While we were working on the July IO, Don Harkins told me that he had figured out that the world was hopeless and the only thing we could do was what God said in the beginning and Anastasia and Ishmael reiterated, and that was to go back to the garden.
I was reminded of the weekend we spent last February with Dr. Leonid Sharashkin, editor and co-translator of Vladimir Megre’s Ringing Cedars Series. Sharashkin, or "Leo," as we came to know him, having been educated at Indiana University and the University of Missouri, wondered why the English speaking world was not excitedly endorsing Anastasia’s words. Motivated as he was by the messages of Anastasia, and being quite fluent in English and Russian, he contacted Megre and offered to translate the books in common English for him. He wanted to remind us how to get back to our motherland: that gardening is not just about growing potatoes and healthy children. It’s about reclaiming our birthright as human beings. And he left his own homeland and set up his "Space of Love" in a foreign country – ours – so he could do so.
While waiting for an okay from Megre he contacted several large publishing houses. One day he read a work of Tolstoy translated and published by one of these houses. The book, This I Believe, which he thought was one of Tolstoy’s greatest pieces, was so stiffly translated that it lost its meaning, that of questioning how a religion that advocates non-violence and love could be used to justify war and the killing of people. He realized the large publishers’ translation of Anastasia would not be any more true to Anastasia’s intention of love, beauty and connection to the Earth as a foundation for survival on this planet.
Therefore he found a small translator and an independent publisher and collaborated with them to honor the poetry and lilt of Anastasia’s works. Almost immediately Megre phoned, and the necessary finances manifested – from a donator named Anastasia. Similar to Anastasia, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael trilogy refers to our culture as that of "takers," whose belief system is: the world was made for man, and man was made to conquer it. Its opposite is "the leaver" culture, whose vision is: The world is a sacred place and a sacred process, and we are part of it.
According to Quinn, the "takers" are nearing the end of a 6000-year journey to destroy the planet.
Leo pointed out that our news media, operated by the "takers," only tells bad news – fear-based stories. If four squirrels die, the media makes a big deal of it, not telling about the thousands of squirrels still alive and well; likewise it reports on the hundred people who lost their homes without mentioning the five hundred who kept theirs. It is all imagery, Leo remarked, like the "collapse of the banking system." The banking system cannot collapse, he said, because it did not exist in the first place. It is just electronic blips on a computer screen. There are people living in the largest country of the world, Russia, who not only are unaware of the "global economic collapse," but they never even heard of World War II, and they are doing just fine.
This is a virtual world. Economic collapse is only part of our reality because we think it is. We need to become aware of the success stories, Leo said. Spend time in the real world. Go out into the garden and focus on what we see. Spend our energy co-creating a beautiful space on this planet.
What we intend to happen will happen, Leo said. He told us that in Russia, everyone has a garden. What they do for vacation is go to their "dacha" (garden in Russian) on weekends to grow food for themselves and their countrymen. The more serious seek out larger marginal or abandoned fields, find the owners and purchase the fields, or rent them from the government in order to create their Space of Love or an "eco-village," where a group of families agree to live together selfsufficiently on a larger piece of property.
As a result, in 2004, averaging 18 hours a week per family, Russian gardeners provided 53% of the country’s agricultural output, much of it on marginal land. In the US, on the other hand, the average family spent 28 hours a week in front of the TV, and we watered 47 million acres of lawn, providing $25 billion to the lawn-care industry.
Leo encouraged us to draw a picture of our Space of Love, our visionary, live, self-sufficient garden homestead where all the family spends its creative energy. Don must have done that, because this spring he expanded his garden space and started a greenhouse on the lawn.
We cannot wait for some day, when a Savior will rescue us from this perverted world. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Anastasia has not carried us across the window of the Dark Forces as she said in her books she might, but she has given us the tools to do it ourselves. It is up to us to turn away from the virtual electronic world, align ourselves with the flow of nature’s universal energy, and use the power of our thought to design our own empires in our own back yards. Carry on where Don left off, and "Just do it."