Cedar Cathedral
I had a dream where a tree introduced herself.
I had a dream where a tree introduced herself. She introduced me to the universe inside her trunk, and how she enables and sustains the inner and outside cosmos. She immersed me in her powerful, flexible roots, upright trunk, twisted branches, and delicate evergreen leaves. Her deep voice resonated with my soul as she hummed, co-creating life with all the birds, spiders, fungi, and insects that dwell in her body. She translates the air and wind vibrations into wisdom; she nurtures and saturates the ground, connecting deeply to the earth's core. All the light from the celestial burning fire is enhancing her presence.
She emanates all she is and all she’s ever supposed to be.
In a thunderous voice, she tells me her name — “I’m Cedar Cathedral.” The sanctuary of life itself, in all its divine immanence. This is no built or isolated structure, but a naturally entangled ancient engineering. This cathedral has no walls that define the sacred space, for it is the inter-being that brings sacredness, for it is the connection of heaven and earth, and all in between that creates a living sanctuary. Her space changes with the seasons, following the ebb and flow of the land. Her shadow dances every day around her trunk.
Furthermore, her original intent is guardianship through her skin, cycles, and intense presence. She gives herself to life at every moment. She does not spare or stop being. Likewise, she spills her wisdom through all her web of relations.
Many years ago, I chose my home because of her presence. I did not know her by then, but felt her presence overflowing in place. She acknowledged me from the beginning, noting my existence as I noted hers.
She chose to introduce herself, and I am humbled by it. To listen to her, I change my time and speed. But never the intensity. Slower, slower. Slower until I can hear the branches creaking by the wind and the spider climbing its trunk. In a quieter and softer time that allows feeling the rustling of the feathers onto the leaves. The Cedar-Cathedral is, according to the human categories that I later checked, an Atlantic cedar, a cedar that lives on the ocean slopes, listening to the stories brought by the tides.
The Cedar-Cathedral brought me whispers of the past and memories of the future, of a long and deep time. It reminded me of the human presence as a guardian in a conscious existence within a multidimensional and living system. With this extension of time inside the heart, we are nothing more than transitions and becomings. Always in transit.
There is a concept, which is called “Cathedral Thinking.” It talks about the capacity of human intergenerational planning, and how we have the cognitive power to launch our mind into the distant and unnamed future, preparing the ground and materializing plans over generations. An example of this superpower, is the cathedral builders in medieval Europe, for their ability to plan and build over several generations. But the Cedar-Cathedral recalls another perspective, that this planning and care, that this profound temporal occurrence is much earlier than the construction of cathedrals. It is in the genesis of our species as guardians of the places we occupy. It is the preservation and regeneration of the following generations, present in the Amazon plantation over millennia as a garden of food, medicine, ecstasy, and wisdom. That to the unwary explorer seems abstract and “wild.” It is the sacred maintenance of life, in belonging and integral presence. It is giving more than we extract. Furthermore, it is the ultimate responsibility of our purpose. So, the Cedar-Cathedral declared, among many other things, the connection to these long temporal spaces, past, and future, both as distant and nameless as present and real.
Unlearning together 🌲 inter-being remembrance 🌲 recalling the poli-poetic of guardianship ❤️
Deep Ecology and Alchemy
The Tree of life
Interweavings from course at Schumacher with Stephan Harding & Per Ingvar Haukeland
I've been working/playing/dialoguing/dreaming with this Tree at my doorstep for years. This time she showed me a different map, a crack, a key, a convergence of the alchemical operations with her space-time body. She invited me to contemplate this cartography, and I humbly drew the vision she offered me. I don't understand it fully yet, and touching this Mandala's deep layers will take a long time to unfold.
We both started from the premise that Trees are dendritic fractals and spiral cyclical beings. And for my emotional involvement and understanding, I needed to search for synonyms for "operations." Never losing sight of the original alchemical term, our workgroup, me and the Tree, opened up to words like: actions, potencies, forces, behaviors, and effects.
Several layers are working here. One is the Tree's living structure in the roots, trunk, branches, flowers, and fruits, along with all its meanings brilliantly discussed throughout the course. Another layer concern the actions/operations/behaviors of each phase and moment of transformation.
This living Mandala merges the fractal structure of the Tree, its living cycle, with the alchemical operation/action/behaviors. They work together in multiple layers of complexity. It happens all the time simultaneously, so the model itself always needs to be contextualized within the complexity of this living fractal being encompassing our stochastic randomness, the singularity of this particular time-space-relation.
So, our workgroup decided to acknowledge the focal point of this observation/experience: the Tree as a contextual living being with specific characteristics in a particular ecosystem. The other option was to focus on the abstraction of the Azoth Mandala. In this group project, the Tree translated the Azoth mandala into her/our vision, the diagram, which is still a rough sketch of these living layers.
The field of the seven actions/operations/behaviors envelops all creation, from the Tree's body, place, and time (and, of course, mine too). It is like a metamorph mantle, cyclical, folding and, unfolding, transforming.
I was left with this idea or sensation of the calcination being the sting, the rapture/rupture moment when something starts to shed. That moment might coincide with the deep experience discussed about the roots of the ecosophical Tree. Once you have that kind of deep experience, everything changes, and how you live your life and how you relate to things morphs. This is also iterative, for each deep experience can become more profound once you incorporate and contemplate it.
Then, on this particular Cedar tree, her soft flowers, and how does the Tree continue with its fruits? How is the pollination working for this particular Tree? The wind is the specific agent of propagation, and this tells me a lot about communication (inspiratus), about the way of making words as worlds, territories, and alive.
This particular Tree has tiny flowers and hard fruits, so it brings me to this place where I've been feeling unintelligible by large, feeling the lack of deep resonance with my immediate cultural context. And how my deep experiences of profoundly relating to the surrounding ecosystem can disperse through the local ecosystem of ideas. This communicates the image of the DNA spiral moving and morphing. From the calcination, and that stinging shedding, being fierce or gently in the roots, also needs to happen in the upper layers of the fractal structure of the Tree being - here in the flowers and fruits, the calcination like the shedding of my ability to express myself.
Of course, calcination is just the cycle's recurrent beginning... the needed actions/behaviors for ideas to take ground, to be seeded in you and the community.
