Privileged Soul in the Primal Divine

by Anya Wolfenden

The aim of life is to live and to live is to be aware. joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. 
~ Henry Miller (As quoted in Prosperity Pie: How to Relax About Money and Everything Else by SARK)

"Earth is not my element," I overheard a woman say. It made me slightly incredulous. I don't see that a person has any real choice in the matter. Or at least I'm not inclined to trust the instincts of a person who doesn't feel part of Nature's wild, sensual energy. We are all made of the same living elements with slight differentiations. The sap of a tree is chemically similar to our blood sugar (glucose) which feeds the brain. Our blood is one element different from chlorophyll, the life blood of plants (where we have iron, plants have magnesium). When we evolved as life forms from the sea, we took the salt water with us internally, to make up over 70% of our bodies with a similar saline.

Fruits and vegetables supply the body with specific nutrients necessary for sustaining life. Have you seen that wonderful periodic table of elements in which each square features a fruit or vegetable high in that particular element? It's no accident that the red beet is a blood builder, or that brightly colored fruits and vegetables help us to see better.

Unfortunately, chemically engineered, over-farmed soil has been depleted of nutrients beyond the root depth of the food we harvest, so we need nutritional supplements to be healthy. We're not even grounded by the essential elements! We've become separated from growing and harvesting our food to the extent that many see processed food as "normal," and a spot in an apple as aberrant.

Say we are divine energetic seeds, or as Edgar Cayce said, know yourself "as a corpuscle, as a facet, as a characteristic, as a love, in the body of God." [Reading 2533-7] Wherever our spiritual explorations may ultimately lead, our souls' unique purposes must manifest right here in this miraculous Earth system.

In the quest for a technologically advanced civilization, the idea that everything had a living energy got plowed under. Modern science reaffirms what ancient stories always told: there is energy within and between all things. Tom Crockett's new book, Stone Age Wisdom: The Healing Principles of Shamanism, explains why we need to reincorporate five universal truths passed down from our ancestors:

1) Everything is alive.
2) Everything is conscious.
3) Everything moves.
4) Everything is connected.
5) Everything responds.

Crockett postulates that without consciousness of ourselves amidst this energetic template, we experience spiritual loss that he terms "soul wandering."

Attunement to the living Earth brings what Crockett calls "primal alignment." Synchronicity, dreams, and intuitive flashes provide peripheral vision outside of the seen world. Stone Age Wisdom offers practical tools for heightening consciousness: exploring dreams, vision shifting, journeying, conducting rituals, and creating or dream weaving. The result? Guidance from the material and spirit worlds toward a "sacred quality of life." Balanced and harmonious relationships with our environment, each other, and our bodies, minds and spirits.

This isn't New Age stuff (Stone Age would be the first clue). When we ground with the naturally transforming energy of the Earth, Caroline Myss says in Your Primal Nature: Connecting With The Power of the Earth, we can integrate our instincts with our intuition. She discusses ancient power centers, shadow power centers, and how they interact with what our spiritual side knows and what it seeks.

"For within the human body...we find every element, every gas, every mineral, every influence that is outside of the organism itself. For indeed it is one with the whole." [Edgar Cayce Reading 470-22] We embody the whole with iron, calcium, water, ground up salad passing through digestive channels, beside rivers of lymph running under plateaus of skin. Every breath participates in the Earth, and reverberates with the phenomenal forces of the natural world.

On the flip side, the atoms in our bodies mirror the vast universe. Between each nucleus and its electrons stretch proportionately huge amounts of space. We need to be grounded in particles of matter precisely because we are so full of air!

Listening to trees, breathing wind, being romanced by the mist in the sunrise, paying attention to what animal crosses my path, biting into a crisp McIntosh apple, awareness is stimulating, enlivening - it feels like freedom - not given but graced.

That fork in the road Robert Frost wrote of as he took the path less traveled is very much on this Earth, through glorious woods and meandering streams. Hopefully, the land is unspoiled by someone's attraction to the chemically altered "perfect apple." Do we hear archetypal echoes of humanity's downfall? If we destroy or ignore this magnificent Eden Earth because we are unconscious, we have nowhere else to go to experience life.

Reverence is natural. The huge willow oak tree has thrown arched limbs wide into a spectacular cold-weather sunset. A vivid bird flits by, his feathers almost as blue as my daughter's eyes. Living things constantly say, "Wow, aren't we magnificent!" It is my soul's privilege to notice the myriad configurations of water, earth, fire, air, and metal, as they play in this primal divine.

© 2003 by Anya Wolfenden, director of communications for The Heritage Health Foods, Café, Books & Gifts, Holistic Center and Edgar Cayce Products 314 Laskin Rd., Virginia Beach, Virginia, www.heritagestore.com. Thanks to Ernie who told me where to find the Periodic table from Ten Speed Press.