Life, Being A School...

“Life is a school.  The purpose is to graduate.”

Those were the words on which I found myself concluding a sharing one evening with a couple of gals back at the spiritual community where we were all members, in the north of Scotland.(1)  Relatively new to the community, they were curious as to what it was like in The Auld Days, back closer to its beginning, when I arrived (and spent the better part of the next 30-some years of my life there).  Off the top of my head, and with one of them quickly typing what I had to say into her laptop (she had forgotten to bring her tape recorder; but was vey adept with the newfangled stuff), I started a reminiscence, and then left it to their questions for specific leads into the story.   

I enjoyed the session, as did they; and the Q&A continued via emails for a considerable time after that, until we met in person one evening, to discuss where we wanted to go from there with all that material.  The upshot of that session was that I approached the community’s book publisher, to see if they would be interested in the material.  I looked on it as a sort of our day’s ‘The Seven Storey Mountain,’ the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s story of his life, leading into a spiritual community of his time, back in the lead-up into WWII; and the Findhorn Press, by then rather independent from its roots in the original community, didn’t seem to know what precisely to do with it, but ‘humored me’ as a respected Elder Brother of the place, in considering it as a sort of in-house production, with limited distribution.  In the event, the deal fell apart when abruptly I felt it was time for me to go (for reasons other than that rebuff of a sort), and nothing ever came of the material.

A pity.  It was a good insight into life in the community after its beginnings, and with its ‘growing pains;' turning into the core of a ‘planetary village,’ and thereby losing to some extent its original identity.  But there you go.  You pays your money. 

So: I left the community in the spring of 2012, to return to my home country (in its time of need; another story).(2)  I have had little contact with the community since.  (Except for an email from one of the ladies a few years later, to let me know how things were going for her there.)  I am sure they are still doing good work in encouraging - inspiring - people to live ’from higher consciousness’ - to live lightly on the planet, and in harmony - and in an educative manner - with each other, in a spiritual context.  But I simply had other work to do by then. 

Having graduated from that level of my education.  And moving on.

And Up.  

As we are all meant to.

\Which is the whole point of the exercise.

Life being a school.  And all.

—

footnotes:

(1) One of them actually ‘only’ a member of the Wider Community, that had grown up around the heart of the place, the Findhorn Foundation; much as a village grew up around the monastic order founded by a man to become known to history as Saint Bernard, in the south of France. 

(2) Briefly: with a Usurper sitting in the presidential chair; which I understood by then, and from shortly after his election, to be the case.  From information gleaned from the Alternative media.  Not the Mainstream media.  Another part of the ‘distress signal’ that I picked up, over in the north of Scotland, living a life of relative ease.  But needing now to swing into action.  With my home country’s life - and values (particularly in honoring the Individual) - at stake.

   And that of the world as a whole, in consequence.