use of the new fifteen-seater ford transit bus and there were six of us with several languages between us. Ian, Michael, Francoise, myself, Lynn and Kristin. Some of the sketches were in German and French but mostly we relied on a good bit of mime, good will, visuals and some music, the main thrust being the wish to share about life in an intentional spiritual community.
I created a rather ambitious dance piece on the theme of transformation and Ian, one of our Blackpool gardeners, a gifted pianist, keyboard player and composer accompanied me with a vivid piece of music he’d created entitled ‘Winter’, inspired by his own experience of an ‘emergence’; Crispin provided the slides used as a backdrop, ice and snow and nature, moving into Spring through the onslaughts of Winter.
family pic photo
We had a new highly talented member on our team, Lynn, an exuberant actress and fabulous singer had just completed a season in the leading role of ‘Godspell’, the stage version, in Washington D.C. There was a good bit of light hearted stuff and I was now pretty good at comedy, being able to make people laugh and I enjoyed it. Some of our material was on the theme of men, women, relationships and sprang out of my everyday life with Michael and the girls. We would find ourselves ad-libbing some ‘charged’ situation over some domestic issue, that has a universal resonance in many families and before we knew it, there would be a sketch with a resolved and humorous statement of some kind, people loved them.
I worked hard learning the folk dances that Bernard Wosien brought to Findhorn so I could share them on tour. Bernard had spent many years travelling the countries of Europe and gathering ancient folk dances, transcribing them into book form, as well as giving workshops along with his daughter. These ancient dances were fading from the collective memory in many places, and he was very happy to share them with a group of enthusiasts in the community – a safe repository – where they would be cherished, becoming part of our own mythology and Sacred Dance. There is something profound in holding hands with people you may not know and going through the same steps and movements; it certainly brings people together in the present, acting as a metaphor for universality. Such being the aim from earlier times.
Michael singing ‘Jellied Eels’
The tour was a really extraordinary experience for us all, we were taking a little bit of our group consciousness out on the road, aspiring to bring the very best of all we had learned, in and about our community life, and of course we had our ups and downs together, but mostly it was all good. Francois Duquesne, our focaliser/organiser, did a great job planning our long journey.
The winter had been ferocious and in Switzerland, part of France and Germany the old and filthy snow was still piled eight or nine feet in some places beside the roads. We stayed with friends of the community who had helped to set up the many venues, in town halls, community centres and a few theatres and conference centres. They kindly opened up their homes to us and we stayed in a traditional Swiss Chalet, a lovely apartment close to the Eiffel Tower, a castle in Germany, an attic in Amsterdam, complete with a rat or two, a bungalow in Belgium, (Ian passed out in the bathroom from carbon monoxide, forgetting to open the window) and a few more besides.
We were greeted with huge enthusiasm and warmth everywhere and I lost count of how many times we performed our material, gave talks, showed slides or sat in front of an audience, answering questions about community life. There’s a lot more I could say about those four weeks, we all ‘grew’ a great deal, sharing tensions, humour and at times, a few tears. I managed to inflict a permanent knee injury on myself, thanks to a rigid sense of perfectionism and a certain amount of vanity! We arrived with no time to spare in the central area of Paris after sustaining a burst tyre. We were booked into a big theatre amazingly and with a full house and no time to warm up sufficiently before the winter dance piece.
Simone
I was really taken with my choreography as well as working in a Paris theatre to a full house. Having at last mastered an ambitious sequence of contemporary ballet movements in the ‘Martha Graham’ mode that culminated in a half splits slide across the floor, ending in a series of rolls. Of course, the half splits without warm-ups was a seriously bad idea and I traumatised my knee limping from the stage, thankfully in a black out… Needless to say, we worked very hard and when I returned, I was not the same person.
Ruby, Gwendy, Amber, Yolande with hair curler and choir mistress Debbie
There was great joy in being with my girls again, who had been well cared for by a close and trusty friend, but it seemed I’d had a growth spurt over the previous month and my life now seemed too narrow, routines over-disciplined the caravan too small. I was ready for change and didn’t know how to create it. But perhaps what had shaken me to my foundations, wasn’t so much the long exhausting exhilarating tour, or a whole month without feeling a strong identity with my mother self but the knowledge that Michael had a lover, one of my closest friends (the best friend phenomena! How they always love the one we love.) This disclosure had surfaced thanks to the pressures on tour and our continual interface. We were well suited in many ways except sexually, we just didn’t have the chemistry, more a brotherly sisterly love and understanding that fostered harmony and a good working relationship.
Michael and Amber in snow
As Michael relieved himself of old guilt, it transpired there had been a few other brief encounters of the sensual kind. Michael was a very attractive man, women friends would say to me how good looking he was and what a charismatic personality he had (and a terrific actor, talented writer, always fun to be around). I had been busy with so much I hadn’t noticed what was going on right under my nose. This was a bleak time and I realised I had to work hard on withholding judgement and extending forgiveness or acceptance at least if I wanted our marriage to endure. Michael felt wretched with remorse and somehow, we patched things up and had some counselling. Friendships too, had not been irretrievably damaged, there was too much good will flowing around to harbour pain and resentment for very long. It was, after all, the ’70s, there was a great deal of experimentation going on in loving relationships, the concept of open marriage was being tested and many of us wanted to be open to understanding what this might mean. Certainly, it wasn’t for me, even though our commitment to the marriage vows had been less than casual.
Simone, Carol Community with cake event
Marriages were breaking up all around us, there were so many pressures in community life at that time that people were not accustomed to. The flow of goodwill, being around like minded people, many of them attractive and attracted, it could blur the edges of the so called nuclear family. Also, the openness to one another and not having learned how to express that appropriately made many of us younger ones, vulnerable. Another factor perhaps, was people staying a short time somehow added to the allure of an affair. No matter how much we aspired to becoming awake and enlightened – in the younger members of the community sexuality sometimes held sway and hormones prevailed.
Who am I to say why marriages broke down or re-commenced, perhaps people needed to find their true-life partner and many did; or the duration of a partnership needed to end for the greater growth of those individuals? I was loyal to Michael, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t felt strong attractions to other men.
Around this time Paul Hawken and his family came to live for a while. An attractive, charismatic man who wrote “The Magic of Findhorn”, dwelling primarily on the more dramatic aspects of key figures who were involved in founding the community. This book put the community firmly on the map and it brought many people to visit, looking for the magic, in some cases they found it but not in the way they might have expected.
Paul’s marriage ended in the community and he met a new partner who was also married and whose partner found a new partner and so it went on; it seemed that no marriage or relationship was impervious from the pressures of community life.
There was much talk at that time and aspiring to ‘unconditional love’ and looking back it seems to me, so many of my generation did aspiring really well, seeking, in our naivety and optimism to be spiritual athletes; I love us for that but since becoming more of a realist, with the passing of years I can see the value of perceiving unconditional love as an ideal and a necessity when it comes to loving ones new born and small child but seeking to extend that love to badly behaved adults – where romance is concerned – simply opens the door to abuse.
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About the photos: Many individuals were involved in the performing arts during the 1970s at Findhorn. Much of the work was well documented by seriously talented photographers. As I only have access to my own album of the ’70s, many of the images above are of a more personal nature, and sadly I don’t know whom to credit for the photos.
A big Thank You to my grandson Ziggy for enhancing the appearance of many of my somewhat battered and ancient photos from the ’70s.
I live very simply in this land I love. On returning to the area with my daughter Jade, I found joy in volunteering in the life of the Community; until Covid, then everything changed.
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