 Eileen Caddy, one of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation community, passed over on Wednesday 13 December 2006.
We never met her, yet she has been a major inspiration to us, and we would like to devote this space to saying ‘thank you’ to her. Why? Well, we came to know Eileen through her autobiography, Flight into Freedom and Beyond, which is one of our favourite books. We read of her abundantly, gloriously fruitful life, an inspiring testimony to the immense, transformative power that can be released when even one person devotes her life singlemindedly to loving and nurturing the divine, in herself and others. Whatever mistakes she made, whatever disasters befell her, her utterly steadfast determination to be a channel for divine love carried her through, and turned all things to the good. And how! Just look at what she did, what she gave birth to, by being true to love. The Findhorn Foundation has influenced thousands of people on their spiritual quest. Innumerable authors and spiritual teachers count their contact with Findhorn and with Eileen in particular among their formative experiences. And humanity’s mushrooming awareness of universal law and how mind, body and spirit interact is due in no small part, we believe, to the work of Findhorn.
Yet Eileen was just, as she described herself, a divinely ordinary person. Shy, retiring and humble by nature, she was not one for the limelight. So how did she do what she did? By ‘holding the vision’, as Diana Cooper says in her tribute to Eileen. It was simply that, whenever she came to a crossroads in her life, however major or minor, she always chose the route that seemed to her to lead closer to the divine in all things. And she always gave her best to that choice - nothing less would do for her, no matter what fears or resistance she may have felt within. And that is why her best was always good enough, more than good enough, and why her humble offerings were so often met with divine help verging on the miraculous. The Findhorn Community first became famous, back in the 1960s, for growing fabulously huge vegetables in nothing but sand. This is no accident, we believe, but a transcendent symbol. A seed planted in sand with great love for and trust in the divine - in oneself, the Earth and all things - will bear greater fruit by far than a seed planted in fertile soil, if that love and trust is absent. Thank you Eileen, thank you - for your planting, your bearing and your fruiting!
Photographs © Cygnus Books 23-Feb-2007
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