behind the scenes
aether magic
By now, as our tour of the elements comes to its grand finale, I bet many of you have realized why I’ve been directing our awareness to the elemental realms in this political season.
I have been doing so in order to re-order our awareness of “the world”. This re-ordering has two paradoxical, but absolutely real benefits:
Humanity is obsessed with this vision of ourselves at the top of the pyramid with everything else “beneath us”; under our purview. But obviously, when we connect to the elements of water, earth, air or fire we pretty quickly arrive at the truth of natural law being “bigger” than human law and vastly more interconnected and powerful. So tuning into the elements helps us by “right-sizing” our sense of ourselves (humanity) in the context of just being little earthlings on a small planet within the ever-expanding universe.
When we begin to tune into and commune with the elementals, we gain access to new kinds of power and intel. Not the kind of power and intel that we lord over others, but the kind that, once you are tuned into it, just emanates from you. To be more specific, working magically with the elements results in the kind of evolutionary power that allows each of us to become a blessing to all - human and more-than-human - that we come into contact with. Again, our sense of ourselves is “right-sized” in a different way - we are empowered through our connection with the elements to fill the “us-sized hole” in the world; by doing the things that the energy of life itself would like us to do. In other words, emboldened by the conscious presence we’ve shared with earth, water, fire and air, we are better able to show up and take our place in what Mary Oliver called, “the family of things”.
Today, for our fifth and final installment of this series, I draw our attention to the mysterious fifth element - sometimes referred to as aether, quintessence or spirit.
Aether is the one element that is least bound to earth and seems to make its moves somewhere above the terrestrial plane while definitely affecting the terrestrial plane.
Sometimes referred to poetically as the “bright upper sky”, in old Grecian times, this aether element stood for everything we don’t understand about the way things work. In modern times, we might call aether dark matter, the superconscious, or the infinite field of all potential. It’s the irrational, the unexplainable, the unknowable. Aether marks the edges of human logic and then radiates out infinitely from there - showing us without a doubt that there is more we don’t know than we do know.
Aether is mysterious because it is the element that we are least able to consciously perceive. But we know it, from the inside out, when it shows up in our lives.
Whenever something good happens that we didn’t see coming, whenever in an “ordinary moment” we feel especially blessed, whenever the worst never comes; we are in the presence of aether.
As magical people, it is extra-important to connect with this fifth element, as it is responsible for supernatural and/or magical phenomena.
When I was dividing up our favorite meditations by element, I kept having the insight that they could ALL be filed under Aether. Any time we go into our inner realms, aether is there waiting for us. Any time love is in the air, aether is present. Any time we cast a spell, or make a wish, aether is the one who fulfills it. Any time we ask for magical protection, aether is the one that gives it. Any time we reach out to any other element, aether is also there, behind the scenes, acting like the “secret ingredient”.
As hard as it is to describe or pin down, the element of aether activates all magic.
If the earth element is related to our physicality, and as the water element is connected to our feelings, and as the fire element is connected to our passions and the air element to our minds; the aether element is connected to our intuition, magic and visions for the future.
Whatever happens today on the global, historical scale, we absolutely must stay connected to aether. It the element that points us towards our highest and best evolutionary path and brings the help and healing that arrives from behind the scenes just in the nick of time.
Luckily, aether is just as easy to connect with as all the other elements.
Connecting to aether can be just as simple as closing our eyes and seeing a spark of it inside ourselves; where it has always been and always will be. And then opening our eyes and understanding that that spark is completely connected to all other sparks in existence via the infinite, invisible, prismatic web that underpins everything we know.
Another trick for communing with aether is to practice “seeing” it as energy and information imbued into or overlaid onto all ordinary reality.
Contemplating the interconnectedness of all things is another way to tune into the aether, as it is the element that weaves all the other elements into the vast tapestry of existence.
We also connect deeply to aether when we perceive events without getting too caught up in judgments and preferences (for example, “this happened and it is bad” or “this happened and it is good”); and instead witness the flow of events and engage our powers of gentle inquiry by using phrases like, “isn’t that interesting?” or “what might I learn here?”.
The aetheric realms are also available any time we meditate, dream, make magic, create or feed our visionary aspect.
Thank you for accompanying me on this little journey through the elements - my hope is that it has been both activating and grounding for us all in these strange times.
Remember, each one of us has agency, especially on the aetheric level - call in what you want, dream BIG, you ARE magic!!!
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. If you were planning on buying books this week, hold off until next Tuesday when I have a VERY SPECIAL, VERY SIGNIFICANT discount code for you. (Am I the worst “business person”? Yes!!! Especially this year!!! But, whatever! I love you all so much and want to make the holidays awesome and magical for you and yours!)
“The dream world and the real world are the same”
- Remedios Varo
“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
- Octavia Butler
THE WEIGHING
by Jane Hirshfield
The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
“We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”
- Rebecca Solnit
“The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It’s how we make the world.”
- Rebecca Solnit
“You will Sense a lot of things that are going unsaid. You will Sense it and not know why. You won’t want to impose, be impolite, create discomfort by mentioning it. If you did, it wouldn’t go over well anyways. No one likes to be Seen before they are ready for show time. As for you, you can’t just go around forcing oysters open before they are ready to revel. Let it be. Confirmation will come of your visions. Maybe many years down the line. And when it does, don’t get too Proud. Don’t make it about you, and what you can do. Only say, “I knew it!” to yourself on a giddy walk. Only say, “Told you so!” alone in the dark. When you calm down, say Thank You For The Message. The Invisible Is So Interesting, I Am Such A Fan of The Irrational, Mysterious Side of Things. What a Delight. Then forget it all.”
- Gabi Abrao
“The suspense of not knowing what’s going to happen is the engine of memorable life. A lot of us (me) spend quite a bit of energy scrubbing our days of this particular quality. The goal is mastery of our circumstances so we can better manage our time or create positive outcome. And our most popular forms of entertainment, like scrolling or watching shows, have been made similarly orderly in our modern era through private, mobile, and instantaneous access. But missing from scheduled days and passive entertainment is the texture from which surprise and delight emerge: the true unknown. I think this is why our impressions of other people and of the world can start to feel so airless and depressing when we spend too much time at home or online—it still isn’t where life actually happens.”
- Haley Nahman, Maybe Baby
“The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research (or they may be what is called “ordinary people,” who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbors.) All these people need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.”
E.M. Forster
“We vision because we live in systems and worlds where the powers that be do not want us to dream. We do this as an act of resistance, as an act of resilience, as an act of creative spell casting. We journal and make lists and get clear on our values so that we may weave them into our precious work.”
“It's so interesting—I feel like it's something I believe in so intensely, and yet, when you go to pin it down, like a butterfly, you kill it. So, I think you have to kind of have a cataphatic experience of it, you have to name it again, and again, and again, in order to in any way, try and actually delineate what it could be.
But for me, I was thinking that there's a modern idea that magic is above the world of material or natural order. That we have the world of science where everything is quantifiable, we can measure it, we understand the rules. And then there's magic, which breaks the rules. I was thinking that I very much disagree with that. I think that magic is actually the deeper layer of rules, it emerges, that can't be quantified, that it's inherently irrational. In a certain way, it gives us space, that we can't actually understand everything, but there is a deeper order, an order that confounds our idea of order.
And when it emerges and erupts through that texture of anthropocentric, quantifiable rules, it gives us a moment to breathe and say, the world is bigger than our machines.”
“Magic, on the other hand... And if that linear logic is the one that leaks out from ever so many papers in the sciences, even and still today, it's this strange rhetoric that is always taking its distance from the world, assuming that we can ultimately "figure out" what it is, how it all works, ultimately. But magic is just this very other logic, from the perspective of a creature from the perspective of a bodied being, like you, like me, down here, in the depths of this blooming, buzzing proliferation of colour and shape and texture and olfactory essences, riding past our noses, wherein some things are always hidden behind other things, because we're down here. And as I shift my position, and perspective, new things become visible and other things are now occluded or hidden.
Magic is the logic of the world, when the world is experienced from within its own depths.”
Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action —
Or it does nothing.
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Good medicine
I loved reading your extra beautiful writing today about aether.