40 Ways My Labyrinth is Like My Life--#17

17. It contains earth, water, wind, and fire.

This might be my favorite thing about my labyrinth. A few years ago I did a long-term study of how these four elements are mentioned or developed in the Bible. It turned out to be quite fascinating. One of these days I'll write a book about what I learned. The insight that seemed the most interesting and useful to me is that everything really is made out of these four things, even if not quite the way the ancients imagined. If you go from the bottom up, so to speak, you have the earth, with all its soil and rock, with water flowing under and over it, raining down on it, and evaporating from it, then wind, or atmosphere, which carries that rain and water vapor, and above it all, the endless fire of the sun, keeping everything going.

So a tree, let's say a peach tree in my labyrinth, "eats" dirt, "drinks" the water it sucks up through its cambium layer to pull up the nutrients from the dirt, "inhales" carbon dioxide and "exhales" oxygen (how convenient!), and in the most astonishing thing of all, if only we could temporarily set aside our familiarity with this fact, turns sunshine into food! It makes its leaves, its bark, its blossoms, and ultimately peaches, out of these elements.

I eat the peach, and voila! I, too, am made of earth, (about $1's worth of minerals, by latest estimates), water (70-80% depending on whom you ask), wind (not only the air I breathe and use for speaking and singing, but oxygen, hydrogen, etc, in my tissues), and fire (98.6 degrees of it on a good day).

I could--well, I couldn't, but someone could--go into the physics of relativity from here (I don't even know if that phrase makes physical sense) and point out that all things can be turned back into pure energy--fire, so to speak--if only we knew how.

There have always been those who believed these elements were the actual makers of life. Some worshiped them as gods; some today use them as excuses to not worship any god at all. I believe these elements were created and put together in their fascinating and infinite combinations by a personal Creator called, in English, God. A better name might be the Nameless One of Many Names. A particularly ancient name that might be better yet is the Hebrew tetragrammaton, transliterated YHWH, which means something like "the Beingness of Being," or "Isness/Wasness/Will-be-ness."

That Creator, that Holy, Gracious One, is in my labyrinth, too. That giving, constantly making One (going "from the top down") can be seen in the purifying power of fire, inspired (literally, breathed in) in the invisible motion and fullness of the wind, experienced in the cleansing, birthing, flowing nature of water, and felt in the earthy clay of our bodies, made in the image of the One.

That One is everywhere. All the time. With you now. With me now. Yes.