The Elementals; an ode to wood

The wood elemental qualities embody a sense of the upsurging, birthing strength of spring. Think of the force of labor and delivery. Anyone who has experienced this birthing tumult of power, strength, fragility and ultimate courage knows how intense an experience it is. It requires that we summon all of our courage, and the strength we didn’t know we had, at a moment when we feel our most raw and vulnerable, at our most exhausted. After 9 or 10 months of growing a human inside our bodies, providing every nutrient and speck of sustenance needed to shape bone, form muscle, knit skin. After giving ourselves in this profound and utterly devastating way, we hand our immune system and our very blood to our child as it passes from the womb world into the bright light of the living earth realm. The womb has its own consciousness, the realm of the archaic, primordial essence of life. The ooze of our cells. Here we are protected, we are nourished, we rest and garner our strength and energy needed to emerge from the gestational period to the living world. 

Wood is alive, a living elemental being that runs through and around us; both part of us and outside of us. It embodies living energy. It is birth, the pushing forth into life. Think of a seedling in the hard, cold ground of winter. As the light returns and the yang qi rises, that tiny seedling must summon all of its strength to sprout. The roots and tendrils must, despite all of the obstacles they face, summon their courage to continue to grow. They must believe, they must hold a vision of their becoming. That eventually they will push up through the soil, continuing their pathway to the light. They know inside them that the light is there, even if they can’t see it. They trust in their becoming. They stick in a direction and don’t give up. This is the energetic resonance of spring.

It is the living beings, the green woman who is alive in the trees. The nature spirits that dance among the rocks, grasses, and dirt. The spirits of the mountain. The hun is the spirit of wood. They rocket to the stars when we sleep to carry our dreams down in a sacred pathway. The star light enters our crown and we are gifted with the visions we need to incarnate. A dream is a gift, even if we don’t understand its meaning. Having the dream, telling the dream, writing the dream, doing dreamwork, are all ways to honor it and receive its gifts. The hun gives us our vision, the grand plan of our life, our creativity and our ability to vision a future that our most authentic nature can walk toward. 

We may feel an overwhelming amount of frustration or a desire to move, to go, to act in Spring. Where I live in Western New York State, we have such a long winter. It snows in spring. The weather oscillates, up and down, hot, cold and damp. People complain, they are so angry in the spring. YES! This is the wood begging to be expressed. All of the gestation in winter, all of the rest is demanding that we express it, in a particular direction. As an elemental, wood is directional. In health it is the free and easy wanderer, but in the moment it has a direction, even if that direction changes in a short time. It is giving ourselves over to our creative energy, the force of birth. When we create, even in very small ways, it opens us, our energy awakens. Even if we never show our painting, our song in the shower, our dance, our poem, the doodle on our page, or our bread to anyone, even if it is the smallest act, it matters. It unlocks us. It doesn’t matter how long you do it, it matters that you do it. It isn't about an audience or having a published master work, it is the spiritual allyship of the creative act, of honoring that flow that is alive in each of us. 

The wood element lives in our liver and gallbladder, our eyes, our tendons, ligaments and connective tissue that long to be stretched, to move and be warmed. It is the bow and arrow pointed to the target, and released with perfect ease toward our goal. It is also our ability to be flexible in the face of difficulty. To be willing to re-strategize, to bend to the winds so that we don’t break. Think of the strength of a sequoia. The depth of its roots, the integrity and uprightness of the trunk, the strength it embodies. The boughs, branches and leaves all expand up and out, dancing toward the light, shifting, moving, turning in multidirectional ways according to the light, temperature, time of day and nutrients it has or hasn’t received. We are like this tree in Spring. This wood is alive in you, in me, in them. As are all of the other elementals, including Metal, Water, Thunder, Fire, Mountain, Wind, Space and Earth, to name a few.