Please join the conversation that is rooted in Lavender's ecological request and short entry about remarking the rainforest as divine nature to be worshiped. While reading, please focus on the unresolved issue of human degradation that is rapidly increasing in Central America (2022).
Captured above is a dismembered Bald cypress (botanical name: Taxodium distichum), which is a long-lived deciduous conifer native to Central America, in temperate and subtropical regions. This tree grows quite slowly, reaching remarkable heights due to an inherent longevity, growing upright and offering tremendous shade. The leaves are like soft feathers that turn orange-red in fall and then drop. Most importantly, the bald cypress is a very adaptable tree, valuable for wild birds by offering them nesting and shelter, as well as food source, since cypress seeds are consumed by many species of birds, such as grosbeaks, pine siskins, wild turkeys, nuthatches, and chickadees. Lastly, yellow-throated warblers use the moss growing on it to forage for insects, while the brown creeper checks the bark, and when growing close to water, this tree is also important food source in winder for waterfowl and wading birds like wood ducks.
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The dismembered aesthetic of a bald cypress tree transpired a sensory experience of an ancient rainforest ecosystem being degraded for the sake of human economy. Remaining is a vibration of dead matter, felt by the bird species and nature life that resounds in the environment, across the spacetime continuum, deep into the lungs of the Earth.
On Patreon, Center of Mystic Arts (CoMA) temple members uploaded a video with insights and theory about the experience in the ecosystem, left a little bit more bare, by a neighbor who cutdown the tree with a chainsaw for an unknown reason. The Patreon post is titled: Ecological Emancipatory and Mystic Thealogy.
Whereby, witnessing the body politic of new “jobs" being valued over elder trees. So we are called to be more involved in our neighborhood, at the turn of a shift in mentality, especially within the Costa Rican local-global nexus. Our goal is to document our perception of a social body that is not prepared for decision-making vis-à-vis land rights and property ownership for the sake of ancient ecosystems. We declare the need to draw attention to today's changing governmentality.
We prompt for ecological activism, or action for ecological resolutions for the disharmony this occurs in our daily life ecosystems and our neighboring ecosystems in nature life settings. We are called to aim for harmony, and we are prompting you to consider a growing town in fast-rapid urban impact and global expansion hitting coastal regions throughout Central America, where further, there is not proper infrastructure in place to dispose of the human waste increasing from the rise of tourism. Another anecdotal from CoMA: the Pacific Ocean is not as blue since 2020.
Three intellectual questions posed: (1.) Who is humanity and how are we impacting the Earth after the rise and fall of a global pandemic? (2.) How can we talk to each other if/when we feel we do not know each other? (3.) Is there a way to remember, to begin to feel we know each other, while holding space for the unknowing in our ongoing universal transformation?
Onward, while diving deeper into a critical analysis of imperial tourism, we find out more about the meaning of being temple members. As we centralize a spiritual temple in Mesoamerica, we focus our study on two predominant influences: prior Hispanic-European conquest and current First World globalism.
Lavender responds with a short entry to inspire further conversation and action:
Rainforest as divine nature My association with the artwork of Center of Mystic Arts led to a raise in vibration that brought current insights on our complex global condition. In “American Tourists in the Holy Land, 1865-1900,” from the Shapell Manuscript Collection, there is an exploration of how sacred sites tug at American hearts and minds, brought by theologians’ emotional interpretations of the land and its people. I therefore aim not to attract popular travel similar to Twain’s Travelogue, while only merely to attract attention and travel for the sake of critical rainforest environmental resolutions. The artwork of CoMA heightened awareness from Radical Immanence: An Hindu Ecological Emancipatory Theology of the Feminine Divine, in which Rita Sherma (2022) explores the teleological flow, reaching for heights not yet attained, upon the divine momentum towards greater complexity. Although the emergence of complexity may create a feeling of chaos, we find moving toward greater complexity is necessary for higher awareness and for “an endless flourishing of divine self-expression” (Sherma 2022, 185). With this in mind, I ponder for spiritual practitioners not to rush to sacred sites and ancient ecosystems, solely not for the experience of reaching for the height of spirituality, but while also appreciating divine self-expression as Mother Nature’s creation, and preventing unnecessary eco-cataclysms. Although I do not prefer to be living in the political sphere, I am leaning into two foci in Indian religions: “liberation” and “protection” based on my background knowledge with the Center of Dharma Studies, finding that these terms have become convoluted in global politics. The global-local nexus of the temple became very important when considering how the space is to be maintained for protection and purified for sustainability in the middle of the rainforest. In Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, Manfred B. Steger (2017) links “the novel term ‘globalization’ to a political agenda aiming at the ‘liberation’ of state-regulated economies around the world” (2017, 41). Steger refers to this agenda as a budding neoliberal economic order that has influenced a significant development of an internationalization of trade and finance. The most relevant conversation today, upon globalism in Central America, for the sake of the rainforest: are spiritual practitioners to be for free trade, protectionism, or something quite different, not yet (re)conceptualized in the religious sphere?
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Take care of you, beautiful soul, CoMA Temple family ~