I spent much of last week up in Guisachen, near Inverness. FlatmatePatrick had been up there for nearly a fortnight, and I’d had my own hermit-holiday just having the house to myself, poring over books, making books, and letting all sorts of crazy mental winds in through the window. Very good for me.
But my birthday was this weekend, and it seemed only fitting to go up and join the Friday Gang for a few days’ R&R in the Scottish countryside. Chris and I took the train, which was a lovely ride, and it was great to have time to chat and read. I’m growing increasingly fond of trains and less happy about the rude processing air travel has become.
Chris and Liz took lots of pictures, which I’m sure they’ll post soon. This is good because they like taking pictures and are way better at it than I am, so not only do I get the pleasure of their company, my travels also end up being well-documented.
What did we do? Eat, drink, sleep, read, wander, drive. The best beer ever is made up there, and the Highland countryside there is a beautiful expanse of rolling greenery and heather. Between that backdrop and the few little towns we visited, with their wee stone buildings, lock-system waterways, beachfronts, and boiled candy shops, I felt like I’d spent some good time being where I am. It gets so easy sometimes to just operate in the rut of everyday interactions and business, but whenever I have these getaways, or even just walk through Edinburgh with my eyes open, I’m reminded how much I love it here.
Yesterday we went to a community called Findhorn. Patrick mentioned it in passing, and I was curious to see this little “sustainable” village. I expected grubby caravans and hippy lean-tos, but instead got enchanted by the place, where people with sharp minds, free spirits, and deep commitments have come together to create the kind of world they’d like to see.
The others indulged me and we went on a tour — when the guide said it would last about an hour, I was conscious of the travel-time that would use up, but we went, and pretty soon I think we were all intrigued by the project.
The houses are remarkable, for starters. They’re all designed to be as efficient as possible, but instead of being a compromise, many of them use their special features to ask questions about what a home is supposed to be and answer them in charming and inviting ways. We visited two homes on the tour.
One was actually made from an old whisky vat, a huge wooden barrel held together by an iron band. Its occupant was an elderly woman in a chair who was recuperating from an illness, but held court with a charming wit and warmth from her seat while we all tromped through her house with our shoes in our hands. The house was on four levels, arranged like a nautilus shell. Out back was a garden with woven wooden fences; a little tree teemed with apples, flowers grew in corners here and there, the sky opened to reveal the first stretch of blue in days, and while I watched a red and black butterfly with shiny silken wings landed on a bush. The overall effect was surreal, super-natural, like a scene out of Tolkien — a setting tended to by creatures aligned with nature, part of it, instead of standing in opposition to it.
The next house belonged to a watercolourist. It was more modern, with lots of big windows looking out on fields, hills, and the sea beyond. It was bright and cozy and practical, and apparently very efficient to live in, but the real inspiration here was this man’s work: he took average scenes from around Scotland and rendered them in washes and strokes, injecting bright gradients of colour that you know aren’t there in reality, yet somehow capture the life in these scenes.
The arts are a central feature in the community, which naturally appealed to me. The theatre, which seems to be a hub for many of their activities, is a beautifully-designed space with a honeycomb wooden roof (great acoustics!) and lovely painted backdrops with vague, rough swatches of colour that unmistakeably capture the Scottish countryside — one with heathery browns and purples, the other with beach-sky colours.
The tour concluded with a visit to “The Living Machine” — Findhorn’s answer to the sewage generated by its inhabitants. We walked into the greenhouse and I remembered a cub-scout trip I once took to the Windsor, Ontario water treatment plant, which was a subterrainian journey to see enormous, stinking vats with central stirring mechanisms clotted with all manner of unspeakable things. This greenhouse, by contrast, had a hot, close atmosphere, but just smelled of plants and heavy swamp life. A series of big green plastic drums about eight feet across sprouted ferns, shoots, flowers, and tiny surface greenery. Each handled a different stage of the filtering process, and by the last vat the water was completely uncontaminated, comparable to city bath-water.
Everything about the place spoke of a committed listening, as opposed to the imposition of will. The design of the homes, the workings of the input (food, energy) and output (creative products, waste) is all inspired by patterns in nature. In chatting to our guide afterward, I got a deep sense of the practical difference it makes to operate this way, that people really do get along better in this sort of scheme where harmony is a cherished virtue, as opposed to being slammed together with no higher motives but our own individual self-interest (which we were thrown into by a society that had already pre-decided the palette of available commercial possibilities, and set about from our beginnings to inspire a longing for those offerings).
It’s easy to leave the future unplanned so it remains unthreatening and undemanding. I found myself a little afraid at Findhorn, though, because it felt like a little piece of destiny fell into place there. I want to live there or someplace like it. For a long time I’ve felt at odds with the waste and the unconsciousness I live in the midst of, and experience in myself. This, by contrast, seemed the one place I’ve ever been where I could imagine living completely in accordance with what I know to be true and right for me.
So it was a great birthday, first because of the generosity and amiable company of my friends, then because of the inspiring trip to this place and across the landscape of this country.
Nice to sleep in my own big bed last night, though.