Back from Erraid

Hi all,

We got back to Findhorn yesterday evening - there was no internet access on Erraid, so sorry for the delay responding to emails and such.  Pictures of the trip are up: http://picasaweb.google.com/colinkeegan (the albums are in reverse chronological order so the first album is at the bottom right).

The week on Erraid was wonderful.  I'll start with a little geography and history to set the scene:

Erraid is a tidal island (at low tide you can walk onto the island) off the coast of the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides - the islands off the west coast of Scotland.  The area is pretty rugged and mountainous, and provides a striking contrast with the water, which looks like the Caribbean - clear and turquoise (a tad colder though!)

The settlement on Erraid is one street, which was built to house the families of the lighthouse keepers on the Scottish west coast in the 1872.  It was built by Robert Louis Stevenson's father (the Stevensons were very involved in building the lighthouses), and the island is featured in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, "Kidnapped."  There's a story that as a teenager Robert sat on the Wishing rock at the high point of the island and wished to become a famous author - the rest is history.

From Erraid you can see the uninhabited island of Staffa which has rock formations similar to Giant's causeway in Ireland and is home to Fingal's cave which was the inspiration for Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture.  On a clear day it is also rumored that you can see Ireland - apparently the more whiskey you have the clearer Ireland becomes! haha

Erraid is also right next to the Isle of Iona - the ancient burial place of Scottish Kings (including Macbeth!)  It is also the sight of a monastery built by St. Columba in the 6th century which began the spread of Christianity into Scotland.  It is also said to be the origin of the Book of Kells - the "illuminated manuscript" of celtic calligraphy and art containing the four gospels of the New Testament.  That's far more history than I was expecting off the windswept western coast of Scotland!

Erraid itself was amazing!  The first two days we were able to just explore the island - rocky hills and boggy valleys, a cave and the Hanging Rock (http://picasaweb.google.com/colinkeegan/HangingRockAndTheCave).  We saw seals off the coast (in a small bay called "The Caribbean") and a LOT of sheep.  On Tuesday we were able to take part in sheep roundup, where about twenty people formed a line that walked across the island herding the sheep in front of us.  Shepherding never sounded like a fun job to me, but it was a great experience - a nice stroll (and scrambling over some rocks and crags) across the island.

On Wednesday we got to go to Iona.  We saw the small church Macbeth was buried in, although there is no marker on the grave.  We also got to see the inside of the Abbey, where Catie and Sarah sang Amazing Grace.  Catie has a family connection to the island - her parents went there on their honeymoon and her grandmother's ashes are scattered off the coast.  Catie had sung Amazing grace at her grandmother's funeral in California, so this gave her a nice opportunity to honor her grandmother.  It was quite beautiful.

The rest of the week we spent working in the gardens and repainting the windows for the community's 30th birthday, which is coming up in August.  (The island is currently owned by a Dutch family, which lets the island be used by the Findhorn community for 11 month out of the year.  This August is the 30th anniversary of the community's connection to the Island.)

We left in the afternoon yesterday, at lowtide, so we were able to drive off the island in the back of the tractor!  (Aside from the tractor, I'm pretty sure that last week was the only time in my life that I had been on a piece of land without a single automobile on it).  The trip to and from the island took us past Loch Ness and Ben Nevis (the highest peak in the UK).  It was a beautiful ride and a great week!

I'm not all that excited to be back at Findhorn now (facing five weeks of papers and final projects), but it should still be good.  Time is flying!  Now I have some reading to get to and a paper to write...

I'll check in again soon.  Hope you're all doing well!!!

Colin

Hi all,

The conference is over, and it's kinda nice to be back to a regular routine.

There was a lot of interesting stuff in the conference, but that week was a bit of blur.  I'm still processing everything we did.

I'm finding that I'm learning a lot more from just getting to know the other people in my group than from anything we're doing in class.  Its disappointing that most of the classes aren't more rewarding, but I'm glad that the time I'm spending with the people here is so valuable.  It's the only part of this trip where I feel like I'm actually learning from experience, which is what the whole program should be about, but where it often falls short.  Group Dynamics class is pretty good though, because that applies directly to living as part of a group - which is what we're experiencing firsthand here.

We're going to Erraid next week - a small island off the west coast of Scotland, and I'm looking forward to that.

Sorry this was so short - gotta go to class!

Colin

Conference and Chaos

Hi all,

Things have been pretty crazy around her for the past week or so.  There's a conference on energy going on this entire week that we're attending as part of our program.  It's basically 9am to 9pm or later each day, with breaks for lunch and tea.  The workshops are intense too.  The beginning of the week was focused on introspection - what people can do personally to contribute to a more sustainable world, and it got pretty emotional for some people.  The rest of the week will be focused on some of the broader global issues about sustainability.

It's been very odd for our group, because this conference is following on the heels of an extremely bizarre weekend.  Last Friday, one of the girls on my program found out that one of her best friends committed suicide while studying abroad in India.  What makes things really weird is that the next day, another girl on my program found out that one of her friends also committed suicide on the same day as the other girl.

Finding out about both back to back has been a bit too much to process, and has brought up some emotional stuff for other people in our group.  It has been an extremely intense week for all of us.  The two girls who lost their friends are doing remarkably well though, and today (for me at least) started to feel like things are beginning to get "normal" - or at least slow down a bit.

All that going on, it has been hard to focus on the conference.  There are a lot of speakers and workshops and activities, which has caused a bit of an information overload on top of the emotional overload in our group.  A good night's sleep last night really helped though.  I've gone to a few talks today about localizing energy production and forming "transition towns" away from a petroleum based way of life, which were really interesting.  Apparently, this conference is a bigger deal than most of us realized here - one girl's parents read about it in a newspaper back in the U.S.  There are also some well-known people in the sustainability movement here (although I'd be surprised if anyone knows of them, seeing as I had only heard of one or two and had to be refreshed on who they were): Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Joanna Macy, and Richard Olivier (Lawrence Olivier's son), among others.

The last surviving founder of Findhorn, Dorothy Maclean, is also here.  She spoke on the first day of the conference.  She spoke a lot about nature and the spiritual origins of Findhorn, but she also referenced Daniel Quinn in her talk (author of "Ishmael" and "The Story of B," for anyone who knows of them), so that was pretty cool.

At the end of last week, we also had a class in permaculture, which is basically practical-application sustainability: green building, planting edible landscapes, efficient use of energy, etc.  The class we had focused on gardening (using cardboard and straw as mulch to prevent weeds, and cutting holes in the cardboard to plant specific crops so that the crops don't die with the rest of the weeds).  There are so many great ideas and techniques involved in permaculture, that I wish the whole semester was devote to it - actually doing what we're learning.  Permaculture certification may be my next step after completing this semester.

I'm sure there's more going on at the moment that I could mention, but that seems like enough for now.  It has been an exceedingly bizarre and somewhat overwhelming week, in different ways, but as of right now, things are ok.  I'll write another post after the conference is over - hopefully things will remain calm-enough until then.

Col

Welcome!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the new blog!

I can't believe I've been here for a month already!  It's been a busy month.  We're now fully immersed in the main part of the program: classes, reading, writing, work shifts, etc.  I'm working in the gardens twice a week and the rest of the time is mostly devoted to classes and class-related activities.  Everyone in my program is taking the same four class: worldviews and consciousness, applied sustainability, group dynamics, and a class that combines "creative expression through the arts" and a service-learning project.  It's a constantly changing program (which is why creativity and service learning are part of the same class at the moment), but everything relates in some way back to sustainability, so it doesn't matter that much what gets taught where.

My favorite class is group dynamics, because so far it has been the most "hands-on" in the sense that we're actually practicing what we're learning.  Last week, part of the class was to hold a discussion on the aspects of the program that we think could be improved, and there was a class-wide agreement that the program as a whole could be much more hands-on than it has been so far.  Right now, we're in the process of coming up with ideas to do something about this for the rest of the semester.  It remains to be seen what will happen, but I think just the fact that we have the opportunity to adjust the program to suit us better says a lot about the program.  In this sense, it is a "living education" in that student feedback continually shapes how the program is run.  I'll post more about this as the situation develops.

I'm also excited about our service learning project, which will be to renovate an old semi-underground bunker left over from when the ecovillage was part of the neighboring Royal Air Force base.  It's a pretty small space, and we'll be able to enlist help from the rest of the community, so we should be able to do something nice with it.  Two of the main ideas we have for it so far are as a place to grow organic mushrooms (if we can find someone who knows what they're doing in the community who can take it over once we leave) or to turn it into an anger/stress release sanctuary - basically a soundproof space to go and scream.  (Findhorn isn't by any means an "angry" place, but it couldn't hurt to have a safe place to let out some stress when community living, research papers, or the crappy exchange rate between the dollar and the pound get to bee too much ;)

I've also noticed an interesting disconnect between the spiritual side of the community and the "eco" side.  Some people are here because it's a spiritual community and others are here because it's an ecovillage.  The underlying theme of the whole place is "awareness" - either spiritual awareness, or ecological/environmental awareness, but both halves don't always seem that aware of the other.  It's ironic, because the two types of awareness have the potential to support each other (a spiritual sense of interconnectedness with the world supporting a sense of environmental responsibility, and an environmental awareness supporting that spiritual awareness).  A lot of people here do understand this, but it doesn't always play out so nicely in daily life.  (As an example, there are people who will drive their cars the three blocks to the community center for dinner when it's raining).  Like our program, the ecovillage is a work in progress.

But overall, everything is going well.  I've put more pictures up since my last email:  http://gallery.mac.com/colinkeegan#gallery  and will post some more soon.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

Colin