The Foundations of our Community were laid on many levels:

In our collective autobiography we aim to give voice to all those levels. Most of the stories are told through the experience of members of our Community, as this is a powerful way to hear from the One Incredible Family.

In this Topic – Our Foundations – more formative people and networks, we bring in facets that shaped the Community in the 1960s and 1970s, and through the decades since:

The times after World War II brought together people dedicated to making the world a better place. The circles were often quite small and they connected with each other in social networks, conferences and through collaborating on specific projects.

Peter had met Naomi (Anne K. Edwards) during his time as RAF officer in the Philippines in and had stayed in touch with her through the Network of Light meditations which were a core practice for the four founders. In 1964 she came to live with them for a while and once she left, her small caravan became the first dedicated sanctuary space.

After focusing completely on their life in the Original Garden, 1965 brought an outward movement when Peter began to travel throughout the UK and met many kindred spirits. The first trip was prompted by Peter’s parents asking him to help with a move to a smaller home. Peter set off in the car with Naomi and Dorothy. On the way South they stopped at St Annes-on-Sea to visit Liebie Pugh. Here they made several important connections, including with Sir Anthony Brooke and Joanie Hartnell-Beavis.

Liebie Pugh was a spiritual teacher and founder of the movement called the Universal Link. Before her death in 1966 she exchanged many letters with Eileen and was an important support for her.

After Liebie’s death, three members from Universal Link – Joanie Hartnell-Beavis, Evelyn Sanford and Anthony Brooke, moved up to Findhorn. The Universal Link mailing list became the basis for an ever increasing network of people who received the newsletters and early publications from the Findhorn Trust.

John Willoner writes about Anthony Brooke: He was the last white Rajah of Sarawak. He was part of the Universal Link in St Annes and became a good friend of Joanie. Together with Monica Parish, he formed a charity called the Universal Foundation to promote peace in the world. He visited Joanie at Findhorn in early 1968 and decided to make Findhorn the base for his enterprise so he purchased the Universal bungalow. Anthony travelled widely and was a great ambassador for Findhorn often giving lectures with slides of this community which resulted in many people visiting Findhorn in the early years. He moved to Sweden and later to New Zealand where he died age 98 in 2011. A highly enthusiastic person, he often finished speaking with the word ‘Hallelujah!’

Peter, Naomi and Dorothy met Wellesley Tudor Pole, the founder of the Chalice Well Trust, when they stayed at the Chalice Well Guest House on their trip to help Peter’s parents move and the connections with Glastonbury grew ever stronger. They had started in 1953 during a visit by Eileen, Peter and Sheena. Sitting in ‘a quiet sanctuary for prayer and meditation’ Eileen had heard for the first time what she would later call her ‘still small voice within’ and it said “Be still and know that I am God.” Glastonbury was one of the important links on the Network of Light. Wellesley Tudor Pole had also initiated the Lamplighter Movement, the amber light in the sanctuaries and in other windows around the Community still hold true to that connection.

The Man of the Trees – Richard St Barbe Baker – travelled the world over and inspired thousands to plant trees. He visited Findhorn for the first time in 1969 and spoke at the One EarthGathering in 1979. Many different rewilding and restoration initiatives have their roots in his inspiration and dedication. In the context of the Community, Vance Martin got involved with the World Wilderness Congress and the Wild Foundation and Alan Watson Featherstone went on to found Trees for Life. At The Park Ecovillage, St Barbe’s Wood, a memorial grove where the first tree was planted in 1975, is a dedication to this great man.

Growing food was of course at the very core of the Findhorn Garden from the beginning. It shaped the daily life of the founders and early visitors. It was also the trigger for its increasing fame in the late 1960s. This took on a much greater weight once Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the Soil Association, came to visit and confirmed the astonishing findings.

Health and Wholeness in its many aspects unfolded and diversified greatly over decades. Bruce MacManaway, a remarkable healer, supported Community members in the early days through treatment, training and opportunities to offer their workshops at his natural health centre in Fife, Scotland. Myrtle Glines, who came with David Spangler in 1970, brought her wisdom and skills as counsellor and supported the community’s growth through the rapid expansion in the early 1970s with her insights about the value of the personality as an important part of our spiritual wholeness.

———————–

For this Topic we have collected short biographies of each one. As they are written by different authors they give different flavours but overall they

  • Give basic biographical info
  • Describe their involvement with the Findhorn Foundation Community
  • Provide a list of publications
  • Offer hyperlinks to stories connected to them on the website (tags)

Herewith the links to those biographies/introductions: Naomi, Liebie Pugh, Anthony Brooke, Wellesley Tudor Pole, Richard St Barbe Baker, Lady Eve Balfour, Bruce MacManaway, Myrtle Glines.

———————–

For a more comprehensive picture of these important people, we draw on individual stories by members of One Incredible Family, as well as relevant publications:

We are inviting Community members to continue to share their own recollections of encounters with, experience and learning from these formative people. You can do that via the Comments function at the end of each post or by submitting your own stories which then will be tagged appropriately to link them to the different individuals.

With great delight and deep appreciation we can offer stories written at the time whenever we have access to them. The complete documents are accessible as pdf flipbooks in our eLibrary which you can find in Books&More. We are posting individual chapters as stories as that makes reading them easier and they also become searchable and we can link them to other relevant stories through our categories and tags so that they take their rightful place in the mosaic of our collective autobiography.

1965 Links to the New Age ©Findhorn Foundation

1965 Links to the New Age ©Findhorn Foundation

We want to acknowledge the Findhorn Foundation for the permission to offer

We thank Alex Walker for his permission to offer The Kingdom Within compiled and edited in 1994.

This Topic is brought to you by an inspired collaboration between Keith Armstrong and Cornelia Featherstone – July 2023.

***

Topics are a ‘reader’s digest’, a summary of essential Community facets offering a compilation of posts for further information. Click here for a list of Topics we have produced so far.

If you have suggestions for improvements (corrections or additional information), please leave a Comment below. Thank you!