Heritage Week: A Living Story

Heritage Week: A Living Story
A contemplative journey into community memory, story and shared experience

Grounded in the spiritual community of the Park Ecovillage, Findhorn
There are moments in the life of a community when the stories we carry begin to ask something of us. They gather in rooms, on shelves, in folders and photograph albums, in old newsletters and quiet conversations. They live in the memories of those who walked here decades ago and in the footsteps of those arriving today. And sometimes, they call out to be gathered, tended, and passed on.

Heritage Week: A Living Story is an invitation to step into the living record of this community, not as a historian observing from a distance, but as an active participant in the ongoing act of remembrance. Together, we explore what it means to tend a collective story: handling the materials of the past, listening to living memory, and weaving threads into narratives that might be relevant for the world today and serve those who come after us.

Here, the work is love made visible. The archive is alive and your own unfolding is at the heart of it. The stories are waiting. From across the decades, they wait in boxes and binders, in digital files, in the voices of elders and the reflections of those who have lived them. They wait for hands to hold them, eyes to read them, hearts to receive them. You are invited to explore what it means to listen to a living story, and to notice what it stirs within your own.
What Heritage Week offers
As the week unfolds, you are invited into the rhythms of community life. Through shared meals, reflective practices, group activities, time in nature and moments of quiet attention, we explore:

Inner listening as a way of sensing what wants to be heard and remembered
Relational awareness through stories held in people, place and community
Love in action through attentive presence, care and witnessing
Co-creation as a way of contributing to a story that is still unfolding

Enjoy the opportunity to explore a rich range of community materials, photographs, writings and digital media, alongside guided conversations with those who carry living memory.

Working individually or together, you may also shape what you discover into a simple offering: a reflection, a story, or a creative response. Both as a project and as a way of gifting back, allowing something of what you have received to take form and be shared.
The Park Ecovillage, Findhorn
Heritage Week: A Living Story is not a conventional heritage programme. It is a citizen-scholar experience, grounded in the daily life of the Park Ecovillage, where the ordinary rhythms of the community become the context for discovery.

Taking place during Birthday Week in November, the programme sits within a meaningful time in the community calendar. Around the 17th November, the community marks the beginnings of this experiment in living, creating a shared atmosphere of reflection, celebration and connection.

This offers a unique opportunity not only to explore the story of Findhorn, but to experience it as it is being lived, remembered and nurtured together.

Surrounded by dunes, forest paths, the beach and the wide skies of the Moray Firth, the Park provides a simple and supportive environment to slow down, listen more deeply, and sense your place within a larger living whole.
Who this week is for
You might feel drawn to the Heritage Week for many reasons:

You sense that stories carry something sacred
You want to explore the origins and story of Findhorn
You are drawn to a slower, more contemplative approach to heritage
You want to contribute to something that may serve future generations
You have lived in this community and feel the call to tend its memory
You want to engage with story, memory and meaning in a reflective way
You are newer here and want to contemplate the ground beneath your feet
You want to listen to and learn from lived experience within the community

No prior experience with archives, research, or community history is required. What matters is a willingness to be present, to listen inwardly and outwardly, to handle materials with care, and to follow what inspires your curiosity.
What you take home
The experience you take home will be uniquely your own.

Many people leave with a deeper sense of connection, to the story of this place, to their own unfolding path, and to the ways in which we are all part of something larger moving through time.

Heritage Week: A Living Story is an invitation to slow down, listen, and discover what it means to be part of a living story. You can explore more about our collective autobiography and the archives here.