Chapter XI: STONES, GNOMES AND WINDMILLS


I had often gazed with a sense of déja vu at the country lane which meandered over Firebrass Hill, near my old home in the Oxfordshire countryside. The place felt to exist outside time and to be associated in some way with the mythical figure who came to me as the Poet of the Dawn. I remembered how I would walk up that road in the pitch black of night, when my life had been full of unhappiness, hoping upon impossible hope that, maybe a spacecraft might land and whisk me away into another, more civilized world!

I knew that the surrounding area was traditionally associated with Earth magic and ancient folk ritual. Perhaps it was the silent, etheric energy in the locale that had so often triggered some internal psychic process, causing my mythical Poet to spring unexpectedly into consciousness. It had taken me years to come to terms with him.

Now, as my son and I drove up the Hill, on our way to Wales and Scotland, I sensed his presence within me. Maybe I had always known that one day I would take that road ... that it would lead away from the past, over the brow of the hill into a new life cycle. At last, I could understand why I had always seen the immortal figure of my Poet walking down that lane and why everything had had this overwhelming sense of death and rebirth about it.

Jan had given me a little present from his holiday. A red-and-white Danish flag. I accepted it with delight, remembering how, less than a day ago, the Lord had drawn a white Cross of Light over me. As we drove off on our northern Quest the little white Danish Cross flew bravely behind us. More leelas.

“Do you know the story of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza?” I asked him.

“No I don’t. Why do you ask, dad?”

“Well,” I replied. “Don Quijote went off, one day, on an adventurous crusade with his trusty companion, Sancho Panza. It seems that we are very like them, going off on this quixotic journey in our old car!” ... to tilt at windmills again! added the unspoken, teasing thought.

At least it would be fun while it lasted. Inevitably, I supposed we would return to London and resume our rather mundane existences, he at his new school and I, as a substitute teacher, playing the grudging Aunt Sally and dreaming of a time when I could finally escape the meaningless treadmill.

“So shall we call our car ‘Rosinante’ after Don Quijote's horse?” I asked.

“It has been a trusty old steed, hasn’t it? Remember the time when we went down to Glastonbury with the door nearly falling off and tied up with string and tape?” We laughed, remembering how the car had broken down, expensively, on leylines near the Tor.

“Let’s call her ‘Rosinante’ then,” he added, patting the dashboard. “She might be falling apart but she’ll get us to Scotland!”

Jan asked me to tell him about my regressions and listened with interest as I recalled them. Up until then he had led a very conventional life and I felt it was high time he knew something of the eastern thought which was part of his heritage as well. I wanted him to grow up to see the much greater, magical reality existing beyond the blinkered view of the material world of which we are all inevitably a part. I had not seen much of my son in the past two years and was glad of the opportunity to talk like this of deep metaphysics, reincarnation, transmigration and karma, of Darwin and Steiner, of mineral, plant, animal and human ... and of magic dragons’ ‘strings and sealing wax’. I wondered if the conversation would help trigger off some inner time capsules for him as well.

On the Midlands road, north of Oxford, was a restaurant with a large fibre-glass elephant outside it. The elephant had a trunk down which children could slide. I had passed it many times. Then it had caused a lump in my throat and sharp pangs of sadness and hurt as I remembered happier times during my son’s childhood. Now we were together again, starting anew. We decided to stop there for lunch.

Though the food was predictably tasteless and expensive we ate it hungrily. Before resuming our journey I silently exorcised the old grief which had so often been my only front-seat passenger when I had driven down this road in recent months.

There’s always something exciting about travelling the open road. I had often taken this route to mid Wales. The hills around Hereford and Worcester felt to be particularly full of Earth and ley magic. As we passed Malvern I began to pick up the energy of the Black Mountains. Depressing the accelerator I heard Rosinante’s little engine respond to purr along obediently at sixty.


Late that afternoon, we got to Newtown and the road to Llani. Jan had never been in this part of Wales and I was glad to share with him my happy memories of places there. A gentle drizzle greeted us as we drove over the Severn in Short Bridge Street.

Catherine was at home. I gave her a petit cadeau of incense which I knew she’d like.

“Oh! how did you know?” she exclaimed in delight. “Only ten minutes ago I was thinking about Chinese incense and saying to myself what a pity we can’t get it in Llani. Now, here you are with it!”

She told me of her recent interest in Nichiren buddhism. Catherine had always struck me to be a natural buddhist and I knew that she would appreciate that particular delicate incense. It was a small token of friendship for all the happy times we had shared during the last eventful eighteen months. I told her of our journey to Findhorn and we spent some time catching-up with each other’s lives.

To sleep in, I was given the tiny corner room close to the bridge outside. That night, listening to the eternal rush of mountain water washing and smoothing down the rocks below the riverbed, I drifted off into a blessed dreamland.


By noon the next day we were ready to move on. But first I had to climb the hill behind the White House to greet an old friend, the marker stone which stood hidden under ivy, overlighting Llanidloes. Laying my hands over it I could feel the gentle energy that flowed through in a peaceful, healing stream of etheric white light. Quietly I uttered the words of the Great Invocation:


From the Point of Light within the Mind of God,
Let light stream forth into the minds of men;
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the Point of Love within the Heart of God,
Let love stream forth into the hearts of men;
May Christ return to Earth.

From the Centre where the Will of God is known,
Let purpose guide the little wills of men;The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the Centre which we call the race of Men,
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out;
and may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.1


I didn’t know it then but I was travelling north along strong ley energy lines, unconsciously following ancient megaliths. A year before I had had a powerful dream of travelling to the Celtic lands to bear witness to the return of the Sun-deity, Arthur. Now the dream unravelled itself on the third dimension.

Some hours later we were on the M56 driving past the smoky, industrial sprawl of Ellesmere Port. Despite Rosinante’s aged engine, I put my foot down on the accelerator to escape the sulphurous clouds polluting that bleak wasteland.

By tea time we were in Windermere with Joan. That evening we took a walk to the top of a hill overlooking Lake Windermere. On its summit we sat down on a bench to watch the sunset. I told her I had been at the CND march at Barrow two years before. Joan reminisced about her life, telling me of the messages she received from the space-people and of her own link with Sai Baba. She remembered how, during the last war, the Luftwaffe would fly low over Windermere valley at night to bomb the ship yards and factories at Barrow. How strange, I thought. I might have been in one of those ‘planes in another lifetime.

Before leaving the Lake District, Joan took us to Keswick to show us the Stone Circle at Castlerigg. Standing below Skiddaw’s rocky three thousand foot peak, the Circle lies in a natural amphitheatre created by the fells surrounding it. I could almost see the glow of flying saucers as they zoomed in on its energies.

Joan and I stood for a moment in the middle of the Circle. It was nearly midday and the Sun approached its zenith — symbolically the time when King Arthur returns with the light to all people. I could hear Sir George’s rousing voice recite his favourite lines from The Armada to kindle the flames of a New Age in our hearts:


...’Til like volcanoes flared to heaven the stormy hills of Wales,
‘Til twelve fair counties saw the flame from Malvern’s lonely height,
‘Til stream’d in crimson on the wind the Wrekin’s crest of light,
‘Til Skiddaw saw the fire that burnt on Gaunt's embattled pile,
And the red glare on Skiddaw woke the burghers of Carlisle...2


The ley journey to the north continued to be a source of magical surprises as the myth of The Return was enacted on some deep psychic, interdimensional matrix. The third regression I had experienced, just prior to the journey, must have opened many doors inside me.

After lunching with Joan we said our farewells and drove on towards the Borders. Soon we had crossed over the first large volcanic rift that creates a subterranean divide running through Scotland’s low lands, keeping the rest of it separate from the south. The sun shone brightly and my spirits soared. By the evening we would be in Findhorn.

Reaching Edinburgh, we stopped at the Forth Bridge for a meal before making an almost ritual crossing of the firth; then onto Perth and the Cairngorms. London seemed very far away. The conifered, alpine fresh contours of the mountains cleaved a blue skyline as we sped on north along a good, new road past lochs and romantic castles. God’s virgin country, I thought. How can I ever go back to the drabness of London after being in this beauty?


By six, that evening, we were driving into Findhorn. It was Regatta Week and the bay was full of elegantly masted yachts from all over the world. Windsurfers cut and danced across water that sparkled in the light of a late northern Sun. An orange-red glow had begun to burnish the treetops that crowded its farther shores.

We ate our dinner in the inn by the Mercat Cross under a royal blue St Andrew’s flag fluttering and cracking in the evening breeze. Though it was early August an autumnal chill was in the air. We ate up and headed towards the beach for a walk before turning in. Ahead lay quite a week for both of us.

The twilight had set in. All around us lay a majestic panorama of the Moray Firth with the shadowy, indigo blue mountains of the Highlands silhouetted against the pink and red gloaming of north westerly skies. A distant lighthouse winked its welcome. We were not far from the very top of Britain now. As Jan ran towards the waves I found a stick and left the universe a note in the sand...


WE MADE IT!!


I stood there on a timeless beach as if I had found a new planet at the end of a long, long journey through inner and outer space. Facing the golden rays that came slanting across the North Sea I uttered a silent prayer of thanks to Baba without whose grace none of this could have ever happened. Beyond all doubt I knew that it was he who spoke within me as my Poet of the Dawn.

That Dawn awaited us and I was learning to go beyond the shadows of self-doubt. The more I opened up to Baba, the more I discovered a joyous new reality in which all my dreams came true. We had followed him to this place and here, in the sunset, we were right in the midst of God’s being. I had been promised my healing at Findhorn and already I could feel it flowing into me on solar waves of love.

We jumped onto dry sand and headed towards the sea wall as the tide began to roll in. The white street lights of the village reflected serenely on a glassy bay and twinkled against the lengthening dusk. Everything was perfect, peaceful light.


It felt like the first day at school as we drove up the pot-holed driveway to Cluny Hill College and Experience Week. Parking Rosinante by the tennis courts I went in to register.

The place was summer-busy. Last week’s guests were on the way out and their luggage stood alongside that of this week’s intake who were on the way in. The lobby was overflowing. I walked into a back office to pay the rest of my bill. Imagine my surprise to be greeted with a friendly “Sai Ram!” by its inhabitant. Henk Meijer was a Dutch Sai devotee. Swami’s smiling face shone out, serendipitously, out of several pictures that lined the office walls. Since the Findhorn Foundation was in no way a western ashram devoted to Sathya Sai Baba this was clear evidence to me of his New Age mission in such light centres.

I met Rory, a quietly spoken Irish-American who would help focalize our Experience Week group. He told me something about the Community and sat listening patiently as I attempted a not-very-coherent explanation how I felt that Baba had brought me to Findhorn. He told me that there were several followers of Baba in the Community. Though not a devotee he too had visited Prashanti Nilayam.

I could feel Swami’s indulgent, mildly teasing, smile light up everyone and everything. Truly, he was everywhere! He seemed to have got me by my collar and he wasn’t letting go. All his inner guidance was manifesting itself before my very eyes! Again, I remembered the dream in which he had asked me whether I would leave everything and go with him. Now he had brought me here.

Our Group met for the first time and, during the sharing, I told them the story of how a cheap, digital watch — whose brand name just happened to be ‘Shivas’ — had got me to Scotland. It must have sounded a bit like a yarn because some of the others giggled. But the thing was it was true!

Experience Week was always a trying time for everyone concerned. I had hoped that at least I would be able to shed off a few more layers of the emotional armouring that, as one of Baba’s more quixotic knights, I had been carrying about since childhood. I was open for any eventuality. We had all been brought together in a group in which each of our life stories would ultimately converge for a week. At some level, we had already begun to weave them together. Yet, the pace of Experience Week can create an atmosphere of ‘manufactured spirituality’ as if one was on a package tour of interpersonal psychology and communal angst. At times this conventional groupiness could start to crumble away. I began to feel that my inner self had begun to feel demeaned by what it perceived as the ceremonial artificiality of tribal, emotional blood-letting.

I began to get very confused. Why had Baba brought me to the Community? I was all too aware of my need for a great deal of emotional healing and began to feel that the Experience Week was simply not going to provide it. Somehow everything we did seemed to leave a strangely ersatz aftertaste. The answers I needed from the universe were most definitely not in evidence here. As the week progressed I began to get increasingly impatient with myself for getting nowhere and irritated with what I perceived to be an atmosphere of false friendliness to which we all had contributed. A smile had frozen into a grotesque mask on my face and the strain of trying to be friends with everyone and going with the flow had become unbearable.

On the third evening I sat outside the reception lobby with a cup of tea, waiting for the 7 o’clock evening sharing. I began to feel a great sense of being alone, and a restlessness. I began to feel that I didn’t want to take part in a group sharing that night. It felt quite wrong. I had to be alone to commune with my inner self. Without quite knowing why I got up and began to walk down the front drive that leads onto the forest path that climbs to the top of Cluny Hill. I knew this feeling very well and I had learned to go along with it — however strange it might seem to others.

Something was leading me up that hill. All I could feel was confusion and emotional turmoil coming to a head. I walked up to a tree stump, sat down and listened to the voices of children playing below the hill. Though tears had begun to well-up inside, they refused to flow however much I tried. I felt like one of those children might — vulnerable to the harsh blows the world dealt. I sat there for a while thinking. No one had the time to listen to my troubles. No one except Baba. How deeply could I share myself with those others and trust that it was alright?

After a while I walked back to the hotel and headed for the Sanctuary. On the way I met the other focalizer who asked me why I had missed the sharing. I tried to explain what had happened.

“I’m sorry” I apologized lamely. “I can’t explain to you, properly. But I just had to go for a walk on Cluny Hill instead. I’m very sorry if I upset anyone by my absence. But that’s just how it was.”

By this time my impatience had grown to the point where I wasn’t sure I could control it any longer. What was this Experience Week going to teach me?


One day, we were taken to nearby Randolph’s Leap where the sensitive, Robert Ogilvie-Crombie (‘Roc’ to his friends), had met the nature spirits. The veil between our world and that of the fairy folk, we were told, was especially thin here. We were given time to walk by ourselves and to commune with the elements. That suited me fine. As I stared down into the gorge below it was easy to feel the sound and movement of the rushing, peaty waters clearing my head of all its troubles. Downriver, a rocky island with a lone Scots Pine tree stood at the confluence of the Findhorn and the Divie. Which way should I go? I decided to walk upstream, looking for the crack in the veil.

Then, from the bushes, I soon began to hear the cumulative chattering of a hundred little voices. I sought a large tree and sat against its roots to listen. Was I imagining all this, making it up as I went along?

“What are you searching for?” I heard a voice. Faintly, I could discern before me in my mind’s eye the figure of a three foot garden gnome with a little red cap on his head.

“I don’t really know,” I replied truthfully.

“What have you come here to find, then?” it asked.

I just refused to believe this could really be happening. “This is ridiculous!” I exclaimed. “I have to be imagining all this!”

“Oh, well,” replied the gnome, resigning itself to my scepticism. “If you think you’re imagining it, I suppose you must be!” it said and disappeared, leaving me feeling foolish for having spoilt things.

“No, come back!” I cried desperately. But it was too late. I had committed the mortal sin of doubting its existence. After all, how would I have felt to stand there and have someone negate my very existence?

Nature spirits exist as beings who live in the Earth’s ethers. Through embodying our projected thought-forms they may take on whatever appearance is most appropriate. To me the spirit had appeared as a character straight out of either Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or a Garden Centre! They are, however, not dependent on our thought forms and will only appear when they choose to. Since then I have been back to Randolph’s Leap on several occasions but have not encountered any since.


The Experience Week was nearly at an end. I could sense the emotions within me ready to burst out. Just as one of our last sharings closed I found myself regressing back into a frightened, hurt child once more. One of the others, Anna, had been trying to express the deep pain that she carried within her. But it wouldn’t come out. Maybe it was because, being Austrian, she had had dificulty in expressing herself spontaneously in a foreign language. I could really feel the pain she was going through. Although English was my mother tongue I too experienced the same emotional wall. Then something broke inside me and my own pain began to spill out all over the place.

The sharing finished and everyone was already walking out leaving me feeling that nobody wanted to listen to my pain when it finally showed up. So much for sharing! But one person had stayed behind and she was holding me like a mother cradling her child. The warm intimacy allowed the dammed up years of all the hurt and fear and anger and confusion to gush out. I wept and dribbled and wept some more. And it didn’t matter. I was home. This woman was my mother the Planet and she had cared enough to stay behind and hold me in her lap.

Since my marriage had broken up I had needed to make this release. And one person had stayed behind ... one person was enough to heal my universe. Finally the tears dried up and the well springs of emotion were spent. I could feel a glow of gentleness and love around me. I was home, right at the heart of Mother Earth. And I could stop playing Experience Week and just be me.


Someone had set up a stall inside the hotel lounge, selling dolls, herbal perfumes, stone decorations ... and a large rabbit with long pointed ears, a red suit and a big, blue bow-tie. It might have been childish but I knew I had to take that rabbit home with me! I went over to the stall, bought the rabbit and got talking. Barbara lived in a farm-house not many miles away. I asked her about the availability of properties to let in the area. She told me that occasionally a house came up to let and gave me the addresses of some local property agents just in case I decided I ever wanted to come up to live here. Though I hadn’t properly realized it yet, the trail to our new home had already been laid...


The last day arrived. As I went into the dormitory to fetch my luggage out a woman approached me and gave me a huge hug. “I hope your dream comes true, whatever it is!” she said, smiled, and walked away.

I had already spent too much on my credit card and couldn’t afford to stay any longer at the Community. I knew I wasn’t ready to return to London. Something else needed to happen first. Maybe we could visit Iona before going back south. It seemed a shame to have travelled so far without visiting this holy island.

I booked into a guest house, nearby, to recover from the harrowing experiences of the last few days. New guests were already arriving at the Community and we had been asked to leave the premises as soon as possible. After staying a little longer to (by now illicitly) wash our laundry and have some tea we moved to the Scania guest house on the quiet side of Cluny Hill.

Driving to Findhorn that evening, divine providence seemed to take over. Suddenly, by Grant Park, the car slowed to a halt. I pushed it off the road and checked underneath the bonnet. The accelerator cable had snapped. I could almost hear Baba telling me to slow down! We walked over to a nearby hotel to ring up the breakdown service. On the way there, we saw two other cars broken down along a five hundred yard stretch. The whole area was full of earth energy and it seemed that the local leylines were particularly active that day. And it hadn’t been the first time that Rosinante had broken down on a leyline! As we sat waiting for the mechanic, a thought began to settle inside me. Maybe the signs were to tell us we could move up to live in Scotland?

We arrived back at the Scania very late. Instead of driving to Iona the next day I was going to have to wait in Forres until Monday to pick up a spare cable. As I prepared for bed, I kept getting a strange feeling that a silent flow of information was entering my consciousness, trying to tell me something.

Then I noticed a picture hanging in the corner of the bedroom. It was a reproduction of Picasso’s Don Quijote. There too was Sancho Panza... and in the background a windmill! Painted on the wall behind our beds — as if to emphasize the synchronicity — was a black-and-white mural depicting the two halves of a circle. The two segments were connected by a pair of arms which appeared to be bringing them slowly together. How could this possibly be happening? I asked myself. And if it is then it’s Baba trying to tell me something, Could it be that my quixotic quest is over? That my circle is almost complete and Rosinante’s journey almost at an end?

The real action which I had expected the week before was now actually taking place within a greater continuum of dreams, revelatory regressions and ley journeys culminating in Experience Week. The crack in the veil had grown wider when the little garden gnome had provoked me with its innocence.


©RW 1989