DC and I are on holiday in the Scottish highlands staying in a wee modern bothy on the north shore of the Moray firth. Located right on the sea front and facing southeast the views are fantastic and ever changing. When conditions are clear and depending upon the light it is possible to make out the three wind turbines to the west of the village of Findhorn. These are part of the wider Findhorn Foundation (FF) community asset and as such have a wider resonance to those of us who are now digesting the news that the FF has sadly come to the conclusion that no economically viable future exists as business. Based upon guest programmes and only just restarted after the closures of the pandemic the sums have not added up for sometime and despite attempts to adjust to the present situation the figures continue to decline, the impulse seems to have moved on or dissipated and thus the staff are now to undergo the process of redundancy.
As I scan the distant shoreline on the other side of the firth I gradually work out the locations of various familiar places. Almost ten years have passed since I was living and working in the FF and traversing the landscape between Inverness and Elgin. Residing in Cluny (the FF's main guest space constructed in the nineteenth century as a hydropathic hotel in the small town of Forres) I would spend time alone, with friends and with DC making my self at home in this part of Scotland while still maintaining roots in Newcastle. DC would travel up and down and seated at the table in Cluny lounge with his laptop, work on his papers and books whilst trying to make sense of the FF. I'd be involved with a number of built environment projects and all the while living the FF life. From the middle of my Experience Week in the FF in January 2006 it had made sense to me; it was many things to many people and you could make of it as much or as little as you needed. There was an impulse here of transformation and healing, of play and growth, of rest and renewal, of the interplay of being and doing. It was always amorphous. And now it leaves its legacy and slips away to be replaced by some container to hold whatever assets, responsibilities and functions remain to be held. And so it is that the three hour round trip from this side of the firth to the Findhorn / Forres side has been to see friends who were part of the FF in a context of much change.
At night the lights on the distant shore come and go according to conditions. I'm reminded of many times over decades in the Lake district looking across to the opposite shore and seeing a light which seemed to offer warmth and shelter, respite from the darkness. Such lights often seem to generate the sense that over there is somehow more satisfactory and so it's as well to look around and see the lights in which one is sitting; those very lights which from over there on the other shore evoke the same callings. We are are pulled back and forth across the landscape of our existence in this way by dukkha. Yet there is more to this than simple unhelpful craving and suffering. There is the calling to live, to experience and ultimately perhaps for that to include awareness of the 'space' holding our life and the interconnectedness of all. Yes we have our projections and fantasies our cravings and desires. Those lights on the other shore can be the greener grass of any field. Living in communities such as the FF and one's relating to any amorphous nature can be like the madness of a love affair where one inhabits a landscape made out of a mix of one's deep and often hidden desires and the apparent although often short lived glimpses of solid form in the amorphous field. As is much of our lives. We can be deluded and blind to what is. BUT, can we ever see what is through anything other than this interplay of shore and the other?
Yesterday, the view across the firth was clear and to the west in the distance off a ridge approximately in the direction of Inverness could be seen the formation of clouds. Slowly rolling into formation, bright in the light and moving east. There was something poetic and evocative in the slow steady movement. I suspect that scenes like these bring us to an awareness of being and doing and the deeper desire to be in ourselves. There's usually a slight melancholy yet also a peace to them. The view across the firth is often redolent with evocative metaphor - other shore, stillness and movement, light and dark, the familiar and barely grasped... Being and ultimately non-being. Death, an inevitable part of life is a good reminder that our cravings are not always unhelpful- without them what would be? And so amongst this view there is the force of life. Manifest in each experience yet often hidden by various forms of discomfort there is the starkness of existence.
During the week DC sent me a link to an interview with Chris Packham. I read it with interest and noted that his descriptions of growing up as someone who would in adult life be diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum mirrored some of my own experience. Mainly I think of experiencing the world and life as or from a vantage point somewhat different to that of society's / one's peers'. In my own case the illuminating element is not autism but homosexuality. Even before puberty many same sex attracted people know they are different and so what is being revealed here is not just simple sexual craving but a sensibility, a 'colour' in our basic desire to be, the 'shape' of our wider erotic impulse. This can give us an almost shaman like ability to see the water that the straight fish can't see. I suspect Chris Packham's autism may have given him a different yet similar faculty. Maybe we might spend less time with diagnosis of 'conditions' and more time accepting that people are just very complex and simply ought not to be restricted into predetermined boxes of how to be. It was then, with interest that I heard on the news of the death of Nick Hitchon who had been part of the Seven Up TV documentary series which followed the lives of fourteen people. I was drawn to watch some of it again and so DC and I found it on YouTube and watched one part of the 63 UP catch up from 2019. I found the energy and evolving shape of the participants lives moving. And what came to mind was the amazing ingenuity in life.
Our other bit of 'TV' was to watch Brokeback Mountain. We'd both seen this at the time of its release in 2006 and had forgotten all but the basic plot. It's a moving and sad depiction of two men trying to find a way to be in a society poisoned by toxic masculinity. Neither of the men have been brought up in a loving and supportive home and struggle to make a living as best they can. They have little to no way to understand and deal with the reality of their love and sexual attraction for each other in a society which totally forbids it. The sadness is that although their love sustains over decades of short periods of a few days together snatched secretively out of their lives as 'straight' partners and parents they're not able to flower into the beautiful couple we might imagine. Aspects of their being, both as individuals and as a couple remain nipped in the bud. At bottom we know there is a sanctity in this flower and that society has committed a sacrilege. It is as if those clouds described above were never to roll off the ridge, the beauty of the movement and its revealing of the stillness were forbidden. It isn't just the life that is snuffed but also the very space in which it would have been. Reading reviews of the film I see that there has been debate about the sexuality of the protagonists and the intentions of the writer and it occurs to me that what those asking such questions fail to see is that the point being made is that the men simply have no context for their relationship. The society in which they find themselves totally prohibits it. The toxicity of homophobic, maladjusted masculinity has ensured that no space exists in which the flower can open and as the writer reminds us 'if you can't fix it you have to stand it'. It is then with celebration, that I can say that generations of 'different' people have worked and made it possible not just to 'stand it' but to enable it to flower.
The early part of the week here was busy with calls about our house move and finally after many date changes the exchange of contracts, with visiting friends and with settling in and taking in. Yesterday and today we've consciously decided to just be more still. In our minds are thoughts of the ongoing journey and we are grateful that friends remain with us and we remain with them. It has been a couple of the most frightening years for me and these reflections help me see that there is the fear life may take away from me the opportunity to see before I reach the great other shore that which I so dearly long to see. Namely both the fullness of life and its very ground.
