"This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness” - Mary Oliver -
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I have always felt connected to the land, ever since growing up in Lebanon during the civil war. The forest at my school was my refuge from the world and my teacher. in 2013, I felt called to become an activist for the Beirut River, which then led me to start regenerating the degraded lands along the concrete banks of the river. Inspired by the work of Dr Miyawaki and under the guidance of his student Shubhendu Sharma, I started bringing the community together in 2019 to reclaim the banks of the concrete, sewage-filled river, turning it into Beirut's RiverLESS Forest. Our work is about enabling the communities to reclaim these degraded lands back into native forest, a shared space for the human and more-than-human to thrive in the city. Thus our initiative theOtherForest was born, as a tool for ecological and social regeneration, bringing this work to concrete school playgrounds, forgotten slivers of land, and even parking lots. And it all starts by bringing Life back to the Soil.
ADIB DADA |
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"My participation in soul and soil regeneration began when I started practicing awareness—awareness of myself and of all living beings. This inner work naturally led me to the land. Farming became a physical expression of understanding cycles, seasons, and the ways they shape our well-being within the ecosystem. As I learned to observe and collaborate with nature, I found myself acting more intentionally toward the future of our lands: regenerating, reviving, remembering, and re-tuning the rhythms of natural biodiversity. I integrate these principles into daily practices such as farming, composting, seed preserving, cooking, cultural and political activism and praying Since then, my work has focused on spreading awareness about sovereignty—recognizing it as our right to grow our food, choose the knowledge we adopt, and respond consciously to the destruction of our ecosystems. For me, soul and soil regeneration is both a personal path and a collective responsibility, rooted in connection, stewardship, and the belief that healing the land begins with healing ourselves. "
HASSAN ZEIDAN |
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I feel deeply connected to the ReGeneration of Soil and Soul because it mirrors my own journey back to belonging — not only to the land, but to myself and to community. Through facilitation, cultural repair, and regenerative practice, I’ve been unlearning separation and remembering how to listen again: to the body, to the soil, to stories, and to each other. This work is a reconnection to self, a soft healing of ancestral disconnect, and a commitment to tend both inner and outer landscapes with care, humility, and love. KARIM MALAK |
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how do you participate in the regeneration of soul?
——-- I fight the numbness that tries to settle in - in myself and in the world. I stay soft where it would be easier to go cold. I don’t let pain, love, loss turn into bitterness or armor. Soul regeneration happens in ordinary, difficult moments: paying attention to my needs, taking up my space, learning where I end and the world begins. Holding onto my voice and using it. It’s also stepping away from ways of living that shrink people into exhaustion and self interest. Putting my energy where something real is growing - in seeds and land, in art and imagination, in community and care, in the quiet intelligence of living things. I don’t experience myself as separate from the world. What I tend in myself feels very connected to what is still healing out there. I keep trying to create small, honest spaces where we can breathe and connect a little easier together. MILOU HELOU |
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Coalitions of Belonging - counter-mapping as practicing the details of our collective understanding. It is a tender insistence that the modalities, temporalities, orientations and scales in which we situate ourselves together in knowing are not incidental pedagogies, but the soil from which our cultures emerge. What if knowing is not fixed and rigid, as portrayed by the modern map, but of a much deeper inheritance, orientation & scale - rhythmic and riverine, of shared food and oiled skin, of stories beyond the language of justification? BOULOS SAAD |
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"To regenerate the soul within the body is to return to the truth that I chose to come here as the part of God that forgets, learns, and takes responsibility for its own becoming. My work invites people back to this place of neutrality, where care is guided by universal laws rather than human ones.
I walk this path through the elements that initiate me. I am a devotee of the air: I find the full, authentic breath: the breath that remembers. A breath that clears old traumas and lets truth rise clean. In this breath, light and shadow stand equal, and move through us consciously. I am a devotee of the water: I hold emotions, drown in them, listen to their irrational wisdom, become a whale in the dark, and trust the ascent back to the sun. I am a devotee of the fire: I warm, I burn, I die, and I rise. Alchemy keeps me going, knowing every death deepens the life that follows. I regenerate soul by offering myself as I am (authentic, devoted, responsible and continually reborn) living what I teach, dying into it, and telling the truth of it. I regenerate soil by practicing humility, remembering my place in the order of things," RAYA NJEIM |
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