The four elements joined together today and held hands for this photo. Here you see Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. The earth is the sand, the water is the ocean, the fire is the sun, and the presence of the unseen air is known by the movement of the clouds. It is said that with these four elements, anything can be created.
But there is a fifth element, a binding element, the one
that fuses the four and gives them purpose.
This is the element of Spirit.
This is the glue, the net, the web.
Without Spirit, the creation of the other four elements would be
meaningless and haphazard at best, if even possible, with no direction and no
purpose. But with the directing pressure
of Spirit, everything falls into its own perfect place.
There have been many names for Spirit over the millennia,
and I would neither presume to give a name here nor argue over the names given
by others. However, I think that
“pressure” is an accurate description--nudging, directing, solidifying, gravitating,
and ultimately manifesting--with waves behaving like particles and particles
behaving like waves.
And how do we know Spirit?
In today’s lesson as I looked out over the very cold ocean in the season
where no life can readily be seen, it was easy to know Spirit. The busy-ness of the other elements was
slowed to a crawl, and there were no other life forms to distract me. This was how I saw it. Spirit is not life; it is that which gives
rise to life, that which comes before. When life pauses, as it
does in the winter, the web can be seen.
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| The joining of the elements. |
