Sunday, June 10, 2007

I think the Greeks coined the western notions of elementals; all matter or people are composed of them. All of them coincided with the signs of the zodiac. There were mitigating factors involved on where one stood with an elemental, but for the most part they still seem like a part of urban lore today; defining who we are and how we react. Not one elemental is better than the other, but who is to say what works or what doesn’t? I think it's funny how we link them with personalities. By being a Capricorn seem to border on the two fronts of water and earth, so I will discuss that which I am familiar with. My bipolarism warps me on some days and sets me on others.

Water is the most fluid of personalities. Ever present in all life, it ebbs and flows with time and people. Cleansing the grime from our souls when we find it or diluting the bile that we ingest from others; water is something that all people seek in each other. It polishes stone from earth and quenches the thirst of fire. With Wind it spreads its miasma or mist to all around it. It babbles and runs, and it's hard to contain. But as always, it soothes. It can reflect the image of souls, often changing the image.

Water meanders and is peaceable, unless there is a torrent behind their motives. Then they are linear and focused without regard to what is destroyed; removing whole tracts of things. They drown out the balance of things in their fits of rage, leaving behind wet wreckage. And sometimes they leave behind the silt of their shame that helps rebuild things. All that is then left by them is the new that was built over their rage.

Water is odd in that none ever seek it out unless they need it. It is in all things living, but always assumed to be there; like a never ending well. Unfortunately, water can dry out and lose it's


Earth is being the most solid. Never flinching to wind and unmoved by fire, earth is the basis for most things strong or solid. Its bearing is set and cannot be manipulated. Truths are produced from it since it cannot be easily broken. Unfortunately it is unmoving and water flows around it, if water doesn’t just take it with itself. Polished, it reflects the image of viewer, but unlike water it cannot distort it. Nurturing is all that it can do to those who stay around it. The jewels of thoughts, ideas, and feelings are stored forever in their mountain mine of being until they are worked free once by those willing to wait out the storm of time; since few chose to mine those ores knowing that the mountain is endless.

Its immovability is its weakness in that all other things slowly erode it: time, change, wind, and water. Shifting a mountain to seemingly useless mud and silt; yet this uselessness is the basis of bricks. A stoic stubbornness etches itself even in the face of good things. It is above all things slow: to change, to learn, to regret. And as those feelings set it, it is as though the mountain trembles.