mythopoetic series on resilience

Paradise Garden

“The Persian garden has always been a refuge and resting place to the scorching heat of the desert. And perhaps every age has its own kind of desert….” — Faranak Mirjalili

There is an old Persian word: pairidaeza. It is the root of the english word paradise. Long before paradise became an idea of a biblical heaven, it was a garden amidst earthly life. A walled sanctuary in the heart of the desert, where water flowed in fountains that stood at the center of blooming roses and nightingale’s songs, where the desert-wind blew the soil of an ancient land into fragrances that inspired poetry, and where music echoed and soul could hold dialogues that flowed like a stream beneath the shade of an ancient cypress tree.

But the Paradise Garden was never simply a place, a locai, although it certainly was materialized into wonderful gardens. As Henry Corbin reminds us, this garden of the soul belongs to the Mundus Imaginalis: an imaginal place that is not fantasy, nor a symbol or metaphor, but a living reality where the visible and invisible meet, where heaven and earth are united in the true meaning of the word “beauty”. A place where the soul remembers how to breathe, how to expand into itself and grow like a blooming rose.

Today, as the world turns more painfully erratic and unpredictable, and our individual lives become increasingly mediated by speed, algorithms, and endless information, we risk forgetting something our wisdom traditions have always known: that wisdom, and soul, cannot simply be consumed. It must be inhabited as a space that comes alive with the right ingredients, both simple and refined. Above all, it asks for us to gather together in spaces that tease the soul.

The Paradise Garden is an invitation into that ancient practice of gathering in beauty. We gather in the sanctuary not as escapism but to experience this wounded and troubled world sitting in the lap of the much older and eternal earthly beauty that it is. Through music, storytelling, image, silence and the weaving of dreams, we enter a space where the spirit of the depths can once again meet the spirit of the time.

This seasonal gathering is an invitation to cultivate this eternal garden once more—as an inner space as much as an outer one. Perhaps we need to rediscover paridaeza not as a lost paradise, but as a way of seeing the world together, and of being in the desert of our times amidst all its ugliness and eternal beauty. 

Where: Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam (Keizersgracht 123) or online via livestream/recording
Next event: July 30th 2026 on the Phoenix, Firebird, Simorgh
Hosts: Jungian analyst Faranak Mirjalili & multi-instrumentalist Sepand Dadbeh

Pre-register here: