Join us as we discuss ecology, faith, interfaith and permaculture. We recorded this podcast just as the war for Ukraine began and touch on the role of community in love, truth and peace.
Katherine can be found most easily on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/katheringing/
To consider training with Hannah Jewel, your host, visit:
https://jewelofpeace.com/training/
Hannah Jewel · Katherine Hreib on Faith, Culture and Permaculture
‘Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of Building for Peace with Hannah. Today we’re having the podcast via Zoom because I am interviewing an incredible young lady who’s based in Turkey, and while the podcast is Sussex based, her current project is related to a project I’m working on myself, and she’s got so much to share. I just really wanted to bring her on. So this is Katherine Hreib. She’s an American like myself and she’s living in Turkey. She has studied sustainable development and the philosophy of religion at Columbia University. She has worked for the United Nations in an initiative called Religions for Peace. And as part of this, she worked on violence against Muslims in the state of Tennessee and also on permaculture with those communities there in Tennessee. As part of her work with the United Nations, she was an environmental coordinator where she created a network of 200 interfaith groups and. Through this, she began to study more into agriculture and farming and spirituality. She’s done research with the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture, which is the acronym NASA. They work with dry farming and no dig. They’re based in California and they continue to support her research. Katherine’s current interest is researching communities which specialise in spirituality and agriculture, or which live with both of these aspects fully embodied. And it is this research which led her first to India and then to Turkey, where I have had the opportunity to meet her. So welcome today, Katherine, to the podcast. It is such a joy and a delight to have you here.
Katherine: Thank you so much for having me. It’s brightening my day.
Hannah: I can see the sun coming in. And we’re here at the beginning of March with the start of spring. Tell us a little bit, Katherine, about some of your projects.
Katherine: I live right now in Seki, Turkey, which is an area in the south of Turkey, near Fethiye. It’s about an hour inland from the city, from the ocean. And we live nested in something in Turkish called a yayla, which I have come to learn means it’s a valley. So it’s a flat area in a mountain range. So it gets full on winter, full on summer, and it’s at a higher elevation. And the reason I moved out here about six, seven months ago is because there’s a community, a Rafai Sufi community out here that is looking to start an agriculture project and also a sort of heritage and lineage project on land that was recently acquired in a mountain close to here. And the mountain is a very special area. It faces Pir Abdul Mousa where his shrine is and also where many blessings have come from. So it’s a special location to the community. And the vision has been that there will be a very extended ceremony of music and whirling and prayers. And before we even get there, the idea is that people would be able to stay there continuously, maybe for up to three years. So food systems come before we start dreaming too much about these prayer celebrations because we need food to fuel our prayers and we also need to pray to the earth there so that we are welcomed and we have mutual benefit that comes out of this ceremony.
We have to make friends and all these things just like planting plants. So this is the reason I moved out here. The process is slow because we’re working in a community and details get changed and the world is changed. And we are even yesterday meeting some families from the Ukraine that just crossed the border on the first day of the war. So there’s so many different ways that we’re holding each other that the Community Land Project has to incorporate these daily acts of giving and sharing and meeting each other. So in the meantime, there are also other projects that will develop. There’s members of the community that are starting their own farms and people are lending hands to them. I’m also in the process of searching for land to create sort of like a base camp for this project where we can create a tree nursery and do some hands-on learning before we move up there long term or for a longer term ceremony. And I think the process right now is some people say gathering the troops we’re seeing who are interested enough to stay, who have what types of knowledge that we need, architects and farmers and families and people with muscles and people who can read astrology charts. And we never really know what we need, but we’re asking slowly and receiving people day by day. So this is the trajectory of the project so far.
H: A fascinating project and one that I’m involved with as well. The land up there is so breathtaking. The air is fresh and there’s just a sense of possibility. And I know everyone around the world is talking about starting a community, but there are not many places where it can actually happen. For example, here in the UK, obtaining land is rather challenging. So it’s so exciting to see that moving ahead there and. I really appreciate how you’ve brought forward the intermixing of peoples that comes in times of war, which has been going on for centuries.’…listen to the full cast for more!