In Anastasia’s Ray. Editor’s Afterword

Taking advantage of the frosty weather which had put a nearby lake under a thick shield of ice, I spent a Sunday afternoon skating with my daughter. The sky was overcast and a chilly north wind was blowing, but layers of winter clothing and energetic movement kept us warm. The same day, 26 December 2004, a local newspaper reported temperatures below io°F (-i2°C) and featured an article on ice fishing.

Five days later, on New Year’s Eve, we were having tea on the porch of our house, basking in the Sun’s hot rays and watching our daughter in her summer dress smelling yellow dandelions and feeding honey to a bee that had joined our meal. After breakfast we went for a walk by the lake, only to discover no traces of ice whatsoever. The Sun’s heat was so intense that the temperature in the shade climbed to 65°F (i8°C) and a new and historic record high was set. The news-paper printed photographs of residents of Columbia, Mis-souri, wearing shorts and T-shirts, enjoying the outdoors on 31 December 2004, and commented on the “unseasonably warm weather”.

And then I remembered the words Anastasia had ad-dressed to Vladimir Megre nine years earlier.

I could not hear any rustling of leaves since it was the middle of winter, but the warm breeze, the bird songs and the Sun’s generous warmth were very real indeed. Anyone who witnessed this unique outpouring of sunshine in the middle of the Midwest winter could not help but sense something unusual in the air, but I felt I knew something special about the cause of this sudden weather change. It was on this day, 31 December 2004, that the English translation of Anastasia was completed, and it seemed as if Nature were rejoicing at the birth of the book, the same way it had celebrated the birth of Anastasia’s son with a warm sunny day, pushing away the icy grip of the Siberian winter in 1996.

A few days later, when the Anastasia text was laid out and sent to the printer, the cold returned and newspapers were replete with stories of ice storms and snowfalls, but the feeling of a great accomplishment lingered, to take embodiment first in the printed book, then in the e-mails and telephone calls of its initial readers. Here is one e-mail I received:

A friend gave me the book Anastasia. I read it today out-doors while the sun shone warmly and the birds sang sweetly My heart knows such an essence as her spirit and I am still basking in the glow of the presence....

After reading that Anastasia suffered a loss in strength after helping someone, I decided to send her distant reiki. I

know from experimenting with my kids that it has a healing effect. Immediately after sending the distant reiki I ‘heard’ her say ‘thankyou’. Today I sent her distant reiki again. Soon after I was finished, I began smelling the sweetest scent of a flower, and the scent went into all my sinuses. My sinuses feel different now I feel such an inexpressible feeling of love and joy It is like being in love, but in a totally different way If you were here right now I would hug you and let you feel it. Thank you for this sweet and precious gift.

Even as this and other heart-warming messages showed me that the book is producing the same response among English-speaking readers as in other parts of the world, I was still wary of the welcome the translated edition of Anastasia would receive in professional and academic circles. But the first impressions shared with me by its early readers — students of psychology, Russian literature, forestry, ecology, sociology and philosophy — are most encouraging. One scholar, after reading just the first chapter, asked me if she could have a pendant of cedar wood...

Dr Richard Bolstad, a psychologist from New Zealand and author of RESOLVE: a new NLP model of therapy , was quick to recognise the value of the book for his professional field and described the Ringing Cedars Series as “ecological common sense and profound wisdom delivered with love, a unique Russian gift towards the needed healing of the whole planet and the creation of space for love in our lives”.

Steven Foster, the ‘Echinacea guru’, one of the leading experts on medicinal plants in North America, author of A field guide to medicinal plants and herbs'4 and other books, after sharing many of his personal experiences corroborating Anastasia’s sayings about the spiritual link between Man and Nature, had this comment about the Series:

The Ringing Cedars Series will impact a new generation of readers, like the works of Carlos Castaneda did for a pre-vious generation — only this time through awakening the latent spiritual connection each of us has with nature. This is not about a walk in the woods, rather these books catapult us to an entirely new way of being on planet Earth.

I also discovered from informal talks with my colleagues that many foresters have psychic experiences in the forest, but keep silent for fear of being ridiculed by their peers. One colleague who manages thousands of acres of forest in the Ozarks confessed to me in a private conversation that when marking trees to be felled he communicated with the Intel-ligence governing the trees and had a deep reverence for the Life manifest in them.5

I am all the more happy to hear these accounts in view of the fact that they are a sincere expression of readers’ actual feelings, rather than a formulation developed by a well-paid marketing specialist and put into the mouths of celebrities, as often happens in current practice in the publishing indus-try. These and all other reviews of the Ringing Cedars Series I have received are genuine, they come straight from the heart.

One of the faculty members at the University of Missouri surprised me by saying he already knew about Anastasia and the impact these books were producing around the world.

It turned out he had learnt about the Ringing Cedars Series from his aunt who lived in Germany and had read the best-selling German translation. He said she had been so greatly impressed by the books that she would call him from Germany and read entire chapters, in German, over the telephone. This story made me wonder as to how many aunts call their nephews on the other side of the globe to read a chapter from a book they particularly liked. Not very many, I would imagine. Which means a book that does elicit such a response must certainly possess a power to set hearts aflame, regardless of the language in which it is read.

I became even more confident about the Ringing Cedars’ power to transcend national boundaries after I received the following message from Europe from Nara Petrovic, editor of the Slovenian translation of the Series. This is what he wrote:

Without any advertisement the book became a best-seller mainly by readers spreading the news from mouth to mouth. In many libraries the waiting lists were soon get-ting longer and longer and in bookstores the sales were very good....

Thousands of readers in Slovenia and Croatia are more than enthusiastic about the books. Whoever has read the books and has a vegetable garden was compelled — even out of sheer curiosity — to try out the ideas explained in the first book. And when I spoke to people they confirmed that everything works. One man even called us and told us that he had made a beehive according to Anastasia’s detailed instructions and was amazed at how well it worked.

One of the publisher’s relatives spent a lot of time in his garden even before he read the books. He loved to work in the garden and thus had cultivated very healthy and tasty crops. But after he implemented Anastasia’s instructions

the tomatoes and some other vegetables yielded so well that all of his relatives and friends were surprised by the tastiest vegetables they’d ever eaten.

One lady who lives near my city planted pumpkins for the first time in her garden according to Anastasia’s in-structions. That year there was a great drought. All her neighbours’ gardens were dry, with very little vegetables, while the pumpkins in her garden were huge, although she took almost no care of them.

I also have accounts of people in North America who — after either reading the Russian version or learning about Anastasia’s ideas from their Russian friends — have followed her advice on gardening to obtain remarkable results. This is very encouraging. In the light of how all the ‘incredible’ revelations of the Series have been playing out in real life, there is no escaping the fact that

Your dream, Anastasia, is entering upon our world, and it really seems as though our world is beginning to change. There are certain people who feel and understand you — they show evidence of new strength coming from some-where, and that is changing the world. The world is be-coming just a little better.

In this English-speakers are no different from other read-ers that embraced Anastasia’s ideas earlier: “The book you have written will circulate all over the world and... it will give you and others a power greater than mere physical or mate-rial strength.” The only difference is that in Russia and other countries the dream has been unfolding for a number of years now, while America, along with the rest of the English- speaking world, is at the very beginning of this radiant path which it may now choose to follow. Wes Jackson, a well- known proponent of ecological approaches to agriculture in the United States and director of the Land Institute, has passionately argued in his writings that there is no other possible way of development for this country but a return to the land. What if he is right and there is indeed no other way? Then it is probably not by chance that two of the central chapters in Vladimir Megre’s eighth book, The new civilisation, convey Anastasia’s vision of America’s future. A beautiful one.

Even as my family are now packing up, getting ready to move from Columbia to a small farm lost amidst the beautiful Ozark mountains — with an aspiration, apart from continuing work on the Ringing Cedars Series, to live their ideas in real life — I have an ever-growing feeling of awe at the clear realisation that what Anastasia dreamt about is already coming to pass in America as well. It is coming to pass.

Within the two months since Anastasia was published in English there have already been two artistic performances of dance and song inspired by her. The dancer — a young breast-feeding mother and a future midwife — told me how her heart had instantly felt and accepted Anastasia’s essence as her own, and how she now feels her presence and support on the path she is following. She told me she felt herself sim-ply overflowing with the energy of Love and wanted to share it with everybody. Then, as she described her captivating dance and song as ‘butterfly women’, I stared at her in awe, experiencing a strange sensation in my heart and head. The remarkable thing is that I have a large painting by Alexander Razboinikov (who designed the cover art for the Series) hanging on the wall in my home. This painting — called The butterfly dance — depicts Anastasia dancing in a whirlwind of butterflies and is inspired by Book 3, The Space of Love, which has not been translated as yet!

But The Space of Love is being translated and is scheduled to see the light on 23 July 2005, a day on which ‘Dachnik Day’ and an ЛИ-Earth holiday’ will be celebrated in America for the first time, true to Anastasia’s promise: “This holiday will indeed begin in Russia. But then it will become the most fan-tastic holiday for the world as a whole”.*

And then, “a wave of warmth will cheer the heart, and over the world will be unfurled a new dawn”. I can already see the twilight of this dawn. And I know that I am not the only one who does.

Columbia, Missouri, U.S.A.

Earth Day (22 April 2005) Leonid Sharashkin

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