scottish dispatch #4

day 4!!! i think i'm getting tired of every day so maybe it will become every other day and then during tent time it'll probably be one every few days

Hello, I’m breaking with my tradition of being like “hello cuties, sweeties, and angels” thing because i can’t think of any random lists of three right now . getting right into it

DAY FOUR

Morning routine was pretty much the same — breakfast with the hens, Taizé, morning meditation. My one moment of disquiet was during Taizé when Roy, the musical director of the day, told us we’d be doing a song called “Namaste.” The chorus goes “namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste” and he asked us to direct our "namastes” at various people around the circle. You can’t really be a discerning observer and a full participant, so I’ve really been trying to restrict any judgement/super ego rational voice bla bla, but the namaste stuff is so glaringly awkward to me that I did not have a fun time during this song at all… but then we went to meditation and everything was fine again.

Pauline and I went to volunteer shift. She was tasked with leading people in staking more blown over tree saplings and I volunteered to throw around more wood :) Especially because it came with RIDING THE FREAKING TRACTOR!! YES BRO!! It ROCKED as FUCK. The other two volunteers on my assignment had to walk to the area. Kaejdo got in the driver’s seat, my lucky ass stood on a piece of metal behind him and held on to the bars above. As we drove over, two individual people stopped and GAVE HIM A SALUTE. HELLO??? THAT RIPS??? Since I was right behind him, they were also technically giving me a salute. In fact, perhaps they were even just giving me the salute. Power trip of the century.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that Kaejdo is looking for an apprentice. He wants a young person interested in longterm stay in the community to train and take over for him when he passes. It is clear that he treats every young person with even a touch of whimsy who shows up to his volunteering shifts as a potential inheritor of his legacy. That means Pauline and I get extremely special treatment, which includes random quizzes to see what we remember, but it also means I get to RIDE THE MF TRACTORRRRRR!!!!

and in all seriousness it is devastating to think about all these aging pockets of wisdom with no place in the future because all the youth live in bushwick . what tractor is there for me to ride in bushwick ? don’t answer that

Aaannyways as we were clearing the bramble from the grass, Tim (a volunteer who will not be a recurring/relevant character I think so you can forget him) got stung by a ton of bees or wasps (unclear). He handled it like a champ. We cleared more of the tree and during our break, oh wow did I get some iconic Kaejdo lore.

He used to be married and when they realized they couldn’t live together, they “got unmarried in a sacred ceremony at the same place they got married.”

He also spoke on what it means to be a leader:

“Crucifixion is part of the curriculum, so study up,”

“A teacher once told me never to speak unless you’re asked, but to live such that you will be asked.”

Extremely quick rundown of my afternoon: the trailer broke so we had to stop early; I tried to find Pauline to help her with saplings but by the time I found her, they were already done; I ate lunch at the cafe that is currently overrun by wasps and was on edge due to Tim’s stings + hearing widespread counts of wasp stings + a daughter telling her mom she got stung by a wasp as I was sitting there; Pauline and I jumped into the Atlantic Ocean together and talked about how happy we were to be at Findhorn alone; I met up with Jonathan who wants to return to his house so I am being booted out to a tent; called my dad to tell him I was woefully unprepared to camp and might leave early if it is miserable; wrote substack; and theeennn….

fire ritual.

In the Earth Lodge, which is actually a large tent over a dig-out, they keep the sacred fire burning to honor the building that burned down at that site some number of years ago. Personally, if a building burned down, I would not honor it with fire. I would honor it with water or fire extinguisher. But hey…perpetually burning fire in a tent that covers a big hole in the ground…pretty sick. For fire ritual, everyone sits in a circle on chopped tree trunks, introduces themselves, we have a few minutes of meditation, and then share stories around a theme. During the intros, everyone kept bringing up their ancestry in a way where, for the second time that day, I had to slightly fight the eye roll. But whatever it’s fine

The theme of the night was times we connected with a being from the natural world. A woman who thought her birthday was yesterday but it was actually today shared a story about seeing a pair of birds raising their babies together and nearby seeing a bird raising her babies alone. The woman is a single mom and seeing single parenting occur in nature made her feel like she wasn’t a freak, that it’s a natural structure. Another woman (this event was mostly women) who was in a shamanic group whose totem animal is the loon began by saying she thinks it’s a good idea for us to have many lovers. One human lover and other lovers in nature. She said she has a lover in Western Scotland, a little river who she must visit semi-frequently. During a night on her last visit, there was terrible rainfall and the next day the river was “gushing, violent.” She got in anyways and clung to a mossy rock as the river’s currents threatened to pull her to danger. She realized this river, her natural lover, was teaching her how to be with her human lover, that her human lover has gushing, violent moods like the river.

The end of every story is punctuated with a ringing of a Tibetan singing bowl, entering us into the “echoes” section where people repeat things that resonated with them. During the echoes for river lover story, a woman said “have many lovers. Thanks for the tip.” The woman next to her and the, I guess, shaman of the event said “I knooowww, that’s what I was thinking too!!” To have been at the fire shaman ditch ritual where two 50+ women learned about polyamory. My life has been honored yet again.

The tent that covers the ditch has a hole cut out in the top so the smoke doesn’t clog the room. In the middle of the ceremony, the women on the opposite side of the circle began to exclaim and gather to peer out that hole. Seeing them cluster was actually so cute and I would’ve taken a picture if pulling out my phone here didn’t feel so genuinely gauche and taboo. (Like I truly haven’t seen a single person pull out their phones or walk around with an AirPod in. The only time I’ve seen a phone in use was when one of the men was trying to call one of the other men to ask him if he was coming back with the tractor.) They were all looking at a huuugee rainbow. Obviously, the fact that this natural event came in the middle of us talking about our connections with the natural felt like magic, a sign that our connections were being honored back. I am now really understanding how religion and cult works: when you set yourself up for magic, magic will always come and someone will attribute it to the thing they want you to believe. Buuuut I do really like magical thinking…the natural order is full of it and when you time it right, it does feel a little bit like your magic. But maybe that’s too possessive… it feels like you’re in sync with magic. And that does feel nice. In that rainbow moment, the group magical think felt contained and small and sweetly aligned. Not cult freaky. phewf

After stories, we each took a small pine cone from an orange bucket and infused it with our prayers...thoughts...wishes…things we wanted to let go…stuff like that you get it…and threw it into the fire.

And then I went to bed :) I loved this day :)