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The Findhorn Community
Findhorn Community Website

Weave it in, secure it
entangling it till it can flow strong and brown
With iron from the earth,
dissolve in the green limestone lake,
Catch the sky's own blue in its eyes as it melts
cutting the path through.

And on the hillside, as I see down,
down into the valley mist,
For a moment we both pause
Breathless at the beauty.

Behind all words there is silence —
Behind all action there is stillness —
Behind all creativity there is peace —

In these things we find the Beloved
And know His creative presence.
In the rhythm of this day

Let us find silence in the midst of speech.
Stillness in the midst of action
And peace in the midst of creativity.

-David Spangler-

An experimental spiritual community founded in 1962 on Findhorn Bay,
located in northern Scotland near the Arctic Circle, and the site of a garden seemingly endowed with special powers.

At its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Findhorn yielded eighteen-kilogram (40 lb.) cabbages and other plants and flowers
that sometimes grew twice their normal size, despite the fact that the soil
was nothing more than sand and gravel and the bitter climate of the North Sea made for abysmal growing conditions.

Findhorn residents claimed that they received the directions for
planting, cultivating, and managing their gardens from spirits that inhabit the natural world.

The Findhorn experiment has come to be viewed as a demonstration of
the power and potential of human beings and the natural world living and working together in harmony.

Peter Caddy and coworker Dorothy Maclean, who established the first garden on the site
claimed to have established contact with a spirit of the plant kingdom, called a deva,
said to hold the archetypal pattern for each individual plant species.
The devas provided specific information about every aspect of the garden:
how far apart to plant seeds, how often to water, and how to remedy problems.
Within a year Findhorn had been transformed with the gardens overflowing with life.
Cabbages were over ten times their usual weight.
Broccoli grew so large the plants were too heavy to lift from the ground.


We have met before.
Whenever anyone contributes attention or feeling to a plant,
part of that person's being mingles with part of our being, and the one world is fostered.
You humans are therefore all very linked to us,
but until you give recognition to these links, they are as nothing and remain undeveloped.
Plants contribute to human food and give of themselves in this way, thus building tangible links.
Although of the past, these links can be brought into the present, by recalling them.
One great use of memory is to recall the Oneness of life.

(Rhubarb Deva, 20th October, 1963. From To Hear the Angels Sing, p.200)

As word of the garden spread, it became a model community for proponents of the New Age movement. By the early 1970s, more than three hundred people lived, worked, and studied in Findhorn. Residents viewed themselves as the vanguard of a new society based on the principles of cooperation between people and the kingdom of nature. By the 1980s the plants, fruits, and vegetables had returned to normal sizes and none of the present gardeners claim direct contact with the natural world. Nevertheless, newer members of the community preserve the original spirit and ideas of the founders. Findhorn has a democratic government, a garden school, and a company to help small businesses within the community.

David Spangler says,
“Manifestation is a process of working with natural principles and laws
in order to translate energy from one level to another.
It is not the creation of something out of nothing,
but rather a process of realising a potential of something that already exists.”

Findhorn Foundation
The Park
Findhorn
Forres IV36 3TZ
Scotland
Tel: +44 (0)1309 691620
Email: communications@findhorn.org

DROP CITY
Near Trinidad, 40 miles S of Pueblo, Colorado

Drop City: A Model Hippie Commune
Bringing It All Together : DROP CITY
from " The 60's Communes-Hippies and Beyond" 1999, Syracuse University Press
by Tim Miller
Department of Religious Studies
University of Kansas

In May of 1965 these strands of communal exploration and cultural paradigm shift came together in the settlement that turned the corner, that can plausibly be called the first full-blown hippie commune: Drop City, located near Trinidad, Colorado. Drop City brought together most of the themes of its predecessor communities--anarchy, pacifism, sexual freedom, drugs, open membership, art--and wrapped them in an exuberance and an architecture that trumpeted the coming of a new communal era.

Drop City's founders were influenced by a number of communal and collective traditions. One was of Mennonite stock and thus familiar with the close-knit, world-rejecting search for community conducted by the Anabaptists. Two were from leftist families in New York, raised with the collective ideals of Marxism was all about them. All three were artists and familiar with the concept of bohemian artists' collectives. The fourth person to settle at Drop City, and the one who lived there the longest of anyone, was raised by parents who had lived in the Jewish colonies of southern New Jersey.

The Droppers had the kind of visionary optimism that would soon characterize the entire hippie movement.
Jo Ann Bernofsky says,
"We knew that we wanted to do something outrageous
and we knew we wanted to do it with other people,
because it was more exciting to be with a group than to be just one or two or three people. . . .
It was full of vitality, and it was extremely exciting and wonderful.
You had the sense that anything was possible."

They also had the beat-hippie disdain for money, material comfort, and work.
As Gene Bernofsky puts it,
It's important to be employed; work is important,
but we felt that to be gainfully employed was a sucking of the soul
and that a part of one of the purposes of the new civilization was to be employed,
but not to be gainfully employed,
so that each individual would be their own master and we idealistically believed
that if we were true to that principle,
that if we did nongainful work that the cosmic forces
would take note of this and would supply us with the necessities of survival.

Excerpted from an article by Dropper Ishmael in Inner Space,
No. 4 (Box 212, New York, N.Y. 10011).

In Drop City we have attempted to create a total living environment outside the structure of society,
where the artist can remain in touch with himself, the universe and other creative human beings.

Each Dropper is free. Does what he/she wants, when he/she wants and how he/she wants.
No rules, no duties, no obligations.
Anarchy. But as anarchistic as the growth of an organism.
Has its own internal needs and desires;
fulfills them in a natural simple way, without compulsion.
The need to work: out of guilt, emptiness.
Need abandoned: desire (hopefully) arises.
No longer work, but pleasure.
As gratifying as eating or loving.
Work — play.
Doing nothing is work.

We are based on the pleasure principle.
Our main concern is being alive.
None of us is employed or has a steady income.
How do we make it? Food? Materials?
At mercy of the gods.
But most of the time we don't worry about it.
Drop City was begun without money, built on practically nothing.
Things have come to us.
Somehow we haven't gone hungry. Or done without materials. Yet.

America, affluent waste society.
Enough waste to feed and house ten thousand artists,
enough junk to turn into a thousand thousand works of art.
To the townspeople (Trinidad, Colorado, 5 miles away) we are scrounges, bums, garbage pickers.
They are right. Perhaps the most beautiful creation in all of Drop City is our junk pile, the garbage of the garbage pickers.

We are sensualists.
There are thousands of undiscovered, unnamed senses.
We attempt to nurture every one.
Drop City is six acres of abandoned goat pasture.
Population fourteen.
We live in geodesic domes, structures built along molecular principles,
basic energetic building blocks of the universe, the strongest, most efficient use of enclosed space.
Following certain dynamic structural laws,
the dome helps provide its own heat in winter, its own air conditioning in summer.
Psychologically it creates an atmosphere of inner harmony and freedom.
An expansive structure: no corners to hide in, no vertical-horizontal rigidities.
Simplest to build. Cheapest.
A 25-foot diameter dome costs less than $200, sometimes much less.

The Farm
Stephen Gaskin Tribute in the Tao
The Farm Website

In 1971, 300 San Francisco hippies loaded up their kids in brightly colored, old school buses
and left the Haight to criss-cross the country in search of the perfect place to create a utopian community.
Calling themselves the ``Technicolor Amish,'' they landed five months later like a spaceship
near Summertown, Tenn., in the poorest county in the state and about as far from
the Haight Ashbury culturally, politically and socially as they could get.

They called it The Farm.
And it became one of the most famous, longest-running communes in the country,
with more than 1,500 people living together at its peak.

If you would like to know more about The Farm here are some worthy resources.

America's Communal Religions
From: Miller and Bates, in America's Communal Religions, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1995.
To write the spirituality of some of these experiments off as pop-Aquarianism would be a mistake.
Many hippie religious tenets are quite deep,
as can be seen in the philosophy of The Farm, a community begun in 1971, near Summertown, Tennessee.

The Farm Midwives
Pronatalism, Midwifery, and Synergistic Marriage
Spiritual Enlightenment and Sexual Ideology on The Farm (Tennessee) by LOUIS J. KERN
Published in W.E. Chmielewski, Kern, L.J., and Klee-Hartzell, M.,
Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States
Syracuse University Press, 1993, Sargent and Claeys, Editors.
"The midwife network constituted a female community that embodied community spiritual ideals and the mastery of the practical techniques of natural childbirth. The qualifications for midwives were consequently both spiritual and practical. "To be a real midwife," a community publication affirmed, "it is necessary to be spiritual. Compassion has to be a way of life for her. The midwife must be able to consider someone else's viewpoint, and in her daily life take care of those around her"
(Ina May 1975, 338).

Communal Living in the Late 60s and Early 70s
By Rachel Meunier
Human Issues Project
12-17-94
(Rachel Meunier grew up on The Farm)
Intent: To better understand some of the reasons behind the movement toward communal living
during the late 1960s and early 1970s and some of the purposes for this social reconstruction.

What usually comes to mind when thinking about the concept of a "commune"?
More often then not images such as drugs and free love associated with the 1960s are visualized.
In actuality, communes have existed since history has been recorded.
For example, the Puritans who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
may have been one of the first utopian communities in the United States.
In the late 1960s more than 2,000 communes were formed in the United States.

Twilight of Hippiedom
Farm commune's founder envisions return to the fold as ex-dropouts age
Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer
Sunday, March 2, 2003

Donnie Rainboat, 58, is building his retirement home in Rosinante,
a 100-acre retirement community for hippies in their golden years
that Stephen Gaskin is planning to establish near the Farm.
Chronicle photo by Craig Lee

And then there's

NIMBIN, AUSTRALIA
A Hippie Community TODAY-Down Under!
Nimbin's Incredible Website

'Home of the Millennium Marijuana March'

The town of Nimbin, nestled in the sub-tropical foothills of the eastern edge
of an extinct volcano in the rainbow region of Northern NSW, is known as the 'Alternative Capital of Australia'.

Nimbin provides an example to the world of how communities working together
can find creative, sustainable solutions to the many environmental and socio-economic
dilemmas facing us all as we plunge into the new millennium.

All creeds and all Nations are welcome in Nimbin,
a highly tolerant town whose rich multicultural diversity is reflected
in the works of our large community of talented Artists and Musicians.

Alternative - land sharing, healing, education, housing and power, cafes,
markets and festivals, forests, mountain views, great music and Art are just some of what Nimbin has to offer.

BABYLON PLAZA
by
David Hallett

the old queen still sits upon her throne
tin soldiers still melt in her furnace
princes still prance on polo ponies/
the clichés are killing us:
we change channels
Africa is burning/ Paris is dancing
we change channels
Africa is dancing/ Paris is burning,
the ice is melting
the tide is rising/
new laws are coming
laws of silence, silence & shopping & work:
spoke the little prime minister of the great island
girt by lies/ by the click of the shear,
by the friend of the Texas hangman
president of where-the-buffalo-roamed/
prince of hurricanes:
trapped in the nightmare of his fallen towers
trapped in the revenger’s tragedies
and we all are punish’d
we all must pay
as we rush through the streets of the terror
to get the last Xmas shopping done
at Babylon Plaza.

1966-2006
What Did The Hippies Want?
by Alicia Bay Laurel
November 19, 2001

"We wanted intimacy--not a neighborhood where you didn't know anyone on the block,
or you competed, kept up with the Joneses.

A hunter-gatherer or early agricultural community meant that people lived, worked and sought deeper contact with the holy spirit as a group, and they all knew one another, from cradle to grave. I used to call my hippie friendships "a horizontal extended family," as opposed to the ancient tribal extended family, which was multi-generational, and therefore, vertical...."

We wanted a culture which acknowledged the human body, not just for sex, but to hug each other, to be naked without shame, to revere the body with natural foods, beneficial exercise, herbs, baths, massage, deep understanding. This was not part of the culture from which we came...."

Read the rest HERE!

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