—Netting a Soul
The purpose of the community is the substitution of inner, divine inspiration for a materialistic philosophy of need. Our concern is not really with the politics of what ought to happen with the environment, but with the practice of developing a loving relationship with all things, the environment included. As with every other aspect of life, relating to nature and the environment is a means of expression of love, and a source of inspiration and teaching. For each individual member and visitor, the relationship with the environment is one that grows and changes. As one interacts with others, discusses and absorbs their views and connects with the natural environment here, the idea of relating to 'Gaia' — Mother Earth — as a vibrant being takes on reality.
When I came to the Findhorn Foundation I was a meat eater. As I became more sensitive to energy, I realised the truth of many things that vegetarians tell us, such as that the way animals are slaughtered has a powerful impact on the energy of their meat, transferring a small dose of terror and despair every time it is consumed. I realised that meat eating encourages rheumatic and heart diseases. There are often chemical or hormonal residues in it that are bad for the body. I read that it takes vastly more land to produce meat protein than an equivalent amount of plant protein and in some areas cattle ranching is destroying vital rain forest. I accepted the Indian tradition that meat eating stimulates hyper energy and angry emotions. Slowly, I reduced intake and took to eating wild meat, easily available here. After Chernobyl, even that was contaminated. Yet with all this knowledge, I still liked meat! It took a long while, till having a meatless diet became a way of being, rather than an ideology imposed upon an unwilling appetite. (Since I left Findhorn I have taken to eating meat again, unhappy as I am about it.)
But I still liked fish, and fish and chips in this area are very inviting. I know that the energy of fish has a depressive effect on the identity, yet again I wasn't ready to give it up. It was only in June 1989, during a workshop I was focalising, that I had an experience which changed my feelings much more dramatically than had happened with meat. In the second week of the workshop we went for an outing to the River Findhorn, to explore nature using Native American exercises. One of them involved finding a power spot and looking fixedly at a certain point for a long period. I had no difficulty in finding a power spot quite close to our assembly point. The others had dispersed farther away. The branches of a wild rose bush in front of my spot made a small triangle through which I could see a patch of the river beyond, perhaps a square metre in size. The spot had a strong energy for me; I began to feel warm, comfortable and relaxed. I looked steadily through the triangle of twigs at the rippling river surface. Suddenly a large salmon jumped, exactly in the spot I was looking at. A few minutes later it jumped again. Nowhere else were the fish jumping, only in this tiny spot. It felt as if I had made a real connection with nature energies and an interaction had begun.
Then I began to receive a message, a mixture of inner voice and images. I was shown the open sea, with a school of fish swimming and diving close to the surface, flashing silver in the sun. The words were:
With your human consciousness, you can enter into our experience, learn to feel the movement, the beauty of our expression, still retaining your own awareness. Our lives are not fear-filled, as you may imagine. Of course, we are chased, but we are in balance and harmony with nature and accept our deaths as part of the maintenance of that balance, so we do not fear. But there is one kind of experience we would not wish to inflict on you. That is our relationship with man. Man is not in balance, in harmony. In his lust to catch and destroy us, he knows no limit; his greed only goes on increasing. He is out of balance, and our relationship with him is fearful. We are terrified of him, and our only experience of him is blind panic.
Yet we know that in his primitive consciousness, man is trying to make connection with us. The only way he knows to do it is to incorporate us, endlessly eating us. We are not part of nature to be greedily eaten by humans. You are capable of an entirely different relationship with us; you can enter into our consciousness with your own and dance the seas with us.
You, personally, yearn for us, identify with us. That is why you like to eat fish. Become aware of the glorious adventure we can have together. Humans alone of all created species can enter the consciousness of others with their own, and share their experiences. Stop eating us, learn to love us and enjoy us, then we will lose our terror of you, and you can begin to share the wonder of our being.
The message stopped, leaving me astonished. It was clear and precise. I continued to look, and twice more salmon jumped in the exact square metre of river that was within my vision. What is the nature of such an experience? The rationally minded may describe it as self-hallucination. But why did the fish jump just there? They hadn't jumped in the whole stretch of river for an hour before while we had our lunch, and there seemed nothing special about the particular spot I was watching. Reason tries to shut out that which won't be shut out. Reality is something much more wonderful than reason; sometimes it is altogether awesome, an incredible dance between consciousness, experience and form, in which all are plastic and malleable. One day I will swim with the fish through the sea, jumping and whirling, shining as I turn in the sun, and know it all with a human consciousness. But not while I frequent fish-shops. I didn't feel any desire to eat fish for several years
I have quoted this personal example at some length, because it illustrates a process of change typical of that which takes place in the Findhorn Community. Instead of turning a spiritually desirable goal into a stick with which to beat ourselves, setting ideal against practice, we rather expand our awareness, so that gradually we become a little more Godlike and no longer have any wish to retain the habit in question. It is not as quick as adopting a new 'Green' morality overnight, but it is a valuable basis for the sharing of the energy of new ways of being. Its basis is 'It is so' rather than 'You ought to do'. However, in this particular instance, community reinforcement strengthened my resolve in these matters.
Collectively, our aim is to 'live lightly on the earth'. We seek to move in the direction of demonstrating a human-sustainable / earth-sustainable balance for humanity. What that means is hard to define exactly. We live in and are largely dependent on an economy which definitely does not sustain this balance. We cannot tell what our life would look like if it did, but the question is hypothetical. The only way the global economy will really change is as humanity adopts attunement to the Divine within as its motivation, rather than the stimulation of demand without. As this happens, the Findhorn Community will merge with the wider society and disappear. For now, we operate within the existing situation.
Our ecological consciousness has been partial so far. In common with the general trend, though, it is increasing rapidly at present and an ecology group is meeting regularly. We have never used chemicals on our gardens (with a slight exception in the early period at Cullerne). We have always enjoyed vegetarian cuisine — except for Friday evening fish meals and at Christmas, when turkey is served to those who want it. On the other hand, we do not use totally organic food, which is very difficult to obtain in this area, our own gardens apart; we haven't made a stand for free-range eggs; and we only recently started to use fully biodegradable detergents and cleaning fluids. Up to the present there has been no provision for recycling paper in northern Scotland outside Aberdeen, so we have driven a truckful over there every other month, which costs us more than we receive in payment for the paper. Bottle recycling is just beginning in the local town; we are eager for it.
Many of the buildings we live in are extremely energy-wasteful. Cluny is an old, leaky building, but the cost of wall insulation and double glazing are quite beyond our means. As a start, we are putting modern heat exchangers into the boiler system, which should reduce energy consumption somewhat. A plan for £15,000 - worth of solar panels on Cluny roof is on ice!
In the Park, our caravans are ecological nightmares, marginally insulated tin boxes that puff out polluting smoke all winter. Until we have the funds to build ecologically effective houses, we can't do very much about this. We have, however, installed a heating system in the central guest bungalows which operates off a single boiler, reducing pollution. Several years ago, two well-known American architects, Sim van der Ryn and James Hubbell, were commissioned to provide us with a concept for interesting, energy-efficient housing in a cluster design that would counteract the kind of suburban isolation created by normal houses. They came up with a remarkable design, which became known as the 'Hubbell Bubble'. But some members objected on aesthetic grounds, and there was unease about the response of the Ferro-concrete shells to damp weather. The buildings would also be very expensive.
In the meantime, we are supporting a limited degree of private building — hedged around with restrictions — by members with some funds. We have pioneered house-building using old whisky vats, a supply of which we were able to obtain cheap. A cluster of the small circular buildings is planned; one is complete and two are being built as I write. They are innovative and very attractive for single people. A Park Environment Group (PEG) has had assistance from visiting landscape architects to draw up tentative land use plans. A simpler housing cluster than the Hubbell project, called Bag End (after Tolkyen), for several homes some private with a timber-frame design is planned to start in 1990. It is one of the UKs first bio-housing schemes, though there are several in Europe
Already we have had our own building school for several summers. We subsidise people with building skills and a spiritual inclination to work in the atmosphere of the Findhorn Foundation. They have built an extension to our community centre, a marked improvement to the existing, functional building. Accommodation appropriate to a more permanent community has been long in coming and any modest progress is very welcome.
We also have our first 75 kilowatt windmill, 'Moya', for generating electric power. After a sojourn in pieces opposite the community centre while we wrestled with technological and financial problems of integrating her into the grid system, she now stands and turns. The windmill is an important symbolic step, a gesture towards self-sufficiency. At present it is not economic, as we must pay off the purchase price through higher energy costs; nor will it provide all our energy needs; nor has it been easy to find an appropriate location — it was too noisy to have close, and to site it in the best spot, 800 metres away, has required transformer equipment, adding enormously to the cost.
In none of these respects are we 'world leaders' in alternative technology or housing design, although the 'Hubbell Bubble' would be quite unique. It has been a long process to acquire all the land we need to make the Hall the hub of a developing community, as it would naturally be. But the vision for such a community is slowly being integrated into the consciousness of our members. As it becomes 'part of us', so we will make it real. I believe it is important that we demonstrate Self-discovery in physical form as well as in group education. The Hall is certainly a work of art. On a smaller scale, the nature sanctuary and the barrelhouses give a foretaste of the potential that exists here for ecologically sound, user-friendly, aesthetically stimulating architecture. Everything else is, at present, plan and vision — the biological, non-toxic sewage reclamation system, the organic farm, have been realized, but only after the main body of this book was written.
Since then our gardening work has been a little overshadowed by Dorothy's special communication skills. Everyone thinks that in order to be a 'real' spiritual gardener, they ought to have the same connection; but no one else has been able to get the specific messages that the devas gave Dorothy in those early days. Because of this the real spiritual gardening tradition became somewhat weakened. Some gardeners were cynical about 'nature energies', product of a romantic past, and would not dream of meditating with a compost heap! Also many people, like myself, feel pulled to gardening as a counterbalance to years of intellectual or office work and just as we are becoming proficient in what is a skilled craft, we feel called to other jobs. Nevertheless, a spiritual connection with the cultivation of the gardens was never entirely lost. When it seemed to be in decline in one garden, it sprang up in another. At present, it is strengthening itself once more. It is important to remember that Dorothy's was only one of many ways of being in touch with the energies of nature.
'Spiritual gardening' differs from ordinary organic gardening in that it uses meditation techniques in the garden as an integrated part of the work. There is a lot of evidence that plants are sensitive to energy and sound: they grow towards classical music and away from rock music, for example, and show micro-energetic disturbances in the presence of people with angry or violent energies (cf. Tompkins & Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, 1989 ed.) Here in the Findhorn Community, in addition to ordinary attunement techniques, we use short meditations after planting, on completion of compost heaps, and with individual plants or beds of plants. This kind of gardening requires love and respect for the plants and attunement with them before harvesting or pruning. It helps to develop a sense of the garden as a whole being with its own character. Gradually you as gardener and the garden come into harmony. You begin to have an inner, intuitive sense of what the plants need, what they will accept and what they dislike. They, in their turn, respond to your inner state and your vision for the garden.
In my first year at the Findhorn Foundation I had the good fortune to work with Alan Watson, who was then focalising Cluny Garden. When during a garden workshop Alan presented a slide show of wonderful nature images, I realised that through his photography Alan had come as close to the plant spirits as Dorothy had. His work, exemplified for some years in an annual nature calendar, brings out the energy presence of plants in a unique way. In a supplementary chapter Alan wrote for the second edition of The Findhorn Garden (1988) he describes a situation in which flies attracted his attention by buzzing around him till he realised that a guest was doing something wrong in the garden. It reminds me of a time when I was working with a guest group on a garden project at Cluny, with Alan and Karin Werner.
Karin chose to dig out a rockery in the hill garden to remove the couch grass that had spread under the stones. It was the hottest day of the year, not at all a day to lift plants. As we attuned we all, including some of the guests, had bad feelings about doing the project in the burning sunshine. But we went ahead —18 people thumping into the bed, lifting out all the old established rockery plants in quick succession. It was like tearing off skin. After about three quarters of an hour Karin put a fork through her leg. A prong went in one side of her calf and came out the other. Alan raced her down to the hospital for a tetanus injection, and the rest of us continued working, subdued. At tea break Alan, barefoot, stood on a spent matchstick which penetrated his foot. After the shift had finally finished and the poor plants, wilted and dried, were struggling for life in their bed again, I fell down the steps in front of Cluny and twisted my ankle. Nature spirits can be rough if you invoke them but don't pay attention. It was an excellent, if painful, lesson in attunement in the garden.
Maria Thun, the German anthroposophical gardener, produces an annual calendar showing appropriate seeding and transplanting times according to lunar and planetary influences. This method has been widely used at the Findhorn Foundation, but we have found that meditating with plants can counteract the effects of doing things at 'inauspicious' times. Plants sown on such days will germinate just as well. While it is rare for people to get clear devic messages as Dorothy did, anyone can meditate with plants. It soon brings results.
The main problems in the gardens of the Findhorn Foundation are not so much connected with the plants themselves as with the high turnover of gardeners. Not only are new guests constantly coming to the garden and working for a few mornings or afternoons, but it is often their first experience of this work. In such a case, the gardens almost always give more than they receive.
We teach guests to slow down, to discriminate between cultivated plant and weed, and where to tread. In the process, of course, the wrong things get pulled up, and heavy feet sometimes crush. But the gardens understand their teaching function. It is very important that some of those who have grown up in a concrete landscape begin to reconnect with the earth that is their real support.
We also get some sentimentalists whose fingers tremble at the grasp of a weed. Nature herself is not at all sentimental. Co-creation with nature involves a clear vision, in harmony with local circumstances and in balance with ecological imperatives, and then the firmness to carry it out. This relationship was beautifully demonstrated by Peter Caddy's gardening in the early days of our community.
As our guests make an initial connection with the garden, the various processes of the work — seeding, raking, composting, harvesting, weeding and so on — often seem to mirror aspects of their own lives: changes they need to make, the weeds of old habits they need to get rid of. Spiritual gardening is a remarkable teaching agent, as well as a stress reducer. The educational function of our gardens explains why the great vegetables of the past are no longer evident.
Members rarely spend more than a year or two in the garden. From the garden's point of view it is a great pity, for natural harmonies do not operate to the speedy rhythm of impatient humans. The really exciting results in the early gardens of the Findhorn Community happened after about three seasons. Many of our current gardeners move on just before this, leaving the gardens with withdrawal symptoms. Nevertheless, when a spiritually centred team begins to operate for a modest time period with coherent focalisation, the nature spirits respond.
At the end of 1989, this is happening in the beautiful Cullerne gardens. It can be seen not so much in outsize or unusual plants but in an overall vibrancy, noticeable even to the insensitive. I worked in these gardens for a season in 1984, when they were just beginning to recover from a very disharmonious time among the previous gardeners, who had been trying unsuccessfully to recover the cost of buying the house and land. A group of us began to do healing meditations in the garden every lunchtime instead of going to the sanctuary. We started the first intensive vegetable garden as an alternative to the maximum-production vegetable fields. It was designed like a butterfly's wings with a circular bed of thyme in the centre.
There was considerable opposition to this project from more experienced gardeners, who declared that it couldn't work in the poor soil. The first indication that our approach was succeeding was when an oyster catcher presented us with a beautiful egg, exactly in the centre of the central bed in the new garden. For me it was a clear message of approval from the garden spirits. Then we were provided with an inexhaustible supply of free horse manure from a local equestrian centre. At the end of that year a deer-proof fence was built around the garden, a major job which had a symbolic function in defining the garden boundaries, which I believe to be as valuable for the nature spirits as for us.
The most delightful times I have spent in the Findhorn Foundation gardens were the two years in Drumduan garden working with Ian Sargent. When we started, the garden was very overgrown and neglected. We felt it was crying out for action. We put up a list of 19 major projects that needed doing, and gulped in guests. We tore out old dead broom, planted beech and rhododendron hedges, completely renovated the vegetable garden and expanded the herbaceous border. We lifted five hundred irises from the ornamental iris bed, weeded it and replanted them, created a new herb garden and, by realigning the paths, opened up a superb annual bed, Ian's pride and joy.
This time it was not the nature spirits who were angry at our pace; they thoroughly approved. Several of the house residents, however, felt we were disturbing the atmosphere of genteel decay that had settled over the place. The community environment group was summoned. Luckily such things take a long time to ripen in the Foundation and by the time the group arrived most of the projects were nearly complete. They were scathing. "The place looks like a building site," said someone. They threatened to remove me from focalisation. But now I was able to promise to slow down and tidy up, as the main work had been done. I knew
that the garden needed and wanted the kind of energy we had given it, but I had to learn the lesson of the need for proper communication with humans, even when the attunement with nature was right.
In the winter we thinned about seventy trees from the forests surrounding the gardens. We cut almost all of them by hand. A man kindly offered to help with his power saw, but the garden screamed at the way he did it. Cutting seventy trees with bow saws nearly killed us, but it was worth it. The devas were happy, we talked to each tree before we felled it, and the remaining trees could breathe and expand. Finally, in the early spring, we got agreement to go ahead with the one project that had been denied us the year before — the removal of an old swimming pool filled with rubbish, an eyesore in the centre of the garden. There was just time before the planting season. With a small army of workshop guests we tore it out and installed a sunken garden with a pool and a sheltered sitting area for workshop groups, all surrounded by a rockery We found beautiful yellow sandstone from a demolished house nearby for the rockery.
It was the finishing touch. That summer some of the guests began to see nature spirits in the grounds of Drumduan. The foxgloves grew over two metres tall and it was bliss to go out each morning. The old vibrancy of the early Findhorn Community gardens had returned. That season we started to harvest the snap peas at the end of July. They normally last for about three weeks. In December, we were still harvesting them. With an inch of snow on the ground they continued to flower!
Drumduan House is now the home of the Moray Steiner School. They need a functional garden, with plenty of grass. Our beautiful ornamental gardens have gone, a memory only. One has to learn to let go in the Findhorn Community
With the release of Drumduan garden, three major garden areas are maintained in the Foundation — the grounds of Cluny College, the complex of gardens in the Park, where everything started, and the seven-acre smallholding at Cullerne. Each garden is tended with equal love by its gardeners and has its own character, but perhaps the Park deserves special mention as the originating garden. There is no single Park garden, but several small ones flanking paths between bungalows. Every time you turn a corner or pass a building, a new aspect of the garden opens up — the original vegetable patch, the flower beds outside the sanctuary, the herb garden hidden away between caravans behind the community centre, the rockeries, ponds and shrubs beside the guest bungalows. In front of the Hall is another garden, with ponds and a daffodil lawn set amongst mature trees. In Pineridge hides yet another area, honouring the nature sanctuary with quiet circular lawns set around with ornamental broom, and there is even a second small vegetable plot, formerly a nursery for young trees. The Park gardens are an intricate lace work of different aspects. To appreciate them one needs to wander around and
afterwards visualise the whole, otherwise you may take each part for granted as we often do. Cluny garden lies around its house; the whole of Cullerne garden spreads out before you; but the Park garden only shyly shows you faces of itself — you cannot view it as a whole, except in your mind's eye.
In the wider community are the large grounds of Minton House and Newbold with its old, walled vegetable garden. Erraid, on the west coast, grows vegetables on a large scale too. Large organic production fields are developing at Kinloss and south of Forres in a scheme in which members and local enthusiasts share production.
Back in the middle of the Park, by the old green caravan that was Eileen, Peter and Dorothy's home, is the original garden, flowers mingling with vegetables in different patterns of colour and setting. Standing there after wandering through the mature gardens of the Park, one can remember that in 1962 Peter Caddy put the first spade into the sandy rubbish tip where the family caravan had come to rest. From that spadeful everything else has grown.
To the north of the vegetable garden is a wild area. No one sets foot in it. Each of our gardens has such a place, a symbolic sanctuary for devic retreat when humans become too insufferable. The nature spirits have never been far away from humanity. As we supplement our rationalistic realism with inner consciousness and stop to look, they shyly emerge again:
(Rhubarb Deva, 20th October, 1963. From To Hear the Angels Sing, p.200)
As the train moved north, the plants became more miniaturised, drawing back from the surface, hesitant and understated; shrunken trees, bracing themselves for the blast soon to come, were twisted into unseemly contortions, their strange and submissive shapes bearing witness to their master like stumpy oak-leaved dwarves kneeling to a king. Nowhere were there flowers, fruits and flowering trees, but supposedly Findhorn was growing them all and more. (p. 11)
There is a disclaimer to this in the after word, but the implication that this description refers to the Findhorn area is quite an insult to the local neighbourhood. Forres has won the Scottish Municipal Garden Trophy and the Britain in Bloom award several times, and is almost always placed. Beautiful, mature trees grow everywhere and local people are justly proud of their gardens. The coasts of the Moray Firth have been good farming land for centuries, and the region grows the northernmost wheat in the British Isles. Rainfall is low and hours of sunshine are many, with delightful autumn and winter weather. We certainly have a fair amount of wind, with occasional gales, but nowhere near as much as the west coast of Wales or the English Lake District. A rich flora and fauna inhabit the charming river valleys of the Spey and Findhorn rivers.
Perhaps Paul Hawken was trying to make the achievements of the early gardeners of the Findhorn Foundation seem more impressive. They do not need such dubious bolstering. Although the Park garden began with very poor soil, the local area as a whole has a quiet richness in which natural energies are very easily perceived. Roc pointed this out back in the sixties, directing us to the special glades and corners of the Findhorn river valley, from Dulsie Bridge and Ardclach to Randolph's Leap and Sluie Walk, places where we take our guests to learn contact with the energies behind the forms of natural life. At Randolph's Leap the ancient beech trees reach magnanimously down to the visitors, encouraging small humans to give up their pretensions and abandon themselves to hug the thoughtful grey bark (as long as no one's looking, of course), while the water continues to shape the rocks to its own forms in sensuous cascades.
Even in the commercial pine plantations there is an abundance of mosses and heathers, blaeberries and fungi, the latter a rich harvest for the connoisseur, since local people tend to be suspicious of any but the supermarket variety of mushrooms! Just south of us, across the dunes, is an eight-mile-long sandy beach, with water luckily cold enough to inhibit commercial development, while further along the coast are miles of beautiful natural rock formations. Everywhere, nature calls to be recognised; part of our work is not merely to honour it in its beauty, but to make use of the gift of our location to help ourselves and our visitors to reharmonise with the energies of a living planet. This kind of experience is the deepest ecological training one can have. Many of our programmes include an element of nature experience. Civilisation has strayed far from a loving appreciation of nature; it is high time to return. The remnants of the 'earth peoples', the Native Americans and the Australian aboriginals, have been able to share some of their gifts just in time. For most of us in the Findhorn Community 'living lightly on the earth' first involves the personal discovery of the earth and its energies by seeking, in quietness, to resonate with the moods and expressions of nature in the countryside around Findhorn.
In 1978, two Dutch families who owned an island off the west coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides offered us its custodianship for ten months of the year. Since then a small community of about ten members has flourished there, living in cottages originally built for lighthouse men and their families in the 1860s. The group is self-financing and, like all of us, its members share their lives with guests. On Erraid visitors experience a way of living much closer to self-sufficiency than the rest of the community can provide. Candles and stained glass are made. The large organic gardens, fertilised largely by seaweed, produce almost enough vegetables for all, and cows and hens provide milk and eggs. Some fish are caught in the summer. Other provisions are sent from the Findhorn Foundation on our weekly bus run, an 11-hour round trip through some of the finest scenery in Scotland, including two ferry crossings each way.
The Erraid family, as we call them, have established their own rhythm of life, adapted to the demanding natural conditions on the island. The climate is quite severe and the island is subject to ferocious gales. The owners have been keen that the natural character of the island should be retained, a view that we heartily share. But what is that natural character? Until recently sheep have roamed and grazed Erraid freely. What would the island look like if the sheep did not strip its vegetation cover so efficiently year after year?
The owners agreed first to the planting of a small area of fenced forest in one of the few more sheltered spots. This small forest, mainly of pine, with young birch and oak, is growing bravely amidst the storms. Now the owners have supported the fencing of the entire north-west corner of the island, some 14% of the land area, for an ecological reconstitution project. The fencing was completed in 1989. After just six sheepless weeks the wild, mountainous area blossomed with abundant wildflowers released from the cycle of annual culling. The next step is the planting of 4,000 native trees — rowans, willows, oaks and birches — to provide the basis for natural regeneration. This is a practical project in reconnection with nature; humans and nature are acting as co-creators in the regeneration of a natural wilderness.
For the Erraid family, life is demanding. The one new building, a small sanctuary set on a hill overlooking the old Abbey on the nearby Isle of Iona, gives a spiritual focus to the hardworking life of the island. For those who want to explore a relatively simple lifestyle and who appreciate wild country, spacious mountain fringed skies and island-studded seas, Erraid is sheer romance. The re-creation of a natural landscape, for its own sake and for human visitors, is a symbolic healing of the planet we have so mishandled.
Alan Watson was central in inspiring the regeneration project on Erraid. He is also working on a potentially much larger scheme to regenerate an area of the old Caledonian Forest in the northern Highlands. Northern and western Scotland is rightly regarded as one of the great beauty spots of Europe. Yet it was denuded of its original forest cover in the 18th century by sheep and deer farming and only 1% remains. In areas such as Glen Affric, where a small patch of forest is preserved, the real Scottish Highland landscape can be experienced; it cries out to express itself to the world once more. Alan envisages the regeneration of this exquisite environment in a 600-square-mile area north of Glen Affric. Some local landowners are already interested, and the first tree-planting parties have gone out, using plastic sheathing in the absence, as yet, of fencing. Without the protection provided by fencing, deer and sheep eliminate young tree growth. Alan's vision has been wholeheartedly supported by the Findhorn Foundation, but the project is far too large for our own resources. At present, the Forestry Commission, the Nature Conservancy Council and some private landowners are supporting pilot fencing projects. Natural regeneration can be supplemented by the cultivation of local seed in protected tree nurseries. A group, Trees for Life, has been formed around the project and has purchased a project house, Plodda, in a nearby village.
Scotland has, as yet, no National Park. The area where this forest regeneration work has started, which is of outstanding natural beauty and very marginal agricultural value, would be ideal for one. Through this project we enter new fields of activity, expanding a spiritual view of human relationship with nature into the wider society. It is an innovative, inspiring kind of outreach.