AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

It hit me yesterday that I have one more week here. I have been too wrapped up in a lot of other things to realize that until now, but during our attunement, when we all walked to the beach together to scream to help us empty some of our frustrations and stress, and when the people I was slowly walking with got there just in time to see the people who had got there just a few minutes earlier running naked into the ocean together, I realized how little time we have left, and how I know these people so well, but can't help just wanting to know them better and better and better. And when we did all scream together until our throats were raw and that man walked past and no one even thought it was strange or made any move to stop, how can I leave that? And 5 rhythms class, where we (there were 40 people there!) made a huge circle and 5 or 6 people at a time danced their chaos dances inside it and I went in and screamed so loud and danced so hard that I couldn't get up off the floor for the next 20 minutes because I would have thrown up, and people just came over to me and laid down next to me or rubbed my back or tickled my feet or ran around me as part of their dance. When that man I don't know gave me a back massage at the end of stillness. What will I ever do without the dance? And last night when some of us got the key to the CC Kitchen to make hummus and ended up staying for 2 hours because we forgot how long it takes garbanzo beans to cook, and so filling our time by having jumping contests and listening to old techno music and dancing and getting the night porter to let us stay longer by giving him some cookie/brownies we had made, how will I leave that?

I don't have any idea.



Anyway, this is one of my assignments for my Worldviews and Consciousness class. It is an autobiography about my worldview and how it has evolved and changed since coming here. The style is a little odd because I wrote it sort of as speaking notes for what I was going to say, but sort of just as a really informal paper. It's pretty personal, but I want to share it with you, because I love you.


HERE IT IS!

I am coming to this presentation with a burden that I am carrying and struggling with.

5 days ago I ended a 3 year relationship with my partner.

As a result, it has been really difficult for me to focus on or think about much else that is going on in my life right now. It’s also really difficult for me to look back over my semester here without bringing in my relationship.

I didn’t feel comfortable writing exclusively about that, though, because it is just really personal and hard to talk about. But this breakup is one of the biggest things that has happened to me in a long time, and one of the biggest things I have started to learn from it is my need for authenticity and honesty and how I think those are two of the most important things in the world. And I’m really FEELING that, not just saying it. And acting on that has just suddenly become more important to me than anything. So I didn’t want to write about what was not most present in me right now. I tried writing about my journey here as connected to spiral dynamics, or the 5 stages, or even astrology, but none of that felt authentic.

So I am writing about my personal sustainability, how being here has helped me heal a lot of self-destructive thought patterns and grow immeasurably. How being here has helped me shift my own worldview so I can learn to love myself better and trust myself and share my authentic self with others.

Coming here I was not really searching for a life path. I knew already that I wanted to be an organic farmer and had spent the previous 6 months doing just that, and the last 2 years self-educating (actually I have spent my life self-educating, but for the past 2 years I wasn’t in school). And I knew that my next step after being here would be practical farmer training of some sort.

I didn’t consciously come here to heal, I came here to figure myself out, but I ended up healing, so much, more even than I maybe thought I needed to heal.

Here are some of the things I brought here with me:

. Lots of body image issues, which has been a lifelong struggle (but I came here in a pretty good place)

. Feelings of creative and academic inadequacy – one of the many reasons I dropped out of college was that I didn’t think I was smart enough to be there, and one of the reasons I ended up quitting playing music was that I didn’t think I was good enough at it. Which was ridiculous, looking back.

.A 3-year partnership that was beautiful, but, having broken up with my boyfriend 5 days ago, a realization that I was in denial about a lot of the problems we had.
.Tying in with that, defining myself as part of a couple, not really as a whole self.

One of the most healing things here has been living in community and living with people who have pretty radically different worldviews than I do/did coming here. I feel like some of the biggest themes of this semester, or at least things we all ended up talking about a lot were: nonattachment, forgiveness/compassion, transparency, going to edges, owning everything you do and have, being open to feedback, creating healthy dialogue and communication, and open/free love/relationships.

Opening my world to all those ideas has made my healing process through my breakup about a trillion times easier, especially since I am in a community where I can talk with people about all these things. I feel no pressure to fit my relationship into a box, into thinking anything like “well he started having feelings for someone else, so that makes him a bad person.” I have a much more open way of looking at all the parts of that relationship, and the ways in which I have built my own self-confidence since being here have made it also so much easier to process.

As far as school goes, I have healed by being with other people who function the same way, generally, that I do in the educational system. Going to school in community has been really important for me, because previously in my life community and school were two different things. Being in a learning community where we sat down at the beginning of our time together and talked about our educational history and the way we learned brought out so many ghosts and showed me what school could/should be, and how school really can be a good thing for me. I’ve also learned that I can do well in school – I can write papers, manage my time, and enjoy myself doing it. It’s really been a labor of putting my belief that all learning is for me and has no other purpose into action.

A lot of you know that dancing and doing the 5 rhythms has changed my life – it has been intensely healing for my body and my issues around that part of myself, as well as for my creativity.

Being in Deborah’s class and just being here and being in community with everyone has taught me/helped me realize that everything I create, especially if I can bring my whole self to it, is a manifestation of myself, and it is so beautiful, because I am so beautiful. Furthermore, I have really internalized the reality that I don’t have to impress anyone with my art or music or my movement – my art/expression is 100% for me.

Being here has helped me break away from so many mainstream, destructive societal/cultural norms and expectations that I didn’t realize I was still carrying with me so heavily, and helped me come into myself so much more fully. I am so intensely grateful for my time here and what I have learned. It has made me an immeasurably stronger person.

Today we have our portfolio presentation. It's a Big Deal and I think we are all a little nervous. 5-8 PM, outside on the Park green, braving the unpredictable Scottish weather, dancing and food and campfires and singing and trapeze performances and beautiful sustainable art from all of us. I'm going to be uploading my portfolio onto the internet someday soon, because it tells even more stories from my time here than this blog does.

I hope you are all well,
Love,
Nora

Work!

We have been doing lots of homework lately. It is really good for me. I have a hard time balancing hanging out with my friends and getting all my work done, and this weekend is the first time I have been really social besides meals and class and dance in awhile.

Last Sunday I did an all-day dance workshop called "Satisfying Anger" that was about working with the 5 rhythms to express and work through feelings of anger. It was taught by my teacher for creativity class, and there were 20 community members there, along with me and Charlotte and some people from Inverness. In the morning we worked on feeling the difference between tightness and openness in our movements and bodies, and did this fun fun fun exercise where we all lined up in 2 lines facing one another across a line, and we danced our anger dances to each other without crossing the line (it was like creating a safe space, while allowing for expressions of anger in front of another person). Everyone was screaming and yelling and jumping around and punching the air and I did this incredibly fun dance where the woman I was partnered with and I danced our annoyance, I guess you could say. It was so useful to dance all our emotions at another person and have them dance theirs to us while knowing that it meant nothing personal. Then in the afternoon we danced a wave with all this angry music and did a lot of partner dancing and my chaos was so so so intense. I thought I was going to throw up, but I feel that most times I dance the 5 rhythms. When we ended we all partnered up and gave each other massages and oh man it was just the best way possible to spend a day. And SO useful, it has made my dance practice better already.

This past week has been full of assessments and big projects, and it has been stressful but also really fun, because we have had all these presentations that have been so full of beautiful, authentic sharing. On Monday we all talked about this Joanna Macy article in a colloquium-style class, and on Tuesday we presented our Art of Fascination projects with the class. I presented my slow eating endeavor with Sarah and Nicole, and other people presented what they learned about batiking, making food (we all made some food together...and subsequently turned into a big class of kindergarteners, it was ridiculously fun), campfire building and cooking food over campfires, (Ashley had made muffins with Amy inside of orange peels on a campfire and brought them in, and also built a sample campfire our of dried bananas, raisins, and coconut flakes), guitar (people who had never played guitar before coming here getting up and played and sang and it was so beautiful and inspiring), tai chi, bike carts, massage, bookmaking, and knitting. Then in the afternoon we started planning our big presentation at the end of the semester. Then Thursday we had a big paper due in Group Dynamics class and we spent the first half of the morning doing a forum, which is a type of check-in or attunement used at a community called Zegg. It differs from a lot of traditional check-ins in that people can give and receive feedback as part of their sharing. And also the person who is speaking stands in the middle and walks around, sometimes even on a stage, instead of sharing from their place in the circle. It was really intense, a lot of people cried and a lot of other people just expressed how big their love was for everyone in the program. At the end of forum everyone also sings a song together, and so we did that, and I don't really have the words for how much I loved it all.

Also all week there were two ladies here from America who were making a documentary. About us! Well, partly about us. I was never totally sure on what it was about in the end, but they filmed all our classes and asked me if they could interview me. They are in some way connected to the Living Routes program or founder, and they did interviews with some of the FCS people before the semester even started, and they came here to fill it all out. But anyway, I think it is about sustainability education and young people who are into this kind of work. In my interview I talked about anthropocentrism and how what I'm doing here connects to the anti-racism and anti-oppression work I have been doing for the past 5 years. So someday I might be in a documentary. Acting nerdy and talking about how I cry sometimes when I read things about sustainability and how young people are gonna change the world. You know.

The other night Dana and I were walking to Lollipop (my house) to watch a movie and on the way there we saw these three girls carrying a mattress and at intervals they would throw it down on the ground and jump up and down for a minute and then pick it up and walk a few more feet and do it all over again. I love Findhorn.

But yesterday Sarah, Dana, Charlotte and I went for an afternoon walk through the dunes and we came to this road that goes to the dunes from Findhorn village. And on the road there was a gang of 15-20 children. At first we thought they were being nice, because they were giving us peace signs, but then we realized that we are in the UK and the kind of peace sign they were giving us meant something very different than peace. And then they started yelling "FINDIE FOUNDIES! FINDIES!" at us. And then they mooned us! And then they ran away. I guess Findhorn is still seen as strange and thus provokes the hatred/mocking of small children.

But we all love each other. After our public humiliation we jumped on the trampoline at Shambala, the Buddhist center, and then we all lay together on the lawn outside the CC with all our friends as we waited for dinner. And after dinner we danced a beautiful wave together to the loudest music while the rain pounded down outside. And after that we lay in a big pile all on top of each other on the floor and told each other about our days.

The end.

Love,
Nora