What Trees Can Teach Us About Spiritual Warfare
What is most valuable to you? What lengths will you go to protect what matters in your life? The answer just might be found in the trees.
Throughout West Africa there are sacred forests, ruled by indigenous deities and ancestral spirits.
Locals believe that cutting down a tree will result in the perpetrator’s imminent death. They also refuse to sell the sacred land to colonizers.
Moreira Mendes was sleeping the first time he heard the whispers from the trees of Cobiana, a sacred forest located in Guinea Bissau.
Mendes became the Baloberu of the forest, the link between the living and the forest spirits. He protects the forest's secrets and rituals, simultaneously teaching his community about forest preservation.
West Africa’s sacred forests might once have been a single massive forest, divided by the violence of colonization. Since 1900, West Africa’s ecosystem has been reduced by 80%.
This damage to forests threatens us all. In addition to enacting spiritual warfare, deforestation increases the world’s carbon output, directly contributing to climate change.
Climate change harms everyone, but especially Black communities worldwide. Mendes uses his spiritual work to protect sacred forests from Western Imperialist “progress.”
What if we all lived in a way that protected what was sacred to us?
Black liberation is our most sacred prayer, action, and future building all in one. How far will we go to protect it?
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