It’s Ostara, Spring Equinox, and new beginnings are all around us. I am opening up to new discoveries about my relationship with the Elements. They are dear friends, but, like any relationship, these relationships can also stagnate unless we are invested and spend time and conversation communing with each other. So, blessed Elements of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth, let us travel the Wheel together and commence our magical visits. May our time be Divine!
I believe the Elements are sacred, working together with the Divine (however we conceptualize this), inhabiting our inner and outer realms, and contributing to our innate sacredness. They exist separately but, at the same time, are a part of the whole. Intimately joining with the creative dance of the universe, in which we also participate, our inner and outer worlds coalescing into who and what we are--individuals yet mysteriously in communion with existence. This is the magic of Creation, the alignment of forces and will coming together and releasing something Else into being.
Starhawk (Miriam Simos) speaks quite eloquently about this:
"Magic is a word that can be defined in many ways. A saying attributed to Dion Fortune is: 'Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.' I sometimes call it the art of evoking power-from-within. Today, I will name it this: the art of liberation, the act that releases the mysteries, that ruptures the fabric of our beliefs, and lets us look into the heart of deep space where dwell the immeasurable, life-generating powers.
Those powers live in us also, as we live in them. The mysteries are what is wild in us, what cannot be quantified or contained. But the mysteries are also what is common to us all: blood, breath, heartbeat, the sprouting of seed, the waxing and waning of the moon, the turning of the earth around the sun, birth, growth, death, and renewal.
...We are never apart from the power of the mysteries. Every breath we take encompasses the circle of birth, death, and rebirth. The forces that push the blood cells through our veins are the same forces that spun the universe out of the primal ball of fire….We can invoke them, but we cannot control them, nor can we disconnect from them. They are our life, and when we die, decay, and decompose, we remain still within their cycle."
We can know about the Elements through academic study, just as we gain knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. However, we often do not truly understand something until our knowledge melds with experience. The old adage that “experience is the best teacher” rings especially true where the Elements are concerned. We are intimately bound together in mystery through time, space, experience, and existence. To know and understand them is to know and understand ourselves.
Blessed be.
Lady Cynthia