Elemental Wade Quotes

You can work with me—or you can wade through the blood and bodies after I'm done.

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole.

Though there is still a large random element, the broad general theme of human history is that each race has developed the institutions appropriate to secure survival in its particular environment. This, then, is the most significant feature of human races: not that their members differ in physical appearance but that their society’s institutions differ because of slight differences in social behavior.

I hoped Tia was different. Easier to manage for people like me, who didn’t naturally jive with the little tykes. I’d only met her for a few seconds, so I had no idea what I was in for, here. All I knew was this wasn’t my element, and her father had just compared me to a pregnant woman. Wasn’t there something wrong with this picture?

The sea is a memory. It is mesmerising. Its beauty is intolerable. What it buries is vaster than what it reveals. Every so often you get a glimpse of what you forget, or you wade in and something snags you, a broken shell or a sea urchin the fishermen missed...No waves speak with the same voice, though they share the same elements and motion, the regular beating of the surf, their rippling heaves.

Almost every element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory cause to the industrial revolution in north-western Europe was also present in China,” concluded the historian Mark Elvin.

I never realized before there were so many ways to die. So many ways to kill people. Why are there so many deadly weapons?" Clapp rubbed his lip and looked down at her. "Listen, Miss Gilbert. I’ve come to figure that man is the only deadly weapon. Take a gun. It’s an absolutely harmless thing—even makes a good honest paperweight—until some man gets his hands around it. You can strip a gun down to its basic parts and it’s lost its power. You can reduce a man to his chemical elements, but you’ve always got the spirit of whatever you call it left. And that spirit will find some damned way to do evil.

Our bones are more gracile than those of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, our personalities less aggressive, our societies more trusting and cohesive. An element of human choice, a preference for negotiation over annihilation, has perhaps been injected into the genome. And that might explain why there is an inescapable sense of progress about human evolution over the last 50,000 years: human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution’s random walk.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many religious rituals involve water. Christians wade into rivers for baptism, Catholics dip their fingers into holy water as they enter the church, Jews go to the mikvah for purifying baths, Muslims wash before the five daily prayers, Hindus go to the sacred Ganges. Immersing yourself in water is like praying. It’s a surrender, an elemental act that is the closest we humans can get to returning to where we started, curled up in our watery maternal bath, submerged in both safety and oblivion.

The most fundamental, a major shift from the ape brand of sociality, was the human nuclear family, which gave all males a chance at procreation along with incentives to cooperate with others in foraging and defense. A second element, developed from an instinct shared with other primates, was a sense of fairness and reciprocity, extended in human societies to a propensity for exchange and trade with other groups. A third element was language. And the fourth, a defense against the snares of language, was religion. All these behaviors are built on the basic calculus of social animals, that cooperation holds more advantages than competition.

Are you going to help me up?” Adaira unwound her matted braid and laughed again. “Do you think I was born yesterday?” She gave him a terrible idea. He almost smiled. “Then will you at least take my harp? It’s going to warp now, after all this time in the water.” He held up his instrument, and Adaira studied it. Jack concealed his glee as she reached forward to take hold of his harp. As soon as her fingers closed over the frame, he pulled. Adaira let out a shriek as she tumbled into the sea, just over his head. He couldn’t resist it; a broad grin spread across his face as Adaira spluttered to the surface. “You will soon pay for that,” she said, wiping water from her eyes. “Old menace.” “I have no doubt,” he replied in a droll tone. “What will it be, heiress? Tar and feathers? The stocks? My firstborn son?” She stared at him a moment, pearls of water on her long lashes. The sea lapped at their shoulders, and Jack could feel her fingers brush his as they both waded in the roll of the waves. “I can think of something far worse.” But she smiled as she said it, and he had never seen such a smile on her face before. Or maybe he had once, long ago when they were children. She was making him remember those old days. Days spent in the sea and caves. Nights spent roaming the wild places, the thistle patches and glens and the rocks on the coast. She was making him remember what it felt like to belong on isle. To belong to the east. She wanted him to stay and play for their clan, and Jack was beginning to think that maybe he should seize that opportunity, even if it stole his health, song by song. Just for a year. A full passing of seasons. Long enough to see her rise as laird. He drew a tendril of golden algae from her hair and begrudgingly acknowledged it then. He disliked her a little less than yesterday. And that could only bring him trouble.

Not so the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To hell with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish. He justifies his will to anarchy with the plausible assertion that there can be no new beginning so long as the old clutters the landscape. He shoves aside the frightened men of words, if they are still around, though he continues to extol their doctrines and mouth their slogans.

THE SEVEN STEPS OF SELF-TRANSFORMATION Illumination is the act of shining the light of consciousness on the egoic forces that obstruct our minds, things such as defense mechanisms, illusions, and other intellectual structures that obscure our capacity to see ourselves and all around us as Sacred. We can think of this as removing lampshades that cover up our inner One Mind's Light. Submersion brings us into deeper self-awareness by wading into the waters of our unconscious, our inner One Thing, thus opening the door to a productive dialog between the conscious and the unconscious selves, which can be considered respectively as our inner One Mind and One Thing. Remember, it is the interaction between these two that gives power to all creation, so it is important to get these forces into a productive dialog within us if we want our soul to create life. Polarization is a process through which we increase our awareness of inner duality— our One Mind and One Thing — and explore the paradox of their underlying unity and separation ability. Just as we saw in the story of creation, these two internal forces can use their separation to create a polarity, such as charging a battery, and this battery enhances our creativity. Merging is the actual fusion of these opposing powers that can also be known as our active and reactive inner natures, the conscious and the unconscious, the mind, and the soul. Here we start to blend the best of both, giving birth to what Egyptian alchemists call the Intelligence of the Heart, thus overloading our internal battery and our creative abilities. Inspiration takes Merging's creative potential and animates it with the Divine breath of life, introducing new dimensions beyond our ability to plan or monitor. The element of surprise threatens the illusion of the ego-self that it is in control, so a part of Inspiration causes the self-deception to die and fall away so that we can be reborn into the Light of Truth. In other terms, our True Self can be remembered. Refining takes from the previous step the divinely inspired solution and further purifies it, removing any last traces of the ego that would otherwise cloud our ability to see our True Self. We lift our human consciousness to the highest possible level to reconnect with the One Self, and Reiki is a wonderful tool to do so as you will know in the near future. Integration completes the process by uniting our One Mind, and One Thing's distilled essence, allowing us to experience their inherent Oneness at a deep level. This can also be considered as the union of spirit, soul, and body with matter. Saying it pragmatically, we take this state of awakened awareness and incorporate it into the very structure of our daily lives; it's not something we feel only when we're on a couch of contemplation or in a class of yoga. And then we return to the beginning, like the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, but this time bearing to bear our newly created insight. These are the seven stages of self-transformation, in a nutshell, and now is the time to weave Reiki into the picture.

It was never the wish. It was her finding the courage to pursue the life she’d only dreamed about. She’d been sleepwalking through her life, but now she’d forced her eyes open to see the world and all its splendor. She’d been wading in puddles, safe from harm, but she was unsatisfied with shallow living. There was no way she could go back to living her life in fear. She could sing. She could fail. Or she could live with a courageous heart.

My thinking knows no bounds, I’m not one to stay in a mental elemental instrumental play pen. So portray me as you will, but your frame will not fit. I’m unique in intellect, and I’m as me as they get.

In the morning mist, as I worked my way upstream, I watched three deer wade across the river ahead of me and quickly got out of my own head. The foliage was thick and green, in that moment before Texas summer becomes too hot to endure without immersing yourself in the water, and the air buzzed with insect and avian life. Canoeing, especially alone, has a meditative quality. I had to tune into the water, into the current, into the air. I felt and followed the flow of the elements around me, moving my body and the vessel that carried it through space, my form propelled by the paddle I stroked along the sides of the boat with learned grace, at the pace of the place, mostly silent. Not unlike the rudimentary meditation practices I had learned in high school from a visiting Zen priestess, I realize now, the activity had a way of emptying the mind of active thought. In zazen, the aim is no more mind than a dim mindfulness of the act of breathing. In a canoe, there’s a lot more going on, a way of moving through the natural environment that by its very essence leaves little room for distracted thought—an exorcism of the self that compels you to let the world around you into your consciousness. I literally had to feel my way using all my senses, opening my being up to everything it was interacting with. To do so without leaving the city, finding myself totally alone in a pocket of urban reality filled with bountifully diverse life, was absolutely transcendent.