Purple loosestrife alongside a road (Dreamstime)
by Donna Schaper
We make a giant environmental mistake when we don't look at the Spirit as a source of renewable energy. To be someone who fruits Spirit is to be in charge of your own inwards, so much so that your relaxation is contagious. You sparkle with composure. That composure makes other people sparkle with composure. The insurmountable becomes surmountable when you are around. You renew.
The Spirit works by invasion. Not the military kind or the deoxygenating kind but the spiritual kind. The Spirit works by the methods of Spirit. The Spirit has a spiritual technology. It is inner peace invading the outer world.
I can show you best what I mean by exploring the invasive species the purple loosestrife. The purple loosestrife a marsh plant that grows as tall as 8 feet. It actually looks beautiful in bloom, with its purply-pink color. You have likely seen them everywhere because they have all but taken over marshes in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota. And they made such a dent in Maryland that the state called out the plant militia.
The plant is demonic instead of Spirited: It goes rapidly into a monoculture, knocking everything else out -- cattails, rush, even salt hay. It also changes the way water flows and destroys the food sources for many marsh animals, especially turtles.
It came to this country in the 19th century on sailing ships from Europe and Asia and grew by attaching its pointy seeds to people's clothing and letting them pay the fare to take the seeds elsewhere. It can contain more than a thousand seeds per plant. The loosestrife can loose strife in a wide area. It also knows how to grow by roots as well as seeding.
There is an antidote to it: The Galerucella beetle, which is even smaller than a loosestrife seed, can and does stop it, and has joined the Maryland effort to combat the fast-growing vine.
You can find the renewable energy of Spirit in contrast to the loosing of strife. When you are gone from this planet, will there be more of a monoculture or more biodiversity? Did you renew or deplete?
Forget the big stuff for a while and think about your office or your home. Will you have crowded out native plants or learned to live among them? Will there be more turtles, more slow things, or fewer? Will you have changed the way water flows, and if so, will the flow help or hurt other animals and plants? Will you have increased the food sources available to people?
In other words, will you be so Spirited that you can coexist happily or will you be so demonic that you will have to wipe out others to survive?
If you don't want the fully renewable resource of the Spirit, then you could just become a Galerucella beetle and stop the bad spirits from invading. But why let the beetles have all the fun? Instead, we can learn the forces of positive invasion and renewable energy.
