Our language was made for earthly things. It’s harder to speak about the realm of the ethers. They’re difficult to differentiate; their individuality isn’t distinct. They aren’t like the elements which go from warmth through air and water to earth, expressing ever-increasing multiplicity and distinctiveness. No, the ethers tend towards unity, towards the wholeness of life. We need another language for that.
There’s a tenderness towards our dilemma in the way John the Baptist points to Christ, the light of the world. It’s as if he’s saying, yes, your earthly selves can only point to the etheric. If you want to participate in what’s heavenly, you’ll have to set aside your hard-won individualism and earthly words. You’ll have to relinquish being separate. This is a reversal, an inversion. It’s not so easy for us.
But help comes in the simple experience of living. We find it in the pause between in-breath and out-breath, or the few days at this time of year, when the number of sunlight hours stops increasing or decreasing and stays the same. There, we can experience the turning point where everything pauses, and then everything reverses. If we could find words for the quality of the four ethers, then, maybe it would be that they feel like invitations from sunlight: warming, illuminating, orchestrating, enlivening. At the turning point, as a gift of the etheric realm, light invites us into the next dispensation. And just so, we enter the dance of earth and heaven.
Image Watercolor by Birgit Ebel: Gegenwärtige Ätherform. Mandorla [Present ether form. Mandorla]
