“The Earth speaks to those who know how to listen: in its whispers the stories of the sky and the sea, of fire and air are hidden. By listening to its breathing, we rediscover the ancient rhythm of life and find our place in the eternal cycle of nature.” The Spirit of the Earth taught me humility and resilience. He showed me that, like the earth that receives seeds and nourishes them until they bloom, I too could be fertile, capable of growing and transforming life experiences into wisdom. He taught me the value of silence, listening and patience, qualities that the Earth embodies with absolute grace.

In our hyper-rational and materialistic culture, individuals have no doubts in perceiving earth, water, fire, and air as substantial objects. Their senses, however, are mental operations. When they see, hear, smell, taste and hear, it is their mind that chooses, among an infinite number of possibilities, what to perceive and how to perceive it. In the end, individuals commonly find themselves living in a kind of mental map of reality, and it is in this map that reality appears objective and substantial to them.

From ancient philosophical conceptions to scientific advances, as well as their intrinsic connection to spiritual beliefs, we immerse ourselves in the realm of ether and water, unveiling their elusive nature. Aether refers to an immaterial, invisible, and elusive element that has been conceived in different ways throughout history. The aether, as a concept, has played a significant role in human history in various contexts. Water, on the other hand, is a tangible substance that is essential to every living creature, with multiple properties and symbolic meanings. Water has played a vital role in the history of mankind in many ways, influencing not only our physical development, but also cultural and spiritual aspects.

Living in strong symbiosis with the natural context in which they were immersed daily, the Native Americans had since time immemorial established links and analogies between what happens in nature and what happens to human beings. According to their vision, each season found its “domicile” in one of the four directions, or cardinal points, with each of which it associated one of the four Elements: the East and Air with Spring, the South with Fire and Summer, the West with Water and Autumn, the North with Earth and Winter.

Wu Xing, usually translated as Five Phases or Five Agents, is a fivefold conceptual scheme used in many traditional Chinese fields of study to explain a wide array of phenomena, including cosmic cycles, the interactions between internal organs, the succession of political regimes, and the properties of herbal medicines.
The agents are Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth. The Wu Xing system has been in use since it was formulated in the second or first century BCE during the Han Dynasty. It appears in many seemingly disparate fields of early Chinese thought, including music, feng shui, alchemy, astrology, martial arts, military strategy, I Ching divination, and traditional medicine, serving as a metaphysics based on cosmic analogy.