Findhorn Garden

Findhorn Garden isn't what I imagined. It feels like a place lived in by people who have no choice but to live there, even though they live there by choice. I looked at the people, I talked with some of them. Each person seemed sad in his or her own way, as if the future they'd imagined happening hadn't become the future at all but had become the past.

I walked around the grounds for an hour becoming sadder and sadder, and finally ended up in The Sanctuary where I took this picture and tried to meditate.

I can't meditate anymore. I try but I can't. I was once a world-class meditator, going into meditations so deeply that I was often on the verge of extinction. I don't kow what happened. It's like prayer. I used to be able to pray. Now I just sit there, sort of empty and sort of full, unable to fight thoughts off the way I used to fight them.

Scotland's such an interesting country. The present is so vivid, but can also look so out of place. In Inverness on a Saturday night, two cops stop a street fight. Two young men are bloodied, drunk by 9 p.m. on Pay Weekend. They're both heavily tatted, both are yelling at each other even as the cops strengthen their grip on each of them, each exultant like each has won something.

I should have taken a picture; they'd have liked that. Like the metal soup spoon I saw yesterday, laying on the pavement on Jackson Street, like the tattoo of a woman's face on the back of the guy's calf who was standing in front of me in the line at Cal-Mart. When I see things out of place like this I want to take their picture, but I'm better off just remembering them as they were and moving on.

I woke up thinking this morning about Mitt Romney and the possibility of a Republican presidency. I'm not sure I'd want to live in a country run by these people. It seems like they really do believe we can live in the past, that whatever vision they have for the Republic is nostalgic for a time and a place that never really existed at all. It's so sad that this position has gotten as much traction as it has. Europe's still a place where a politician can say "there is hope, that's all I can offer," as Samaras the Greek Prime Minister said the other day, and not be laughed at.

What is it about Romney that's so mildy disturbing, other than a political rhetoric that's banal to the point of true hypocrisy?  I think it's that his personal narrative is so weak. How like the son of a rich powerful man to have his narrative supplied him! He's basically a businessman; the very best that can be said of him is that he's an executive. Ryan's even harder to like but has better narrative. Obama's all narrative which may prove to be a big problem. It's laughable that Romney accuses Obama of never 'making anything', when there may be no greater self-made man in our recent history!

The past is a place to take refuge in. What things were like when they were like themselves, like what Findhorn Garden must have been like in the early 1960's when it was born and a whole new world was imagined as being possible.