(Editor’s note: Stan wrote the following as a result of conversations/correspondence with two long-term guests staying at Cluny 2010/11.)

My personal relationship with the Shop covered two completely different time periods. But let me get to first things first: its opening.

Around 1981 a fellow who had been in the Guest Department with me the previous year apparently made a proposal to the Foundation management to run a bookshop at Cluny, particularly to make sure that books recommended by workshop focalisers – of which he was one – and for Conference guests of the speakers were here, ready to go at the time of the event. He had been disappointed in the past that ‘the system’, via the Phoenix [Book & Craft Shop at the Park], didn’t always work well; and in this community, if you have a good idea, you need to be ready to act on -’champion’ – it. Hence he was. Hence he did.

Initially the bookshop was in Room 6. Even the bibliophile that I am thought that was a bit of overkill (the larger of those two rooms, there in the main hallway); but it was his project. Support a brother’s worthy cause, and all that. And at that stage it was really, mainly, books. After My Year in America – from mid-August ‘81 to mid-August ‘82 – I came back to live in Cluny (had been living in the Park for some years before taking off for the Big Apple – New York City, and work with Planetary Citizens) and found that the bookshop had been moved to Room 5. Made good sense; room is always at a premium for meeting space in this place. As well, the shop had become something of a hybrid – a bookshop AND a tuck/toiletries shop. Serving a different era. Perhaps a different clientele?? Whatever: a subtle change. But as long as books – good books; interesting books – were still available at Cluny, for the guests especially to take next steps on their spiritual journeys with, I was satisfied. That was a wonderful service we could provide them. Yes, and the occasional bar of chocolate, to ground it all…

(Footnote: During the Coach Party days, and into a short while afterwards, Room 5 was a bedroom. There lived there at that time – ta-da! – Rita the ‘Meta’ Maid, of The Beatles’ fame. Yes, she lived in this community for a short while. And there hangs another story, or two. But to get on with this one.)

I got directly involved some years later when, having spent the summer as custodian at Traigh Bhan [the Findhorn Foundation [FF]’s home on Iona, available in the summers as a retreat place for our guests; a subject in itself], I was looking at what to get involved with. Our Staff lines were rather more flexible in those pre-contract, pre-money-conscious days, and though I was nominally in the Education Department, I could help out wherever the Foundation’s needs were, in between co-focalising, say, the FF’s 3-month program at the time, the Essence of Findhorn (of which I ended up co-focalising three in the ‘80s), or various workshops (‘Primal Painting’; etc.). One area at that time turned out to be a scheme by the FF Focaliser, Francois Duquesne (on his way out), to create a Time Share plan: Good friends of the Foundation could put up the money for the building of a residential property, which the FF could use for its guest accommodation needs when the time-share owners were not present. (In the event, I gave it a good shot; but the project never got off the ground. We may have been over-optimistic about how much interest there really was out there in the world for such a scheme here. But it was a good idea in principle; worth investigating.)

So I was looking at all this – newly back from Iona; not really up to speed on issues in the Cluny Family – when there was an emergency Family meeting one afternoon, in the BTR [Beechtree Room], at which it was pointed out to the Family that no one had stepped forward to become the manager of the Bookshop, and if someone didn’t volunteer to take it on (no one got paid for any of these sorts of things in those days; it was just part of community life), they would have to close it down. Wow. This was serious. Angela (Morton; I think she was focalising the Education Department at the time; is now a business consultant in Europe, and Game of Transformation Facilitator trainer. So there IS life after Findhorn…) spelled out briefly what the job entailed, and before we went into meditation to see what that elicited from us, I heard myself say, “Well; I can do that.” Before I could change my mind, everybody briskly decamped from the room. Problem solved.

So I took over managing the Cluny Book Shop. Well; Book and Tuck Shop by then. But I knew what it was for me. It was an inspiration. And I had some great, inspiring conversations with the guests in there, over quite a period of time. (Including a visit, many years later, from Rita the Meter Maid, back for just a short stayover.) Until one day…

I was away briefly for something or other*, and when I came back, I saw some condoms being sold on the toiletries shelf. What?! I asked my main assistant what was going on. She told me that the Cluny Focaliser (a female at the time; of a rather strong bent) had told her to bring some over. (Her main job in assisting me was to go over to the Phoenix for stock and bring it back in her car. She was a Wider Community gal, in those mainly pre-Wider Community days; wanting to serve the community in some way.) I stormed into the Cluny Campus Office to find out what this was all about. It turned out that the precipitating event was that a long-term member had asked her to have the Cluny Shop carry them, “like it has toothbrushes”. Excuse me? There is a large difference between a condom and a toothbrush. It’s, as I said above, an attitudinal thing; and I told her she was “playing with fire” – and possibly, even, literally, from the fire we had had in Cluny back in the early ‘80s, very probably over just such a subject-area issue. (And of which – as I have mentioned elsewhere in this chronicle – I had personally spent months holding the focus for the clean-up; so it was perhaps a more meaningful issue to me than to others. But, really, shouldn’t have been. It was about life in this ever-tentative rabbit warren of Cluny – or like a big orgone energy box – and living our lives with consciousness.)

I immediately asked to speak to the Guest Department (GD) (to elicit their potential support), about Cluny being a hothouse of sexual volatility, especially at the height of our seasons, with all the heart openings going on for the guests (which I well knew about from having spent two seasons in that department). If the guests saw that the management of the place was casual about making condoms available in its Book Shop for casual sex, it might well send a wrong impression, ‘signal’; might open up predatory activity on vulnerable guests (mostly, from my perspective, on the females; but there were plenty of females exercising their newly-won ‘rights’ as female libbers in those days as well), to whom we have some sort of proprietorial responsibility, of ‘duty of care’ (as in holding with all due responsibility the security in the building, particularly because we force our guests to live in unlocked rooms).

I waited for their response. One of the GD members said he just saw it as part of the HIV-Safe Sex drive that was starting to go on in the world at large around that time. Mixed signals from the rest. ‘We can’t determine what the guests get up to’; etc etc…

I couldn’t be turned from my concerns. To save a major potential process on the matter, I quit. And never went back in to the Cluny Shop for years, and years, and years. They could do whatever they wanted in there. The hell with them. This was beginning to be not my community of old; was beginning – for me – to betray its founding principles, especially of a life built on Service, and awareness. On the raising of consciousness. On building a New Age. Not buying into the old.

P.S. At this point in this telling, I will report that some years later I asked my former assistant what on earth she had been on about, doing something as major as that without my say on the matter. She agreed that I should have been in the loop; but felt “It was a male thing”. Meaning (at least as I took it to mean) that she had not seen herself as merely my assistant, but as co-manager, and was not going to be potentially put down by me, live in my shadow; could make her own decisions about the shop. Interesting, how small perception differences can have major repercussions. (I was clearly the manager; did all the cashing-up, etc etc.)

I could have the assumptions in this thing wrong. (Another take on her comment could be to mean: ‘Take it up with your focaliser. Nothing to do with me.’ Or: ‘If males don’t like to wear condoms, well, they can just get over it. It’s a new era.’) But the concluding observation from the situation is still valid, I feel: we needed to be more sensitive to the message we might have sent to our guests. After all, this is a spiritual community. If WE were lax on such issues…

P.P.S. In the interests of full transparency, I should perhaps report that the Cluny Focaliser might well have thought I was being hypocritical regarding the sexual subject arena, because I was beginning to have a girlfriend visit me occasionally at the community, whom I had met there when she was a guest in one of my Experience Weeks. But I was living at Drumduan House [a short walk through the woods from Cluny], and figured that whoever I might have as a guest there was my business purely – to the point that I took takeouts from Cluny for our meal times and we ate in my room, well away from Cluny. The Cluny Focaliser never, apparently, got the difference, to understand fully the point I was trying to make. (They even started thinking at that time of putting up a condom dispensing machine in the Gents. I’m glad to be able to report that cooler heads prevailed on that one, and I didn’t even have to go ballistic over the matter. Tack-y. My Cluny, turning into a hotel in Soho…)

My next personal connection with the Cluny Shop happened in 2010, when it began to lose some of its long-term till operators – who were being paid at the minimum wage (i.e., by law) by then. It had lost its long-time manageress (Jacqueline), who was too busy with a new job in the Education Department to keep this chore up as well; when, at the same time, the Phoenix began cutting back on the stock in the room, and some of the regular shop keepers were getting disillusioned with the ambience of the place, feeling it was going ‘seedy’. Particularly because of my – basic – support for the Shop (N.B. It was no longer engaged in flogging condoms; I don’t know when that personal irritant dropped out of the picture), I chipped in to help hold first one shift, then more (I was an Elder by then, with my time pretty much my own).

But I was wondering what was going on; it had always been a nice little income generator, besides a great service, both to the guests and to the members of the Cluny Family. But with the Phoenix now having to pay minimum wage, was that hurting their income from it sufficiently to put its operation under question?? It seemed to be so; in conjunction with financial difficulties back at the Phoenix. For whatever reason(s), they were hurting financially; as had been reported on in our weekly Community newsletter, the Rainbow Bridge. And then the word came down definitively: they were going to close the Cluny Shop.

I was incensed. After all those years of loyalty and service to the Cluny guests, and, increasingly, Family members, as it began to take on more of the vibe of a tuck shop – meeting end-of-day snack needs – it was a real blow. And particularly, for me, when the statement was made, to us and to the Community, in the Rainbow Bridge, that the Cluny Shop “had been losing money”.

That didn’t sit well with me. To me, that made it sound as though we Clunyites weren’t doing a very good job there – which happened to coincide with my time in coming in to help, back towards the beginning of the year. What’s going on here? I wondered. And the business about the stock being run down…so I laboriously checked the income figures for that year against the previous year; and sure enough, the income was down considerably against that year. Not “losing money” as in going in the hole, but simply in comparison to its previous year’s income figures. Big difference. And with the business about the appearance of the stock being run down, I started getting a little suspicious; knowing, that that’s the sort of thing businesses do when they want to close a branch: run it down energetically and then look at the results and say, ‘Well, there’s your proof’. Was it possibly a tax thing at the Phoenix??

Anyway, I felt we were being hard done by, and didn’t like the vibe that I felt was circulating about the Cluny operation, that there was something wrong with it (What. Were the till operators stealing from the stock?? Come out with the accusations), and took the fellow in charge at the Phoenix to a bit of a task on the matter, via email.

He came back (online) outraged that I would take the matter that way, said it was simply a matter of the Cluny operation not profiting them enough to cover all the time spent in checking its stock, pricing the items, etc etc. It was a bit of a do for awhile between us. India got into the act, from her role on the Cluny Campus Team, assuring me that the guy was a very sincere fellow, and suggested that I take the initiative to apply some of the Common Ground principles of the community. Fair enough: I offered to meet with him over a cuppa and let us both have our say face to face. And that was what we were about to do, when he was going to be away for a couple of weeks first, and they had a lot of work to keep looking after the Phoenix, which was doing very poorly financially (why??); and time simply moved on. Nothing was going to change the basics of the picture. It was the end of the line for the Cluny Book Shop, morphed into, more accurately, the Cluny Shop.

After 30 years, of great service and potential: A sad day.

(I never did get to point out to him that just taking the stock back into the mother shop wasn’t the answer – because they were open 7 days a week, 7 or whatever hours a day, and the Cluny operation was only open a couple of hours a day, which was one of the points they made – because the bulk of those Cluny sales weren’t going to be made over at the Phoenix instead; they were simply going to be lost. It was the convenience of Cluny that made it such a great deal. )

I feel as though I probably loaded you up with a little more than you bargained for in a simple story about the Cluny Bookshop. But as you can see, it wasn’t so simple with me.

I’m reminded of the story of the little girl who took a book back to the library and turning it in, said to the Librarian, “There’s more about alligators in this book than I ever wanted to know.” Bet you didn’t think I had so much to say on this subject…

By the way, and for the historical record, and an interesting take on community life here: Some time not too long after I released managing the Shop, back in my earlier days with it, I became aware that it was ‘under the new management’ of a woman who was not actually a member of the Foundation, was one of those people who around that time – late ‘80s-early ‘90s – began to be here, in the area, as part of the fledgling Wider Community. (My assistant had moved on by then, out of the area.) And thereby hangs an important part of the story of this community; because it was this beginning of moving out of one clearly-delineated culture and into something else, a hybrid of some sort (precisely like the Shop itself was undergoing; quite a metaphor for the changes going on around here, was our venerable little Cluny Shop) that started giving us some growing pains.

To explain. This woman, it turned out – after having been a long-term guest here – was being paid by the Phoenix to manage the Cluny Shop**. So far, so fair enough; she wasn’t one of ‘us’ per se. And she pretty much ran the Shop all on her own. So, she had hit on a way to afford to be here, in this community environment; and in return, her lifestyle situation served the Shop. But then the snake crept in to our little Eden through that narrow opening, when it turned out that she had started paying a member of the Cluny Family to run the shop on Saturday mornings for her, while she was over at the Phoenix getting stock. Kerfuffle time. I only heard about all this tangentially, because I was well out of the scene by then; none of my business what was going on regarding the Shop. But I totally supported the report of the angst, and sense of injustice, that this caused for at least some of the members here, because that member was not only no longer then on the Saturday morning Homecare rota – which all Cluny staff were subject to – but as well was, in effect, being paid for NOT being there. Yes, she was providing a service to Cluny, through helping to run the Shop; but it was just this sort of separation – as I called it above, growing pains – that got introduced then.

For years before all this, we were very clear as a community – i.e., just the Foundation in those days – that we did not provide work exchange, let alone paid employment. And then we started taking on people on work exchange (or outright short-term employment), with a particular skill, FOR their particular skill. And then…

What did we do before that?

We manifested.

The right person at the right time, for the particular need. There’s many a story of such Manifestation in the early days.

Sign of the times…

* It may have been because I was down in London to help out on the Foundation’s stall at the Festival of Mind-Body-Spirit. I did that a number of times over the years. I know it wasn’t due to being on vacation. I didn’t take, or need, vacations. I was doing here what I loved doing; what made my heart sing, in the vernacular of the day.
(Oh – I tell a lie. I did take a vacation, once. I took a week off, and went down to Erraid, and spent the week running a steamer up and down the inner walls of one of the homes, stripping off the old wallpaper. Well; the sort of thing you would do, on a holiday…)

** The fact that the Phoenix itself started out simply as a department of the Foundation, and then went independent – when it became clear that the Foundation, as a charitable trust, couldn’t legally run what was becoming quite a viable profit-making enterprise (for a time, at least) – is another part of the Foundation’s story; intersecting my story of it, but not becoming a part of mine sufficiently for me to make knowledgeable comment on it.

—

N.B. to expand on the mention of ‘Rita the Meter Maid’

Rita was a ‘meter maid’ in Australia (tooling around town on a scooter collecting the money from parking meters) that the Beatles met when they were first Down Under; and being the outgoing, vivacious sort that she was, I’m not surprised that she made contact with them, and inspired whichever one of them to write the song. What caused her to come to this community I don’t know; but I got an inkling of it years later, when she came back by on a brief visit, and I had a chance to have a chat with her in the Cluny Book Shop, when I was manning the till. Anyway, back to the story, briefly.

So she was here at the time when the community bought Cluny, and we ran the coach parties through here that first summer (quick: the year??…). She may have had some experience with hotel guests, and holding groups; all I know is that she made no friends here when, after the coach parties had finished, and it was just our own guests in the house, she tried to carry on with the hotel ambience by marching gaily through the Lounge ringing a bell and announcing dinner time. It was, simply, not our way of doing things, and she stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. Good-hearted, but out of place.

I don’t recall how long she lasted at Cluny; my next memory of her is when she had moved to the Park, and was working in Homecare over there. That didn’t feel like a match, either; and I remember seeing her one day, looking rather down. It was simply not working for her here. I heard rumors that she wanted to be involved with running guest groups, but with her ‘alien’ ways – to the culture here – that wasn’t about to happen. Her connection with the place pretty much ended when she was interviewed by some radio station about her life here, and brought into question our finances; saying that she had offered to run a travel service here, a real money-making opportunity, with people coming here from all over the world, but had been turned down, and where was all the money that the Foundation was making going, anyway?? That was pretty much it for her here, and on her way she went; gently pushed, I would imagine.

And then this still-good-looking woman came into the Cluny Book Shop those many years later (I actually can’t remember when that was; it could have been in the mid- to late-’80s, but it could also have been just this past year. Time flies when you’re having fun), and told me – a little wistfully, I felt; in a reminiscing mood – that that used to be her bedroom. I told her that I knew that, that I had been here then; and we got talking. And that’s when I found out that she was really a sincere seeker; had been going to workshops in the States, etc. I don’t recall the details of the conversation. I just remember, at the end of it, going around the desk and giving her a hug, and wishing her very, very well on her path, wherever it led her. She smiled, teary-eyed; and that was that.

And I wish her well to this day.

And I hope I’m not getting Alzheimer’s, for losing track of time.

Now where was I….