Sorry I haven't posted in awhile! It's really busy here, surprisingly. We have class only Tuesday - Friday, but usually Tuesday and Thursday are completely scheduled up morning to night and Wednesday and Friday have morning and afternoons scheduled. Monday we have work departments in the afternoons, and it feels like all the free time is sucked away into work or KP or meals or planning things to do in the rest of the free time. Usually this means dancing or watching documentaries together. I'm not sure how many I have watched so far. And I think I really do dance every day. The homework doesn't feel like it is too intense, but if I think ahead to all my big projects (one in every class) it starts to get overwhelming. I've been trying to really get started on my projects but I'm still so excited about my daily practice of creative expression that a lot of my time/brain power ends up getting sucked into that.
This past Saturday was one of the best times I've had here so far. We all, at lunch on Saturday, decided that we really wanted to cook for ourselves for Saturday night dinner. For us, this meant a lot of steps: signing out of dinner so the cooks could adjust quantities, getting passwords and keys into the other food sheds (besides the one where we get all our oatcakes and apples), being aware of all the different dietary needs in our group, coming up with enough ingredients for some semblance of a dish, preparing it, and organizing enough dinner utensils for everyone to join together in one house. I was prepared for it to be really shabby, thrown together, and our house opted to just make a raw dessert (apples, soaked sunflower seeds and raisins, dried coconut, and cinnamon, delicious!) and bring some food from the Commnity Center (CC, where we eat all our other meals), just to make sure we would all have enough food. I was blown away though, as everyone prepared loads of delicious food, all with an awareness of who could eat what, and spent money (not very much at all) and spent all afternoon baking spelt bread and EVERYTHING you could possible think of. We set up our classroom in a big, clean circle and attuned and everyone shared what they were bringing and what was in it and we all made toasts and there was so so much joy. It was one of the first times we have Really felt like a family to me.
After the dinner, which disappeared pretty quickly, we all laid on the floor together, having of course all eaten way too much, and told stories and played games and sang and laughed for a long, long time. And then, of course, we danced. Not all of us were ready, so it was just a small group of dancers for a long time until Seth and Matt came back from an excursion and told us there was a 70s dance party happening in the Universal Hall. It was hilarious and strange. It ended up being a 16-year-old's birthday party. Everyone was dressed in really intense costumes and it was kind of cool to see a bunch of teenagers partying it up in Findhorn. Of course, because we are in Findhorn, everyone seemed to have been invited, and so every once in awhile I would see who I thought was a teenager in a minidress and platform, knee high boots, and it would turn out to be a forty-five year old. Also, I'm not going to lie, we kind of got that party started. We were riding the high of just discovering 5 rhythms dancing and coming out of a night full of love and happiness, so we were ready for anything, and at the party it was a bunch of self-conscious teenagers - though it's true that they were quickly losing that self-consciousness through alcohol consumption (remember they were sixteen and it was a party with tons of adults in attendance as well...Europe?). In any case, Tim hurt his hip from his incredible dancing and could hardly walk the next day, but we all agreed any physical pains we may have suffered at the dance (it really was WILD) were completely worth it.
This morning I ended up skipping the session on clowning for Creativity class because I woke up feeling like I could throw up a hundred times and it would never be enough. I may have accidentally eaten something with wheat (which I have discovered I am genuinely allergic to) or dairy in the CC last night, which would explain it. But I didn't throw up because I have a phobia of it, which I learned this morning is called Emetophobia. So sometimes when I am nauseated I start to have little panic attacks, because I am irrationally afraid of throwing up/don't know how. It was a weird morning. I mostly tried to fall back asleep and hoped it would go away after some more rest. It seems to have subsided, but I'm going to be really careful about what I eat. Most of us here are taking this kind of care and attention with our bodies and food and it's really amazing to see what everyone is learning about their health. I'm sad I couldn't even go over to the class to see what it was all about, but I'm glad to have taken care of myself, and I've just been relaxing in bed listening to Greg Brown for awhile now, which makes me have a lot of good memories of family and friends and home.
Mom and Dad are in Kenya right now, I'm sending them lots of love, and you should too. Patrick has a broken hand from playing Ultimate, which makes him a badass. I have a new first cousin? I don't know what relation she is to me, but my cousin Elaine had a beautiful baby girl named Taylor. I can't wait to see her. I can't wait to see my family! I had a dream about the Indianapolis airport the other night. I'm not ready to go home though, I still have so much to do here and love it tremendously, and wouldn't really rather be anywhere else in the world at this point in my life. Ecovillage living is amazing and I wish you could all come see.
Love,
Nora
P.S. I put new pictures up too!
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Gratitude
I love it here. I really, really love it here. I can't believe that this is my life, and that I am in a space that facilitates my learning SO much about mysef, and that I get to keep that knowledge and these experiences with me forever. I am so lucky. I am so very privileged and blessed and lucky to be here and with these people and in this place. It is incredible. Thank you.
Saturday was the eclipse. Charlotte and Page and I made it out the bonfire really late; we got extra lost on the way there and ended up wandering through the dunes for over an hour. The journey there was definitely the best part of the night though, as we were stumbling about for the better part of the three hour eclipse process and got to see it from lots of different angles. The night was perfectly clear and the moon turned a deep, vibrant red, and when it was mostly eclipsed the stars were so, so bright. It was like being in a planetarium. The stars were ALL around us. Isn't it awful that I feel I have to liken the experience of the real thing to a simulation to convey how amazing it is? It makes me so sad to know that the clarity with which I saw the sky that night was nothing like many people have ever seen. We saw the Pleiades, which I've never seen before knowing what they are, and when we got down to the water we all laid down together on the sand and watched the moon come back out.
Sunday we mostly did homework, and a bunch of us got together and watched a documentary about Hugo Chavez and the coup in Venezuela surrounding him in 2002. It was intense. I love that people here just plan these things independently in class and most everyone will show up and all pile together onto couches and beds and get really, really into it and have long conversations about it afterwards.
Monday all we had was work departments, and I got to go to Cluny gardens once again and work with Sverre and Christine. It is the best thing in the world to be working there. Caitlin and I were feeling like we wanted to stay in so we washed sick plants in the greenhouse with toothbrushes and organic biodegradable lavender soap and water. They had little insects on their undersides, so we took them off and got rid of all the sap that had accumulated because of their sicknesses. We ended up singing a lot of Leonard Cohen songs and some Unitarian hymns to keep our energy up, and poured all our love into the plants. I'm starting to feel the "work is love in action" motto in my life here. It's so easy, when all types of work and the people who do them are respected. I don't know how I'll go back to doing work where we don't all attune together first and do a check-in and sharing of where we all are. It all seems so necessary and natural.
Today we had creativity class. We danced the 5 rhythms (which we call a wave) twice and I absolutely loved it. I thought the euphoria of being in a place like this had all worn off but I keep getting falling back into it. We did a bunch of dance exercises before we started, lots of things like gliding/rolling all over one another and funny partner improvisational dances, and loosening up all our body parts. The wave is a form of dance and I guess spiritual practice where you dance through these five rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. We did a 20 minute wave inside with music, and having never really danced before, ever, besides ridiculous dancing at parties, it felt surprisingly natural and safe. I wasn't nervous at all and I can feel a lot of my old silly self-consciousness breaking down already. Later we danced a little shorter wave outside, with no music, and it was kind of incredible to me how different the two experiences were. I guess I really have never danced for any extended period of time without music before, and I really felt in touch with my body and was just flowing through the wave. There are 5 rhythms dances twice a week, and a lot of us are planning on going, as well as having our own waves most days of the week. I might have to switch my daily practice to 5 rhythms dancing.
Tonight eight of us went to Melissa's house, which she shares with seven other people, to cook and eat a meal together. She ended up not being able to stay but we cooked a delicious, gingery potato leek soup with Hannah (who led our sacred dance in the first week). It was so nice to cook a meal and sit around a big table in a warm kitchen and be a family. We eat potatoes and leeks most days but it was better to cook for ourselves and it all just felt really special. After that we went to a presentation about Trees for Life, which is a great organization that we will be doing some work for in May. It was nice but very, very long. So now I am here. And now it is time for bed. I got a sweet letter from my best friend today and I got into a letter writing frenzy as a result. If you want one give me a holler.
Love,
Nora
Saturday was the eclipse. Charlotte and Page and I made it out the bonfire really late; we got extra lost on the way there and ended up wandering through the dunes for over an hour. The journey there was definitely the best part of the night though, as we were stumbling about for the better part of the three hour eclipse process and got to see it from lots of different angles. The night was perfectly clear and the moon turned a deep, vibrant red, and when it was mostly eclipsed the stars were so, so bright. It was like being in a planetarium. The stars were ALL around us. Isn't it awful that I feel I have to liken the experience of the real thing to a simulation to convey how amazing it is? It makes me so sad to know that the clarity with which I saw the sky that night was nothing like many people have ever seen. We saw the Pleiades, which I've never seen before knowing what they are, and when we got down to the water we all laid down together on the sand and watched the moon come back out.
Sunday we mostly did homework, and a bunch of us got together and watched a documentary about Hugo Chavez and the coup in Venezuela surrounding him in 2002. It was intense. I love that people here just plan these things independently in class and most everyone will show up and all pile together onto couches and beds and get really, really into it and have long conversations about it afterwards.
Monday all we had was work departments, and I got to go to Cluny gardens once again and work with Sverre and Christine. It is the best thing in the world to be working there. Caitlin and I were feeling like we wanted to stay in so we washed sick plants in the greenhouse with toothbrushes and organic biodegradable lavender soap and water. They had little insects on their undersides, so we took them off and got rid of all the sap that had accumulated because of their sicknesses. We ended up singing a lot of Leonard Cohen songs and some Unitarian hymns to keep our energy up, and poured all our love into the plants. I'm starting to feel the "work is love in action" motto in my life here. It's so easy, when all types of work and the people who do them are respected. I don't know how I'll go back to doing work where we don't all attune together first and do a check-in and sharing of where we all are. It all seems so necessary and natural.
Today we had creativity class. We danced the 5 rhythms (which we call a wave) twice and I absolutely loved it. I thought the euphoria of being in a place like this had all worn off but I keep getting falling back into it. We did a bunch of dance exercises before we started, lots of things like gliding/rolling all over one another and funny partner improvisational dances, and loosening up all our body parts. The wave is a form of dance and I guess spiritual practice where you dance through these five rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. We did a 20 minute wave inside with music, and having never really danced before, ever, besides ridiculous dancing at parties, it felt surprisingly natural and safe. I wasn't nervous at all and I can feel a lot of my old silly self-consciousness breaking down already. Later we danced a little shorter wave outside, with no music, and it was kind of incredible to me how different the two experiences were. I guess I really have never danced for any extended period of time without music before, and I really felt in touch with my body and was just flowing through the wave. There are 5 rhythms dances twice a week, and a lot of us are planning on going, as well as having our own waves most days of the week. I might have to switch my daily practice to 5 rhythms dancing.
Tonight eight of us went to Melissa's house, which she shares with seven other people, to cook and eat a meal together. She ended up not being able to stay but we cooked a delicious, gingery potato leek soup with Hannah (who led our sacred dance in the first week). It was so nice to cook a meal and sit around a big table in a warm kitchen and be a family. We eat potatoes and leeks most days but it was better to cook for ourselves and it all just felt really special. After that we went to a presentation about Trees for Life, which is a great organization that we will be doing some work for in May. It was nice but very, very long. So now I am here. And now it is time for bed. I got a sweet letter from my best friend today and I got into a letter writing frenzy as a result. If you want one give me a holler.
Love,
Nora
Saturday, March 3, 2007
A dance party every day
On Thursday we had "Service Learning: Exploring Self and Community through the Arts" class. That is a ridiculous name. It's really just Creativity class. We already have a lot to be thinking about, lots of projects and activities. Some of the things we are going to be doing are dancing the 5 rhythms, a workshop on clowning and physical theater as activism, pottery, weaving, sharing creative skills with one another (I'm sharing knitting, and I hope that my friend Matt will teach me guitar), creative writing, making big portfolios that connect all our learning here from all our classes and experiences, and a big group exhibition and presentation for the whole Findhorn community at the end. I'm thinking about doing a bunch of artistic identity mapping work for my portfolio, either just on myself or on our group as a whole, on assumptions and identities and how they manifest in groups and group behaviors. It's all a lot clearer in my mind, I'm sure I'll show you pictures as I get further along. It's really fabulous for me to be in a creative, artistic class and not feel so much fear and anxiety. I'm still nervous, because I haven't ever really felt like I was an artistic person, but this class is more about exploring our own creativity and working through the creative blocks that we all have and developing trust in ourselves and knowledge that all of the art we create is valid and beautiful.
Then Friday we had Worldviews and Consciousness (WC). I mostly wasn't excited about it because we had to read this book I have a really hard time with, A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber, who I affectionately renamed Man-Face (do you see why? Now no one here refers to the book as anything but Man-Face), is absurd and says most things with a lot of unnecessarily difficult and confusing and academic words. It's a very inaccessible book, and he has weird weird ideas about gender equality but I like some of the other concepts. It takes me 5 minutes to read a page though. I feel most times like the whole thing is just so pretentious. But the class was alright, the teacher is the most formal, but the assignments are still very much about personal development and learning and far removed from traditional school. The best thing about WC class is that our biggest assigment is developing a daily practice and journaling about it. My daily practice is working on creative exploration, I got a few books and am very excited about it all. Other people are doing things like yoga, mindfulness meditation, T'ai Chi, and dream interpretation. School is kind of fun here.
The castle I mentioned we were going to in my last entry was beautiful, I put up pictures on my flickr website. You can read about it here. We climbed on it and then had teatime and a Bard told us the story of Tristan and Isolde. Apparently we are going to be doing restoration and planting trees in the forest that Tristan and Isolde ran away to, the Caledonian Forest. The Caledonian Forest is also where Merlin lived, in the Legends of King Arthur. This place is wild.
Yesterday at lunch Sarah found a caterpillar crawling on her plate under her salad. Kirk then ate it, without a dare or anything. It reminded me of my Dad, and when he made us go to a bug-eating festival. I think Kirk ate the bug because he misses eating meat. I just miss sugar. I ate some apple crisp the other day, because it was a special occasion, and it didn't make me feel bad or anything, I just felt so happy because it tasted like granola and home.
Today Page, Dana, Sarah and I all went to Forres for the day. All there is in Forres is thrift stores and pharmacies. It's very strange. We were so overwhelmed, because there was so much stuff there! (There wasn't really. There was one main street and it was 3 blocks long.) We also had a really hard time crossing the street because in Findhorn everyone just walks wherever they want and cars just wait. Also driving on the other side of the road is really hard to get used to. There is a free bus between Forres and the Park (because part of Findhorn, Cluny, is in Forres) every day at 5 or so different times, but by the time we wanted to leave, we had to take the public bus, which is bright blue and neon orange on the inside. I Love Scotland.
Tonight is the full moon, and a big lunar eclipse, so we are having a dance party on the beach. I hope you can all see the lunar eclipse too. When I am seeing it you might be eating dinner, or washing the dishes afterwards, or maybe watching a movie, or walking your dog, and when you see it, I will be dancing around a big bonfire with people in mittens and hats and long underwear and rosy cheeks. And maybe some cold skinnydippers warming by the fire. You should all go outside and watch is so we can both be looking at the same thing at the same time. Wouldn't that be nice?
Love,
Nora
P.S. My mom's birthday is tomorrow. If you know her you should call her up and tell her you love her, because I know you do.
Then Friday we had Worldviews and Consciousness (WC). I mostly wasn't excited about it because we had to read this book I have a really hard time with, A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber, who I affectionately renamed Man-Face (do you see why? Now no one here refers to the book as anything but Man-Face), is absurd and says most things with a lot of unnecessarily difficult and confusing and academic words. It's a very inaccessible book, and he has weird weird ideas about gender equality but I like some of the other concepts. It takes me 5 minutes to read a page though. I feel most times like the whole thing is just so pretentious. But the class was alright, the teacher is the most formal, but the assignments are still very much about personal development and learning and far removed from traditional school. The best thing about WC class is that our biggest assigment is developing a daily practice and journaling about it. My daily practice is working on creative exploration, I got a few books and am very excited about it all. Other people are doing things like yoga, mindfulness meditation, T'ai Chi, and dream interpretation. School is kind of fun here.
The castle I mentioned we were going to in my last entry was beautiful, I put up pictures on my flickr website. You can read about it here. We climbed on it and then had teatime and a Bard told us the story of Tristan and Isolde. Apparently we are going to be doing restoration and planting trees in the forest that Tristan and Isolde ran away to, the Caledonian Forest. The Caledonian Forest is also where Merlin lived, in the Legends of King Arthur. This place is wild.
Yesterday at lunch Sarah found a caterpillar crawling on her plate under her salad. Kirk then ate it, without a dare or anything. It reminded me of my Dad, and when he made us go to a bug-eating festival. I think Kirk ate the bug because he misses eating meat. I just miss sugar. I ate some apple crisp the other day, because it was a special occasion, and it didn't make me feel bad or anything, I just felt so happy because it tasted like granola and home.
Today Page, Dana, Sarah and I all went to Forres for the day. All there is in Forres is thrift stores and pharmacies. It's very strange. We were so overwhelmed, because there was so much stuff there! (There wasn't really. There was one main street and it was 3 blocks long.) We also had a really hard time crossing the street because in Findhorn everyone just walks wherever they want and cars just wait. Also driving on the other side of the road is really hard to get used to. There is a free bus between Forres and the Park (because part of Findhorn, Cluny, is in Forres) every day at 5 or so different times, but by the time we wanted to leave, we had to take the public bus, which is bright blue and neon orange on the inside. I Love Scotland.
Tonight is the full moon, and a big lunar eclipse, so we are having a dance party on the beach. I hope you can all see the lunar eclipse too. When I am seeing it you might be eating dinner, or washing the dishes afterwards, or maybe watching a movie, or walking your dog, and when you see it, I will be dancing around a big bonfire with people in mittens and hats and long underwear and rosy cheeks. And maybe some cold skinnydippers warming by the fire. You should all go outside and watch is so we can both be looking at the same thing at the same time. Wouldn't that be nice?
Love,
Nora
P.S. My mom's birthday is tomorrow. If you know her you should call her up and tell her you love her, because I know you do.
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