Edwin Keith

Daily Guidance:

Today we'll look at some of the other things represented on the North side of the Wheel. This is the place of Elders and wisdom keepers who work to protect the long term good of group. Wind, breath, air and Spirit are also found here.

Cynthia's Journal:

In his lovely book, Conscious Dreaming, Robert Moss writes, Our soul force travels on the breath.  Instinctively we check to see if a baby is breathing when it is born, and we know someone has died when they have taken their last breath.  At those moments we pay close attention to exhalation and inhalation, no matter what we believe about God or spirituality. 

Every time we take a breath of air into our lungs we are connecting with every other living thing that breathes from the same atmosphere that surrounds our earthly sphere. Even those who do not breathe, like the mountain tops, are visited by the blowing winds. How many sets of lungs has the air passed through before it reaches me and you? 

Wind, breath, air and Spirit are so precious, they go together on the Wheel, in the place of honor in the North. We can survive for a few days without water, and many days without food (as fasters know), but most of us won't last more than five minutes without air. We don't think very often about the next breath, and most of us just expect the oxygen to be there when we need it. We rarely give thanks for it. But if you spend time with someone who has a lung disease, and is slowly suffocating to death, you will have a renewed appreciation for what this element represents. 

Some say that every prayer ever whispered is carried on the wind forever, along with every swear word and curse ever uttered. Perhaps we should be more careful about what we put out on the air since the winds will bring it back to us.

The North is where we are called upon to envision how everything fits together. Since we must all share the resources of the Earth, we need to know more about those resources and each other. We are bound together in a single unit some call Gaia. Your garbage is my garbage is our garbage. Is the air safe to breathe? Is the water clean?

The Wheel can improve the environmental situation in several ways. First, it is an ideal model, complex enough to be applied to multi-dimensional challenges, with many interdependent factors, such as the preservation and allocation of resources. It can also be used to teach people how to think through the implications of their decisions and see how they will affect all parties in the long term, for instance. We need models and tools like the Wheel to help improve our abilities to resolve conflicts peacefully.    

Over the years I’ve seen many people be drawn towards the Wheel but some seem to bounce off it. A certain readiness is required. The Wheel sets up a mysterious, centrifugal force that protects it as you will see.   

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