Jonathan Dawson pays tribute to Findhorn co-founder Eileen Caddy who has died aged 89

This week saw the death of Eileen Caddy, one of the co-founders of the Findhorn community, at the age of 89. Eileen has been a treasure and a huge source of inspiration to the community.

The last of the many gifts that she gave was the clear instruction that her passing be a cause for thanksgiving rather than mourning and, true to her wish, the community seems almost to have an extra skip in its step this week.

So many glorious stories surround Eileen and the other early pioneers who were involved in the creation of this settlement back in the early 1960s. Most centre around her unwavering obedience to the guidance she received from the inner source that she called ‘the God Within’.

This guidance ranged from the bizarre (‘Build a community centre that can seat 200 people’ at a time when there was neither money in the bank nor any plans to create a community as such) to the unexpected (‘if the caravan you are sharing with six others is too noisy, go meditate in the public toilets’ – she did, for years) to the many gems of wisdom on achieving stillness and connecting with inner divinity that were later collected into the book ‘Opening Doors Within’.

Whether it made obvious sense or not, Eileen’s guidance was the compass by which the emerging community steered.

The key moment in defining the nature of the community came in 1971 when Eileen returned from a meditation with the guidance that it was now up to members to get their own guidance – no longer would she be the sole source of authority. This mirrors a tricky moment in the evolution of many intentional communities: how to stage the transition from the founders to the next generation?

This is all the more difficult in cases like Findhorn, where the authority of the first, founding generation is recognized as being divinely inspired. Eileen’s guidance ensured the transition to a mature community that had to find the wisdom and inspiration to make its own decisions.

Guidance remains at the heart of our decision-making structures to this day. So, meetings tend to begin and end with periods of silence and are often punctuated with short meditations. For sure, there is no guarantee that peoples’ guidance will always coincide – make of that what you will! However, the attempt to gain access to deeper sources of wisdom is surely laudable, on the premise alone that the intelligence potentially available to us is not limited to the rational mind.

Take, for example, the new piece of land just to the south of the built settlement that is coming up for development, called Duneland. We could limit our process around this to rational discussions involving planners and architects. What we have chosen to do is to walk the boundaries of the land singing, to sit in the land getting to know its moods and shapes more intimately, to seek to create a silence in which the spirit of the land and of the other creatures that share it can communicate with us.

This is not just more fun than heady discussions in darkened rooms – though we are no strangers to these too! – but is also capable of opening us up to wisdom that can only accessed in stillness; we are ever seeking ways of listening more deeply to the vibrations of the web in which we are but one thread.

This is the legacy that Eileen and her co-founders have left to us. For this, and so much else, thank you.

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