FANA-FI-GAIA

Imbolc - February 1, 2025

14th Quarterly from the Ziraat Council

Note from the Council

The Blessing of New Beginnings

Sunrise photo by Sierra Salin

Alima Silke Stoeckel

In the northern hemisphere, we are in the season of winter. The time of darkness and cold is still near, when life in nature withdraws deep inside and rests. With renewed energy, it will begin a new round around the sun in spring.

In the depths of winter, I realised that within me lies an invincible summer, wrote Albert Camus. The time of abundance is still far away and barely imaginable. But the new becoming is already here and can be gently felt in the atmosphere.

Imbolc is a quiet festival in which we celebrate the growing light and the tenderness of new life; a festival of reawakening, renewal and purification. In this clear energy, we align our visions with the new year.

What begins invisibly and small harbours a great, unstoppable force that will transform life on the outside.

In tune with the season, let us honour these moments of pausing, cleansing, visioning and aligning ourselves. The life we create grows from these spiritual seeds. The small begins in each of us and will help shape the world of tomorrow.

As creative inspiration for this time of Imbolc, I would like to share this song with you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL3KG2L-evE&list=PLAE496328B9819C23&index=7

May our being and work serve life and the wellbeing all beings!

Alima, on behalf of the Ziraat Council

From our Ziraat Website

Moineddin Jablonski - from "Illuminating the Shadow"

The newest of these revolutions is the environmental movement- but the politics of a sane ecology is only the surface of a larger planetary consciousness now emerging.

Human sensitivities are deepening every day, every year, every decade. We are moving rapidly toward a conscious multi-dimensional rapport with the vast global and spiritual being of Earth-whose healing is our healing, whose evolution is our evolution, whose illumination is our illumination.

Ziraat in Action

The Peacegarden in Ruhau, Germany

It began with a vision. As a Cheraga, Ingrid Anahita Mettert is deeply connected to the Universal Worship Service and the Universal Peace Celebrations, as they are often practised in Ruhaniat. The vision grew in her to create a garden with natural altars that would be a space for meditation, contemplation, encounters and peace celebrations for the various religions. Slowly, she entrusted her inspiration to individuals. Tenderly, the vision began to become a tangible reality for us.

A beautiful place was found on the land of Rafia and Wolfgang Salik Sieglin–Ruckhardtshausen (Ruhau), a farm and much appreciated retreat center for the dances

A first website was created on which the idea was presented and plans could be seen. A call for contributions and donations went out. This link shows those first steps:

http://hof-ruckhardtshausen.de/gaestehaus-2/friedensgarten/

The project needed many hands, forces, competences and financial means to eventually enrich many people as a beautiful peace garden. As it now says on the website: ‘This open garden is dedicated to all-embracing unity, to peace in our hearts and between religions. It is reserved for silent walking meditations and prayers. A place for universal peace dances and peace celebrations. Born from a vision of Ingrid Anahita Mettert to support and enrich the living power of peace dances’.

The Peace Garden lives with the changing seasons. Its centre with the connected hearts and its altars bear witness to that which remains through all changes. The one divine being that lives and shines through everything.

It began with a vision

And today the Peace Garden shows us in a marvellous way

- the power of a vision that is born from the depths

- the power of working passionately to realise this vision

- the power of togetherness that is needed to bring a vision to earth

- the power of guardians who preserve the beauty of a place for the benefit of all.

Excerpt from Ziraat Reader

Man’s need for oneness with nature is not fulfilled simply by hiking or camping in nature, but by penetrating into the consciousness of the trees and the flowers, of the planet and the atoms, experiencing what it would be like to be that flower or tree and getting into the spirit of the wind on a landscape or of a musical note: in fact, switching to a totally different focus of consciousness, tuning into a transfigured world which, as the Sufis say, "transpires through that which appears."

—Introduction by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

to the Nature Meditations

Ziraat Reader (Part 1), page 54