The short attunement meditation at the beginning ended with a Mayan Prayer

From the East, House of Light
May wisdom Dawn in us
So we may see all things in clarity

From the North, House of the Night
May Wisdom Ripen in Us
So we may know all from within

From the West, House of Transformation
May Wisdom be transformed into right action
So we may do what must be done

From the South, House of the Eternal Sun
May right action reap the harvest
So we may enjoy the fruits of Planetary being

From Above, House of Heaven
Where star people and Ancestors gather
May their blessings come to us Now

From Below, House of Earth
May the heartbeat of her crystal core
Bless us with harmonies to end all war

From the Center, Galactic Source
Which is everywhere at once
May everything be known
As the light of mutual love
Oh Yum Hunab Ku Evam Maya E Ma Ho
All Hail the Harmony of Mind and Nature

The seven directions, brought by Laura Pasetti, artistic director of the Theatre of the 7 Directions, as a working map rather than a doctrine, rooted in the medicine wheel and the four seasons — East as dawn and infancy, the white canvas of pure possibility; South as summer and the body, fire, freedom and curiosity; West as sunset, transformation, the falling-in-love of the muses; North as winter, the warrior and the leader, the place of true adulthood and service — with above (collective consciousness), below (soul and purpose) and centre (the spider’s web from which all directions can be reached and served) completing it.

Laura encouraged the group to use the concept loosely with an invitation to locate themselves where they felt drawn (the freedom of the South, the deepening of the East, the North’s demand for structure and sustainability etc.) and using that as a lens for the stories and objects they went on to make. Some reflected on nature’s seasons, with the coming darkness of Winter, remembering that the seed needs darkness to germinate, and how the founders, three people, arrived in the dark “not knowing a thing,” with no money, in a caravan.

Laura recited the Emily Dickinson poem “Not knowing when the Dawn will come, I open every Door”  — and this wove as a thread through the workshop: that creativity begins in the place before you know what you are making.

The group traced a loose timeline:

• The fun nights and the Lollipop Shop of the early years, when Community members created skits making fun of Peter Caddy. It is said that Peter himself supported this and someone wondered whether that may even have been part of why the Community survived his leaving in 1979.
• In the early 1970s, the New Troubadours, and the Arts and Performance group that performed not only in the Community but also locally and even went on tour with Peter and Eileen.
• In 1976 Bernhard Wosien brought Sacred Dance to the Community. The fiftieth anniversary was marked by the weeklong Sacred Dance Festival going on at the same time as this workshop.
• Five Rhythms arriving around 1990; evolving into Open Floor.
• Theatre and dance work of the 1990s and 2000s led in part to what is now Dance North, and so much more, work that carries the Community’s culture and values out into local schools and groups.
• The many different singing traditions, such as Taizé Singing and Kirtan, and the many different choirs.
• The Moray Art Centre and the tradition of fine arts, media
• … there is so much that the list will always be incomplete.

What connects it all is the insight that art and creativity can convey, so much more than words, the underlying values and practices of our Community’s culture.

A strong thread of the afternoon was a shared, sometimes painful, reckoning of how the arts have been valued — and undervalued — in the world, but also in the Community. Several participants traced this back through decades of lived experience:

• a movement and drama therapist arriving in 1989 and having to argue her way into a work department that could hold what she did;
• another was told that “the community is a work of art, it doesn’t need works of art”. She went on to channel her practice outward into the local community instead, because creating work inside the Findhorn Foundation’s structures wasn’t supported;
• the sting, still remembered clearly, of being asked to provide some music for a tea break at a 2019 conference and feeling her expertise treated as a ‘filler’ rather than substance.

The group named the pattern directly: a felt hierarchy between work and art, in which artists were sometimes seen as having the easier, more self-indulgent path, free to do what they wanted rather than what was “needed.” Is was stated emphatically that art is not entertainment, it is the soul of a place, and being an artist is a mission that can be as painful as it is joyful.

The Universal Hall and the Moray Arts Centre were named as two of the largest buildings in the Park devoted to the arts. Present fundraising for the Universal Hall is focused on bricks and mortar rather than the people and practice inside it, and the charity that had been supporting the Moray Arts Centre had just given up its tenancy in the building due to financial constraints.

The Universal Hall fundraiser recently evoked a barrage of hostile Facebook comments from some people in the local area showing that more bridges still need to be built between the Community and its wider neighbourhood, particularly with areas experiencing real deprivation.

The group commented on the global pattern, that when budgets are tight, arts, creativity and community funding are cut as politicians seem to prioritise the ‘urgent’ needs of criminal justice and health care systems. As a counterpoint, the group proposed that this is the wrong way round, considering that demands on those systems increase in a society that is ‘less hospitable to the soul’, where the strength of ‘goodness, truth and beauty’ is eroded.

The example of an ecovillage in Spain, Los Portales, was mentioned. The founders’ inspiration was drawn from Jungian dreamwork, and art, theatre and dream-sharing are woven into the structure of community life rather than sitting outside it.

This prompted the question of how Ecovillage Findhorn compares, and led to a broader conversation about universal basic income as one route to a world where people’s whole expression — intellect, spirit, psyche, soul, art — can be held and supported rather than squeezed to the margins.

The reflections kept returning to imagination, its essential nature and how it is at risk. Without protecting and cultivating imagination, a community or a culture risks losing itself.

The fundamental value of the Arts and the need for protection, even in the face of impermanence (or perhaps because of it) was reflected in many ways. The following are sharings from the Show-and-Tell round:

One participant shared that they found some magazines at the very end. “I’m really intrigued, I’d love to read them — this one from 1983/4 had this beautiful quote on it, unattributed, that I want to read out.”

creativity: the ability to bring into being or form
out of nothing. The ability to bring into being by
force of imagination, to make, produce, or form, to
invest with a new form, office, or character.

Two clay creations were presented, each intended to be given back to the earth.

A protective clay wrapping over leaves, berries, a feather, deliberately including shrivelled fruit to honour our relationship with death and renewal. In the process of needing to ask for help which doesn’t come easy. A meditation on impermanence, paradigm change, and the slow pull from clock time into kairos time.

A temporary landscape, mountains lit with beauty, a river running through carrying echoes of Nepal, where she’d visited a village shortly before it was buried by the 2015 earthquake, and of course now the devastating floods. “The earth is telling us, we must rely on nothing, no matter how beautiful or permanent we think it is. We need to learn that lesson, and do what we can to provide some stability in a time when there’s very little.”

Presence, Transmission and Trust in Not-Knowing

The gift of Art and Creativity which can’t easily be measured or produced on demand: presence, spaciousness, and the transmission that happens between performer and audience, maker and witness.

One participant spoke of the minimalism in a recent summer-camp theatre piece that gave her, as an audience member, the time and space to actually be with what was being transmitted and framed this as close to the founding spirit of the Community itself: valuing the unseen as much as the seen.

Another described the particular, hard-to-schedule, rhythm of the creative process — the ten minutes it can take simply to cross from clock time into what she called kairos time, the deeper time of making.

This connected back to the day’s opening theme of not-knowing: resisting the pressure to know in advance what a piece, a story, a day or even a life is going to become, and about the discipline of staying with that uncertainty rather than resolving it too quickly.

The role of “muse” — someone who simply witnesses and draws out the ideas of others, rather than making something visible themselves — was named explicitly as a valid and undervalued creative contribution in its own right.

An ‘energy sketch’ and some life drawings shared in the Show-and-Tell expressed that relationship.

The group also addressed the ‘power of love’, the reality that everything is energy:

• How the immediacy and intimacy of the workshop created a sense of connection, prompting one participant to state emphatically “I love you all”.
• Another recalled an exercise in a Tantra workshop, where you had to say to a packet of tissues, for one hour, “I love you.” It sounds insane, or silly, but you really do start to love that box of tissues; the resistance goes, within the hour.
• And Giles wondered whether his love for the hammer made the hammer catch the box of tacks so gently. (Click here to read his story.)

Throughout the workshop personal stories emerged, each one a gem and some have been added to the collective autobiography as separate posts – please see the list at the end.

Ruby arrived in the Community at eighteen months old, raised among artists, and later became a socially engaged creative practitioner herself. Browsing the Community magazines on display this one caught her eye as the cover shows her as a 10 year old. She shared: “This is a picture of me when I was 10 years old, probably when I was living in Station House Cottage. I remember my mother painting my face, and I remember this doll quite clearly. And I remember Edwin who came to take the photograph. I had a little read of what he said, and something was very beautiful at the end:

“I still delight in photography as a silent alchemy. In fact, photography provided, perhaps, my first disciplined approach to meditation. Yet, it is also preeminently a meditation in the midst of action. An inconspicuous form of dancing in the street.”

She also read out the four points of the Charter for the Guild of Artists on page 14/5:

• Excellence: Our creation should be developed to the best of the artist’s ability at the time.
• Discipline: Artists are expected to maintain the optimum conditions in which to work, remaining free from outside distractions.
• Productivity: Artists are to ensure that their work reaches completion and that a reasonable output is maintained.
• Appropriateness: Our work produced should give form to new revelation, be in accordance with the aims of the foundation, and add to the quality of life.

At Show-and-Tell, she presented us with a beautiful mixed-media presentation in which she shared her story of “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” — a vivid childhood memory of dancers, shifting green light and slide projections in the old Lollipop Shop, still luminous fifty years on. Click here for her story. It completed with the offer of 2 minutes of tender group movement.

Giles remembered his connection with a beautiful hammer which saved the day in an almost magical way – click here to read The Hammer that Caught the Falling Box of Tacks.

Caroline who was visiting the Community for the first time shared a dream she had four weeks ago. It felt meaningful for her unexpected participation in this workshop: a group deliberating humanity’s future, blue, white and silver bead-like symbols resembling a Turkish Tespi prayer chain. (Click here for the story of her dream).

She invited the group to make their own beads with her – and these were the outcomes:

Marilyn explored the design of an Experience Week for Community members entitled “Spiritual Deepening Through the Arts“. Structured around four levels of commitment

• a dip (an hour)
• a float (a day)
• a dive (a weekend)
• a full deep dive (the week)

The design was mapped onto the four-dimensions framework (economy, ecology, social, spiritual), re-imagined as movement/currency, gardens, music and archive-treasure, and stillness/meditation, each led by a different group — dancers, gardeners, singers, and children respectively.

This led to an exploration of the dimensions of a regenerative culture, described in the 1986 diagram developed by John Talbott and Andrew Yates, which evolved into the dimensions used by the Global Ecovillage Network and Gaia Education. We considered the benefits of using a common language across the global networks. We used these concepts for our Your Community Your Story workshop series and the proposal is to embed them in the newly designed Community Archive cataloguing system.