My research into worldbuilding over the past two years has been expansive, but focused on the ways in which people in the SWANA - and particularly Bilad al-Sham - have narrated their worlds and their place within them. Part of it took me into weather lore, and how traditions and practices stem from similar sources of knowledge, but vary from region to region, and encode different atmospheric phenomena into place-based narrative practices that are informed by the different cultures and ecologies.

Earlier this year, I was delving into the worlds of thinkers from other parts of the world, whose practices emerged from other realities. I was becoming increasingly curious about where the decision of what counts as ‘real’ came from, and what happens when that decision looks like if it came from alternate perspectives within that same world, and how that changes the way things are narrated, enacted, exchanged and negotiated, and how they are anticipated when the very definition of language changes with that perspective.

That led me to thinking about water, as the medium, the mediator, the source and the signal that moves through the different layers of the cascading wdrldbuildling system that I was beginning to observe. I started with the politics of water, its relationship to the terrestrial, the spiritual, the celestial, and to time. I started by looking at places like Batir, a village in Palestine whose residents decided that in ‘water time’, a week has 8 days, to enable the 8 families of the village to each get a day of water supply. I looked at rain prayers across Bilad al-Sham, with beliefs that breath carries intention from the spiritual - via the corporeal - through condensation to reach the cosmic, negotiating the anticipated downpour through the atmospheric, and finally back down to the terrestrial.

That is where my curiosity became anchored to the Marbaaniyeh: the first wind of winter in Shami lore. She became an entry point into a much larger system of environmental knowledge: the accumulated ways people in Palestine and the wider Bilad al-Sham have read the atmosphere, land and sky in order to understand what kind of season might be coming. My research moved through Palestinian weather sayings and proverbs, agricultural calendars, the observation of winds, clouds, rain, frost and celestial movements, and the use of plants and animal behaviours as environmental signals. I became interested in how these different forms of observation operate together: how knowledge is built through repeated, situated attention to changes in the land, and how that knowledge passes between generations through agricultural practice, domestic preparation, sayings, stories and embodied experience.

I looked at practices through which life within areas of Palestine persists through a sensory and relational understanding of the environment. Ones that moves, connecting realms, weaving through past, present and future in temporalities that differ from the accelerated versions imposed by colonialism and capitalism. It became apparent that ecological knowledge wasn’t limited to the ecological, extending through relations between bodies, materials, landscapes, celestial phenomena and inherited practices. In the same vain, a community or village organises itself around these phenomena, which become narrative substrates that shape social imagination, which then in turn ensures that certain practices continue to be enacted.

تاريخ النظم: ١٢٢٢ للهجرة / ١٨٠٨م - المؤلف: الشيخ الشاعر صالح بن سيف العتيقي- نظم منازل القمر الثمانية والعشرين

That led me back to Tawfiq Canaan, particularly his work on Palestinian seasonal folklore and plant lore. In the material Canaan recorded, agricultural knowledge is transmitted through repeated observation, sayings, participation and story. The direction in which rain travels can carry meaning; constellations help situate the agricultural season; the appearance of animals after heavy rain becomes an environmental sign. Children learn by accompanying adults into fields, participating in harvests and repeating the sayings that organise seasonal knowledge. Canaan also recorded Palestinian practices for periods when the expected relationship between people, land and weather broke down altogether. During drought, rain-seeking processions included songs and communal appeals for water, sometimes involving the figure of Um al-Ghaith, the Mother of Rain. These practices brought prayer, performance, collective responsibility, agriculture and atmospheric uncertainty into the same system.

Alongside this were forms of practical forecasting that treat the surrounding environment as a distributed field of sensors that inform systems of inherited observation. Through naming and narrative wrappers, they' are preserved and relayed generationally, continuing to carry forward an extraordinarily dense heritage that has accumulated through direct encounter, without the need for, or reliance on scientifically verified modes of forecasting.

What continuously caught my attention was the relationship that these practices imply. Weather, for example, is never read as a single abstract number narrated from the POV of a human with knowledge certified by an institution. Through these practices, the materiality of the land became the narrator on which communities relied. This took on different forms, from salt piles that dry differently according to humidity, a plant growing if enough moisture is in the ground, or certain types of birds arriving when certain weather conditions are present. Observing the world around them is a form of forecasting, and agricultural decisions are arrived at through various kinds of evidence from a dispersed network of bodies - plants, animals, soil, atmosphere, celestial movement - interpreted through inherited memory and communal knowledge.

Raja Shehadeh’s writing fed into this part of the research from another direction. Palestinian Walks describes a landscape of terraces, springs, paths, olive groves, valleys and old agricultural structures whose meanings emerge through movement and familiarity, and whose narratives are anchored spatially. Scholarship on Shehadeh has described this as a Palestinian practice of place-making in which knowledge of land is carried through names, routes and landmarks. It helped me think about land as a segment of a world only truly legible from within, and only to what is sustained/reciprocal.

The research then extended upwards into the celestial. Pre-modern Arab systems of anwa’a and the manazil al-qamar, the twenty-eight lunar mansions, connected celestial observation with the passing of seasons, weather and agricultural time. Jordanian astronomical accounts still describe the older practice of identifying periods of cold, heat, sowing and harvest through the rising and setting of stars, and the broader history of Arab star knowledge also has stars functioning as seasonal and navigational markers, making the sky simultaneously a clock, calendar and means of orientation.

From there I arrived at the lunar mansions as something more operational. Research by Daniel Martin Varisco on the section of the Shams al-Maarif devoted to the manazil al-qamar examines a twenty-eight-part lunar system in which each station carries prognostications and astrological or mystical associations. Importantly, the surviving version he analyses is a seventeenth-century manuscript attributed to al-Būnī, so I have been careful not to treat every element of the received Shams al-Maarif as securely authored by the historical thirteenth-century al-Buni. What interested me here was the structure itself: celestial position establishes conditions; those conditions alter what actions are possible or advisable; particular moments have different potentials, restrictions and consequences.

Gradually, all of these things began to look like extensions of the same world/ystem, observed at different scales, and from different perspectives. The plant, the proverb, the star, the salt, the migrating bird, the rain procession, the stored food, the planted terrace, the fros, and the placement of the moon all offer different interfaces through which a community interprets and negotiates the conditions of its world. Some belong to practical environmental observation, some to oral history, some to religious or spiritual practice, some to celestial systems, and some move between several of those registers. Taken together, they describe a reality produced through relations between the terrestrial, ecological, hydrological, atmospheric, celestial, social and spiritual.

This is where the Marbaaniyeh began to change within my own worldbuilding. I started treating her as an atmospheric consciousness - a kind of reality machine whose arrival establishes the conditions under which the village’s next world can exist. Wind, rain, frost, water, soil and temperature determine what germinates, what fails, what is preserved, what is damaged, which animals endure, what can be planted, and eventually what can be eaten. In that sense, she decides what survives and what does not. The farmer’s position is one of uncertainty and negotiation: trying to anticipate how she will arrive by reading signs, remembering what has happened before, listening to other people, preparing the land and household, and choosing how seriously to take the different forms of knowledge available to them.

I began diagramming this worldbuilding system: What/who can sense the state of the Marbaaniyeh? What signals does she produce? Who interprets them? What interfaces do humans have with land, weather and the cosmos? What forms of preparation are possible? Where do individual and communal decisions diverge? How does information pass between generations, but also between humans and their kin? How do modes of communication move between planes? What counts as success or failure? What changes in the world as a consequence?

*Al Marbaaniyeh - diagram of cascading worldbuilding -* © 2026 Yasmeen Ayyashi | Local Narratives Ltd

Agricultural preparation, domestic preparation, food preservation, storytelling, sayings, songs, ritual, celestial observation, modern meteorological information and inherited environmental knowledge all became possible modes of action. The point was never to establish which tradition could perfectly predict the weather. The system became interesting precisely because everyone is acting under uncertainty, with different kinds of partial knowledge, while the consequences are shared.

Narrative branching in Twine - © 2026 Yasmeen Ayyashi | Local Narratives Ltd

Once I had mapped it in this way, it became increasingly clear that I had inadvertently constructed a narrative system. I am now converting that system into a game played online by twelve guests, ten days before the physical supper club. Each guest is cast as a character living in an unnamed village in Bilad al-Sham, with a particular age, profession, demeanour, attitude, set of relationships and hidden agenda. Across the session they have to make decisions both collectively and individually as the Marbaaniyeh approaches: how to prepare the land and household, which signals to trust, what to preserve, when to plant or hold back, how to respond to warnings, whose knowledge to listen to, and whether to draw on sayings, songs, lore, agricultural practices, domestic behaviours, ritual or newer forms of prediction. Their decisions alter the state of the village and its agricultural year.

The harvest produced by that game becomes materially consequential. Ten days later, when the same group arrives for the supper club, the outcome of the simulated agricultural season determines the menu they are served. What they managed to grow, preserve, protect or lose during their negotiation with the Marbaaniyeh shapes what can appear on the table. The meal therefore becomes the final state of the world they made together: an edible consequence of decisions taken across different kinds of knowledge, competing priorities and relations with forces that none of the characters can fully control.

The wider intention behind Winter Winds is to surface forms of worldbuilding that already exist within SWANA cultures. I am interested in worldbuilding as something that can emerge through long relationships with land, weather, plants, animals, stars, spiritual practice, language, memory and communal behaviour. The human occupies one position inside that network. The process of ‘worldbuilding’ - or producing the conditions of the world - is distributed across the ecological, terrestrial, celestial, atmospheric and unseen, and the world is continually enacted through the relations between them. The village cannot create its reality alone. However, it can observe, interpret, prepare, remember, cooperate and attempt to negotiate with everything that shares its reality. Worldbuilding, here, becomes a communal practice of narrating reality, and actively sustaining it/creating it alongside everything that has been narrated as ‘real’, across land, kin and cosmos.