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Author Topic: East/Air--What Elemental Connections Do You Make?  (Read 2939 times)

TheGreenWizard

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Re: East/Air--What Elemental Connections Do You Make?
« Reply #15 on: October 11, 2018, 11:27:37 pm »
Can you go into more detail, TGW? I want to understand how you align the elements relative to NYC geography.
Hey Altair.

No problem! For me and my practice, it's more about relative geography.

 East of NYC is both the rising sun and the Atlantic Ocean. But since the ocean is also south of us... I made the decision to have Fire in the East and Water in the South. To the West is Earth - no denying that. Air is designated to the North because of the frigid air that comes from Canada and the Arctic.

Now, if this was Buffalo NY, I'd change it based on the local geography and the natural phenomena I've observed there over the years. Lake Erie is to our West, thus where Water is. North is still air, again, cold air from Canada usually means lake effect snow in Buffalo. Earth would be South since we're more inland. Fire is still East in my mind - the rising sun always has greeted me and I associate it with Fire.

Now I realize that Buffalo designations make more sense in terms of balance and opposition than NYC designations. For whatever reason... My brain associates that way.

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Hariti

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Re: East/Air--What Elemental Connections Do You Make?
« Reply #16 on: October 20, 2018, 06:37:55 pm »
Anyway, that’s a start. Chime in with your east/air observations

I'm a Hindu, and my Esoteric practices are more rooted in Buddhism, Hinduism, Tantra, Bon, Tengrism, Taoism, Shinto and other eastern practices than they are in the Western Tradition, but Eastern Esoteric practices do acknowledge the four elements, and so I'm going to post here with my associations.

East: Water. The Atlantic ocean is deep, vast, and very, very wet. It's an ocean that's been fished and sailed for millennia, by people from many cultures. It's a place of fluidity and mixture, of commerce, migration, and exploration, and an important barrier between the "Old" world and the "New" world. Since I live in America, I associate water with the East. Even if I lived in Asia, I would still have an ocean to my east, the mighty pacific, and since other directions are taken by other elements, East-water makes the most sense to me!

West: Fire. West is fire for me, because the eastern half of North America is far more temperate than the western half. It's far more common to get snow in Georgia than it LA or Vegas! The American south, unlike for example Southern Europe, is not really much more firey than the American north. Sure, it's hotter, but it's not any drier, and you get hot summers in the north and cold winters in the south, just with differing degrees of harshness. So, the east-west gradient made more sense to me as the gradient for fire versus water.

The Mojave, the Sierra Nevada, the Mediterranean climate of SoCal, Death valley and the Great Salt Lake, all speak to me of fire, and so to me Fire is the element of the west. It's also the direction of the sunset, which is far more dramatic and firery orange than the sunrise is here in Kentucky, because the sunrise is blocked by the Appalachians whereas the sunset is unimpeded, looking west toward the Great Plains.

The western part of South America is also a fiery place! As anyone whose ever visited the Atacama can tell you, it's like another planet. It's the driest place on earth, and the sand is strikingly grey, and very very fine and dusty, like the ash from a Hindu cremation ground. I've been there, and it left a strong impression on how I view the east-west axis.

South: Earth. The American South is a place of hard labor, of farming and hunting, of mud and dust and grit, of old mountains and deep caves. If you visit Georgia or Alabama, you can see blood-red clay soil, turned up by the farmers plow, and ground into the pavement and sidewalks of the cities by years of traffic. In Kentucky, we have the longest and deepest caves on earth, and in the Eastern parts of our state, and in Western Virginia and Tennessee, there are the great Appalachian mountains. They are old, older than the Andes, Rockies, or Alps, and embedded with fossils of ancient creatures, as well as with thick veins of midnight-black coal. The streams and rivers of Kentucky, even the smallest rills, all have flecks of coal among the pebbles. It's also a land of rolling hills, not unlike Ireland (where many of Kentucky's inhabitants ancestors come from), and it's not hard to imagine the fair folk dancing there are night.

So, for me, the South is the land of the element of earth. It's the land of dirt and rocks, mud and sand, mountains and caves.

North: Air. The North is the land of air, for me. Air comes down from the north, here in Kentucky, every winter, bringing with it arctic chills and subzero temperatures. Cold fronts beat down on us in the spring and fall to bring forth tornado, and in the summer great thunderstorms bear down from the northwest. The mountains block most of the wind that would come from the east or the south, and shield us from hurricane winds (though not the rain; that gets dumped on the Appalachians and comes rushing down the river valleys).

So, those are the directions I associate with the elements!
"The worshippers of the gods go to them; to the manes go the ancestor-worshippers; to the Deities who preside over the elements go their worshippers; My devotees come to Me." ... "Whichever devotee desires to adore whatever such Deity with faith, in all such votaries I make that particular faith unshakable. Endowed with that faith, a votary performs the worship of that particular deity and obtains the fruits thereof, these being granted by Me alone." - Sri Krishna

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