Beach Time

July 28 was a long day. It began at 3:30 am in the drizzly darkness of the Munich suburbs and ended with the call of seagulls and the funky smell of the ocean at Findhorn campground in rural North Scotland. Between these two wildly different places was a two and a half hour plane ride, a morning at the mall in Edinburgh buying groceries and SIM cards, a five hour Megabus ride through endless traffic jams and construction, an hour-long local bus ride along the coast outside Inverness, and then a 5 kilometer walk to the campground as we staggered under the weight of our combined 40 kg of gear. Finally, we had arrived at Findhorn! Why here, you might ask?

We chose Findhorn for our first week in the UK because it is a world-famous intentional community and ecovillage. We are both intrigued by life in such a community and wanted to get a feel for this iconic place. Later on, we will be volunteering at two smaller intentional communities in England, so we figured Findhorn would be a fitting place to begin our time in the UK. The clincher for our decision was Findhorn’s location next to two enticing natural features – a sweeping 10-kilometer arc of sandy ocean beach as well as a wildlife-rich tidal bay.

We pitched our tent at the Findhorn Bay Holiday Park and settled in for the week. Nestled between a field of RVs and the main road, it wasn’t the most scenic campsite, but it was conveniently located right next to the Findhorn ecovillage. From our base camp, we could meander through the streets of the ecovillage, nicknamed “The Park,” and imagine what life there might be like. It is a quiet neighborhood of private residences, community spaces, administrative buildings, and workshops, interspersed with lots of pretty gardens and natural spaces. From our surface experience of it, at least, it seemed like a peaceful and lovely place to live. We enjoyed dipping our toe into the life of the community, stopping by Findhorn’s natural foods store for daily restocks and attending a Scottish fiddle and accordion concert in the community auditorium.

Original Caravan

One afternoon we got to delve in a little deeper with a 3-hour tour of The Park. For how large and complex the Findhorn world is today, it was fascinating to learn about its scrappy beginnings. In the 1960s, three spiritually-minded people lost their jobs and, out of money, felt a calling to move to Findhorn Caravan Park. At that time, it was a humble trailer park on an infertile stretch of sand by the ocean, and remained so for quite a while thereafter. In this hostile environment, the founders of Findhorn are perhaps most famous for creating a flourishing garden by communicating with the spirits of the plants. Findhorn was never specifically intended to become an intentional community, but developed organically over time. It became a hub attracting more and more people interested in living a cooperative community life based on spiritual principles. As the community grew and morphed, it got organized constructing community buildings and devising decision-making structures. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Findhorn began shifting in earnest towards a primary focus on ecological living, which it maintains today. It is trying to serve as a model for a new way of living, both on a practical level and a consciousness level.  

On the tour we began the process of wrapping our heads around the crazy complicated structure of the Findhorn community today. Over the decades, it has grown so big that it has been reorganized into a complex web of organizations, associations, nonprofits, and businesses all under the Findhorn umbrella. There is the ecovillage housing component of course, but also things like extensive educational workshops, a printing press, a solar panel company, a public utilities group for the village, and an organization helping to reforest the Scottish highlands. At the core of it all is the Findhorn Foundation (with about 150 members), but there is also the broader New Findhorn Association with a total community of 700 people associated with it. We’re still a little baffled ourselves as to how it all fits together and functions in unity. Since Findhorn has grown so large, we wondered: at what size does an intentional community lose its closeness and integrated daily life?

As our tour wound to a close, we were also curious: What are the strongest factors that pull the Findhorn community together? Our guide described three of the top things that form the identity of Findhorn: viewing work as “love-in-action,” living in community, and communicating with nature. Of course, every community member places different levels of emphasis on each of these facets and others. It is not all cut and dry: the Findhorn Foundation itself is in an ongoing process of trying to specifically define its mission and vision. Uniting the community, though, is the hope that Findhorn can serve as a hotbed of change and transformation that will spread into the broader world.

Coming to Findhorn, we didn’t know quite what to expect. Often, places like this can feel wacky, insular, strangely New Agey, or too cultishly tied to their founders. However, we didn’t find that to be the case at Findhorn. If anything, it was more like a normally functioning modern town that happened to be made up of people who share a generally common vision for the world.

Of course, no community functions without some rocky spots. One challenge that Findhorn is facing is its tendency towards becoming a bit of a gentrified retirement village. Since the homes are in such high demand, the soaring prices mean that it is hard for young families to afford living there. Attracting and retaining young people is vital to the life of any community, so this presents a big challenge for Findhorn. There have also been some ongoing disagreements regarding a new construction area, specifically how much of it should be built up with houses versus left for nature. This brings up the age-old question of where we find our balance in the give-and-take with nature. Despite challenges like these, Findhorn seemed to us like a well-functioning community with a positive energy.

Near the end of our stay, Julia joined a handful of residents and visitors in the Nature Sanctuary for a meditation on nature. One intriguing aspect of Findhorn is its focus on the intelligence of nature, specifically the spirits and energies that infuse natural places and natural objects. This week, the meditation was focused on the Deva of the Moray Firth (the spirit-being of the coastline where Findhorn is located). As we sat together in a peaceful circle, Julia reflected on all the beauty we had experienced around Findhorn...

Growing up in Minnesota, the ocean has not been a big part of our daily life and so retains an extra measure of magical awe. As we meandered down the sandy seashore, we marveled at the spirit of creative exuberance that expresses itself in the natural world. The patterns and forms of the shells, the lavender designs in the dead jellyfish, the teal sparkle of the salty water, the glide of a seal, the strange mats of seaweed colonizing concrete blocks from WWII, the moon rising over the scrubby sand dunes in the pastel dusk… it was all wondrous.

In addition to the ocean beach, we also ventured out into Findhorn Bay. It’s a shallow tidal bay; at low tide we could (almost) walk the entire kilometer or more across the bay without the water rising over our thighs. As the tide goes out it leaves a massive plain of wet muddy sand that is strewn with patches of oyster shells, braided with shallow streams, speckled with little tubes of sand excavated by burrowing worms, and scattered with numerous other animal and vegetable creations. It was easy to imagine the way, hundreds of millions of years ago, tidal flats served as hotbeds of evolutionary creativity for the spread of life onto land.

The bay is a haven for birds, and evening was the most wonderful time to see them. We walked way out onto the tidal flats as night fell, the calls of hundreds of birds echoing around us with a wild freedom. Their melodic cries were cradled by the round bay into a swirling chorus that rose like mist. And oh, the sunsets we saw from the bay! It was as if all the light and color had been sapped out of the grey Scottish sky and distilled into that one corner of the horizon, a blazing radiance saturated with magenta and purple and gold.

Relaxing in the landscape of Findhorn was a great way to ease into our time in the UK. Of course, we were very bad at taking an actually lazy beach vacation and spent a lot of our time at our laptops finally making concrete plans for our time here. Although we kept busy, it was nice to have the learning opportunities of the Findhorn community and lots of beautiful places to walk and explore.