Water, Earth, Air, Fire: elements all
In the beginning life was hidden. In the beginning life was latent. In the beginning it was possible, but not yet actual.
(There was as yet, no idea of the possible: that needed living, sensing, imagining, thinking, self-conscious ‘stuff’).
The waters are moving and giving energy in many forms, in many ways and in many directions —currents, trickles, ocean waves. Water is the earth’s primary gift to life and is so fundamental to the earth, that it is beyond our comprehension. Its ramifications, entanglement with life and its complementarity with the transformation of the earth itself, are all traces and tracks of the wonder.
I mean ‘Earth’, not only the whole thing, our planet, but the very earth beneath our feet whenever we walk, whenever we bike, whenever we car, whenever we crawl, whenever we touch the ground. Mountains are earth disguised as rock. Earth is just rock disguised as mountains. They are the same and different and interchangeable. It is as we say, only a question of time. This is so because time is a form of movement. Clay is also coming, that plastic earth impregnated with water as its very core.
Even before, there was a before, and a before.
Breath is so often taken as the metaphor for the human soul – air, air, air. Not only human life hangs by a thread within this sphere, from earth to the exosphere membrane.
After is only after, that is, until it becomes a before, and before that, a before. We can then say that one before came after another before, and another before came before another before, and they all came before the after. All this is, of course, long after the great fire.
Clay is not an element — all the ‘befores’ are its ancestors. Clay is ours.
PS. Featured mage. Title: Earth’s Mantle, beige stoneware, slab vase, 45cm high, 30 cm wide, matt cobalt iron glaze, overlay iron saturated glaze, once fired, cone 5 oxidation
