Summary Report of the workshop held on 14th June 2026 in the Park Ecovillage Findhorn.

Overview

This report captures the sharing and reflections offered at the completion of Module 2 of Your Community Your Story.

The workshop invited participants to explore the theme of Our Roots. It included a tour of the Original Caravan where Jonathan Caddy recounted his memories of living there for 7 years from the age of 6.

Original Caravan tour photo Cansu Pelin Isbilen

Following that, participants explored their own connections to the theme of Our Roots, some relating to their own personal ancestors, others reflecting on their connections with the Community.

What emerged was a rich and layered sharing, ranging from multi-generational family stories set across continents to quiet personal moments of arrival and belonging. Taken together, the contributions paint a collective portrait of how this Community has been shaped — and continues to be shaped — by its roots and the connections members bring with them.

Stories from the Circle

• The Coconut Moth and a Market Garden: A Story of Beginnings
  One of the session’s most expansive contributions traced a life journey from early 20th-century Scotland to Fiji, Malaya, Singapore, Java and back again. Beginning in childhood — following a beloved gardener around a garden, watching plants grown from seed — the story wove through a remarkable career in entomological fieldwork, unrequited love, a wedding in Singapore, and a dream carried for decades of a market garden in the Scottish Highlands.This story grounded the session in deep time, reminding participants of the extraordinary chain of circumstances — spanning decades and continents — through which communities and families come to exist at all.
• A Broken Back, a Helicopter, and Learning to Land
  A second contribution offered a more personal and still-unfolding story of how one member came to belong here — a story that remains, in their own words, a cliffhanger. It began in September 1993: a badly broken back sustained while climbing down a cliff chasing an otter, a corrugated-roofed cottage hospital, morphine, a lengthy recovery journey, with a profoundly sustaining visit from a group of fellow members from their Findhorn Foundation work department.
• Synchronicities and powerful insights
  One emotionally vivid contribution came from a participant who had come to Findhorn a year ago following the death of their mother, the loss of a brother, the end of a relationship, and the news of impending redundancy from work.The journey to Findhorn had felt guided yet turbulent, on arrival they attended a family constellation event ‘by accident’, initially mistaking it for something to do with astrology, where they found themselves representing the Findhorn Foundation itself. They have returned several times since then. They ended with one of Eileen Caddy‘s principles that had stayed with them: Learn to trust one another implicitly, for without trust there is no love.
• A Crisis of Imagination: Findhorn as Seedbed
  This participant shared their curiosity about how communities imagine their way forward and named both Findhorn and Auroville as places doing this most intentionally, though in almost opposite ways.Auroville started out with a grand vision: a city of the future for fifty thousand people, an experiment in conscious evolution. Findhorn’s founding was the reverse: three adults and three children in a caravan, with no grand plan, but three simple daily practices — listen within, co-create with nature, work is love in action — and a trust that something would evolve from those roots.Their deep concern was, as they described it, a crisis of imagination in the world: not a failure to imagine, but an imagination so captured by existing structures — capitalism, borders, money — that it mistakes those stories for fixed reality. Findhorn, they suggested, once carried a tagline about cultivating positive visions for humanity and the planet and put these questions to the group: How do we help cultivate this seedbed?
• What Are Bad Things Asking of Us?Another participant drew a thread between two moments in the session: Jonathan’s account of Peter Caddy losing his job and having no money, and their own family story. Their parents met during the war — meaning that without Hitler, they would not exist. From both stories emerged the same question: what are difficult things asking of us?
• A Poem: The Golden Thread
  A spider on the glass spins its little web.
  Below, we walk our path and spin our little story.
  Dewdrops catch the light and set the web on fire, but the golden thread doesn’t burn — it shines. Hardship meets our path and brings the darkness.
  Only in the darkness can you see the light.
• The High School Jacket
  A participant spoke of a high school jacket they were wearing — one that, they said, “holds a lot of the stories I tell about myself”. Moved by the session’s recurring theme of difficult experiences opening new beginnings, they reflected that perhaps the time had come to pass the jacket on, to give it — and the story it carries — a new life, so that they too might begin again.
  Another participant gently suggested the community boutique, a place for clothes to be exchanged and given new life.
• Pulled to the Caravan
  A final contribution came from a participant who had arrived slightly late. They recalled the very first evening they had come to Findhorn — walking around with a friend who had introduced them to the place through a book — and finding themselves somehow drawn, almost without intention, to the Sanctuary and the caravan. Hearing Jonathan speak had brought the same feeling back.
  They spent the afternoon in the garden: watching bees, smelling flowers, exploring the creative space, making a small collage from flowers and seeds collected in the garden — seed packets of wonder, as they described it. A gentle, embodied response to a session that had asked participants to reach into their roots and their stories.

Cansu’s collage

Emerging Themes

Several threads wove through the contributions of this session:

• • Something good from something not good
    From a broken back to a rejected proposal, from wartime parents to a journey taken in grief, the session was full of stories in which difficult or painful events turned out to be the very conditions for arrival — here, in this Community, in this life. The question of what hardship is asking of us ran quietly through many contributions.
  • Listening when there is nothing else
    The Community’s founders listened to Spirit because they had no money and no plan. Several participants wondered aloud whether that quality of listening — to inner voice, to nature, to something beyond the rational — is harder to sustain when the external pressures ease. This felt like an invitation as much as an observation.
  • Roots as continuity across time
    The session revealed participants’ sense that the past is never simply behind us — it runs through us, and sometimes speaks.
  • The question of imagination and vision
    One contribution named directly what others circled around: what is the role of Ecovillage Findhorn in the world, at this moment? The early principles were simple and daily; the vision they carried was vast. How does a community keep faith with that original imaginative act?
  • Arrival as a process, not a moment
    Multiple contributors spoke about how long it took to feel they belonged here — years of walking golf courses at night, of tears in caravans, of not knowing what the Community was about. Landing, it seems, is something that at times happens slowly, and the Community’s willingness to hold people through that process is itself part of its character.

butterfly hammock photo Cornelia Featherstone

• Feedback forms from Module 2 were completed to help shape upcoming sessions. 4.6 star rating for the workshop overall.

Watch this space for outcomes and links to stories created in this workshop:

Laura Pasetti and Jonathan made plans for a special event to celebrate Jonathan’s 70th birthday during the 64th Community Birthday celebrations in November.

Jonathan Caddy – A Boy’s Own Story (2002)

COIF TEAM

Inspired by CommUnity, a group of NFA volunteers, manages this website. Hearing each others stories, and learning about the history of this community can help us all to find more cohesion and a sense of belonging. Read more.&lt