From the Sufi tradition as originally taught by Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan.
A suggested daily Ziraat practice is to find time every day to be in the Holy Book of nature.
By Ananda Cronin
This is a practice to embody HIK’s Elemental Breaths as a modality for Healing. As Murshid Sam says, “One can spiritualize any breath by placing a name of God upon it.”
Video: Healing Breaths Attuned to the Living Elements
By Richard McMurtry
The alarm rings in the darkness of the early morning. I hesitate a moment, then slide out of bed realizing that failure to do so will result in my being late. And then I will need to track down the trackers, rather than join them at the outset. Which is fun, of course, but not as rewarding as seeing the first tracks together.
A warm shower enlivens and awakens my body. And any remorse for the early rise is replaced by the excitement of anticipation of joining my beloved group of trackers!
By Chanda Shannon Gorres
In the small Midwestern town where I grew up, the human population was 98% white. The lawns around the houses were 98% impeccably mowed grass, with a flower or two here and there. Surrounding the town were 98% corn and soybean fields. 98% of the town went to either Catholic or Lutheran churches. You could guess by now that the cultural ethos was uniformity and conformity. Still, it merits a deeper contemplation: what does growing up with this kind of visual homogeneity do to the psyche?
By Maboud Charles Swierkosz
Throughout the winter season I sit outside in the early morning hours under the portal and engage in practices of prayer, breath, elemental centering within the body and the world around me. Being outside in the backyard this way helps me to be grounded and present as the cold air holds me, as the wind whistles to me, as the snow glistens upon my eyes and as the rising sun touches my body.
By PamAllah Dussault
How lovely is a walk in the woods….. with the wind river sound through
the tree tops, the shades of color and textures and scents along the
way. Being embraced by the quiet, rooted nature of the tree people.
By Mirabai WolfWillow
It started with a wonder.
It always starts with wonder.
I wonder what would happen if I befriended some aspect of nature,
took it into my consciousness and followed it daily
through four seasons
to see what it would teach me?
Would my life be changed by this?
Where would it lead me?
I wondered.
And what would it be like to share this journey with others?
Could we inspire and delight each other as we went along?
By Betty Lou Chaika
www.earthsanctuaries.net
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.”
by Aatoon Nina Massey
Prayer to Mother Earth
Breathe in your light,
Breathe out love for you.
Let me walk in rhythm
With your heartbeat, Great Mother.
The Path of Gardening in the Alchemy of the Heart: Clearing, Weeding, Composting the Unwanted (Turning Poison into Medicine), Watering (Bestowing the Blessing), and Harvesting: Path of Gardening
by Arjuna
‘Towards the one, united with all!’
Murshid SAM used to say quite often ‘One of the purposes of the Sufi Message is to restore not the “ancient” but the eternal mysteries.’ Perhaps one aspect of the Ziraat work will be to resurrect the Nature mysteries of Pan, the Green Man, the Great Mother, and others.
Moinneddin Jablonski (1997)
By Hakima Betty Lou Chaika
For her Mother’s Day Ziraat Retreat in Ashville, NC, Darvesha asked me to make an ending ritual as a seal on our intentions to reciprocate with Earth, and as an empowerment for the participants to go forth to celebrate the Divine Mother and Mother Earth. She also asked me to write about the creation of a ceremony, so here’s the story:
By Arjuna
Welcome to our inaugural Bulwalwanga Ran Festival! ‘Bulwalwanga Ran’ in Dhurga language of the Yuin Nation of the South Coast of NSW means ‘we are strong you all.’
Our festival is about celebrating indigenous and other world wisdom traditions that honour Mother Earth. It is about learning from each other and finding the best ways to support personal as well as planetary wellbeing. It is also an attempt to redress some of the wrongs of the past when Europeans first encountered the First Nations of Australia. (From http://bulwalwangaran.com.au accessed 7/9/2017)
Una confabulación para transformar el imaginario sobre lo femenino
by Majida Ana Maria Hoyos and Jamia Yami Campo
"EVA" es una estrategia dirigida a las esferas mental, emocional, espiritual y simbólica de los seres humanos, cuya consciencia colectiva, influenciada y programada por la cultura occidental, patriarcal y dominante, ubica a las mujeres como seres de segunda categoría, culpables del pecado original que trajo consigo castigos a la humanidad. Esta concepción justifica y hace legítima tanta violencia y agresión hacia lo femenino.
Se pretende resinificar el mito de Adán y Eva en el paraíso y contribuir a restablecer el equilibrio entre las fuerzas femeninas y masculinas que nos componen como humanidad.
El diseño metodológico del ritual incluye geometría sagrada, círculos sagrados de danzas, cantos y tambor en vivo, las energías del anochecer y del amanecer, y otros elementos que hacen parte del legado ancestral de américa.
The "EVA" ritual is a strategy aimed at the mental, emotional, spiritual and symbolic spheres of human beings, whose collective consciousness, influenced and programmed by Western, patriarchal and dominant culture, places women as second class beings, guilty of the original sin that brought punishment to humanity. This conception justifies and makes legitimate so much violence and aggression towards the feminine.
It is intended to give a new perception of the myth of Adam and Eve in paradise and contribute to restoring the balance between the feminine and masculine forces that make up us as humanity.
The methodological design of the ritual includes sacred geometry, sacred dance circles, live drum and chanting, the energies of dusk and dawn, and other elements that are part of the ancestral legacy of America.
By Bodhi Be
Going home is a phrase I often hear at the bedside of the dying. While I understand the sentiments, these words have deep implications. Do they mean that this is not our home, here on Earth? Does it follow the transcendent view to be “in the world, but not of it” ?
by Hakima Betty Lou Chaika
A DUP dance, a memorial sculpture, Native Americans, Irish people, Ancestors, Nature-Spirit, and a humble ceremony. How do these all come together?
Here's the story: Two of our beloved Dances of Universal Peace leaders, Larry Taylor and Lynda Aiman-Smith, created the Hashtali Elements Dance for our North Carolina DUP community a number of years ago, Lynda being of Choctaw lineage. (Her Choctaw great-great-grandmother married an Irish settler.) A few years ago they moved away from us, and then, sadly, Larry, an incredible musician, passed away. My husband, Hamid David, is of another Native American lineage (his Ojibwe great-great-grandmother also married an Irish man), and we've always loved this dance. When we heard about the unveiling of a Choctaw Monument in County Cork, Ireland, where my Irish ancestors are from, we were determined to go to it. In September, 2016, we traveled to see the Choctaw memorial sculpture, “Kindred Spirits,” created by Alex Pentek.
Ziraat is an inter-faced message. The outer fabric weaves a too brief outline with harvesting the fruits of the earth. The interfacing is the cultivating of the soul by individual workers under Allah's all-seeing eye. Ziraat enables the initiate to comprehend the qualities of the soul in every aspect of nature.
A Note about our Current Transition
In the Sufi world, various types of ‘taking hand’ have taken place over the centuries. In the Hazrat Inayat Khan family, we sometimes group all of these together under the word ‘initiation,’ but this can lead to confusion.
"There is one Holy Book,
the sacred manuscript of nature,
the only scripture which can enlighten the reader."
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Experience
In the early 90s I learned about the Ziraat concentration from Vakil Forest Shomer at a retreat or camp. I took a public initiation or oath with him to align myself with my true heart’s calling of a spirituality rooted in Earth consciousness. In my mind this included practicing respect for all life forms by living more ecologically, learning ways to incorporate ritual into my Sufi practice that included participation and prayer with nature, and teaching the next generation about Earth-centered spirituality.
WALKING YOUR TALK WITH ZIRAAT
In Thy nature
I feel Thy presence (HIK)
Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote these words as a meditation. This meditation is just one of many in a small book called Nature Meditations. The meditations are used in conjunction with the breath. Hazrat Inayat Khan called the Nature Meditations “the cream of the Message.” From my experience these meditations cut through the morass of words and concepts that often follow us when deepening our consciousness to The Real.
The ancients were more in touch with the rhythms of nature than we in modern industrialized societies are today. They didn't know as much as we do about the details—we get better predictions and control from chemistry and physics than they did from analyzing matter into earth, air, fire and water—but they knew more about the effects of the natural world on the psyche, the interiority, of the human being.
