stereo mp3 audio file.
Writer, Leslie Hill
Host/Producer, Ingrid Rose
From September 09, 2024 to September 22, 2024
From her essay, Grief:
Eventually I left my life in Canada and moved to the Findhorn Foundation, a New Age spiritual community in northern Scotland. It's a place where people are open, accepting and compassionate. I lived there for nearly six years, confronting all the feelings that I'd denied most of my life. By the time my visa had ended and I returned to Canada I could feel that the bits of grit from the past that I'd imagined clinging to me forever, had become pearls. The natural kind, lumpy and irregular, but my own. Grief and denial have become acceptance, understanding and maturity.
On leaving Findhorn Leslie wrote Dressed for Dancing which was characterized by former Associate Director of the Findhorn community, David Spangler, as: hands down the best book I’ve read in years about the modern Findhorn Foundation community. He also wrote, Dressed for Dancing drew me in from the first page and held me captivated throughout. Gracefully written, it has the excitement of a good novel but with the depth and insights that come from it being a true story of one woman’s spiritual awakening and journey.
Leslie Hill's essays have been published in Pilgrimage, Shark Reef, What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming A Teacher, the Tahoma Literary Review, Braided Way, and the Globe and Mail.
Dressed for Dancing was self published in 2012. It was one of ten nominees for the Whistler Independent Book Awards that year.
In my opinion, it deserves far more attention than it has received so far. Dressed for Dancing is available through the public library system. It may be ordered from Hager Books in Vancouver.
Findhorn
The history section of Findhorn Foundation website relates, Our story has a very unlikely beginning. Our founders hadn’t actually intended to create a community – rather, the community found them. On the way they turned a windswept wasteland into astonishing food gardens, and formed a centre that’s inspired change makers and explorers throughout the world.
Located on the Moray Peninsula in northeast Scotland, Findhorn Foundation community is named for Findhorn River. It evolved after spiritual seekers Eileen and Peter Caddy and their friend Dorothy MacLean lost their jobs managing Cluny Hill Hotel in Forres, Moray Peninsula, in the 1960's.
Living in a shared trailer, with the Caddy's three sons as well, they planted a garden which was so remarkable it attracted international attention. Eileen's spiritual guidance and Peter's practical horticultural skills were guided by Dorothy's communications with entities she called the overlighting angels, or devas, of plants and other natural elements. Others joined them and the community grew, eventually taking over Cluny Hill Hotel and building an eco-village.
In 2023 Findhorn underwent another transformation; Covid, and a fire on their property, had challenged the financial viability of the community. The broader programming was stopped and in 2024 the Foundation began offering much smaller programs at locations in the west of Scotland as they feel their way forward to a new operational model.