Writing with Earth’s Elements: Part IV – The Earth of Philosophy

Fossil in Sandstone

“Old as dirt.” That’s not necessarily an insult. If you are building a foundation and expecting some stability, you want some good ol’ dirt. When I think Earth, I think ancient, archaic, like fossils fused into rocks and old bones preserved in their place for eons.

Building a foundation for thought takes stability as well, something that has stood the test of time, lots of time, something ancient like Plato, or even older like Zoroastrian thought, as in Zarathustra.

According to the article in Wikipedia, “Zoroaster,” Zarathustra may be the first philosopher. Some say he lived in the second millennium BC, some say six thousand years before the invasion of Greece by Xerxes I in 480 BCE, others in the late 10thcentury BC. All of these estimations qualify Zarathustra as fossil-like evidence of philosophy as solidly archaic.

And what does philosophy do? How does it function? I’m no more a philosopher than I am a poet, but here are some thoughts. Philosophy grounds us, but not in the sense of making us statically unmovable. Part of what I like about philosophy, at least the Socratic kind, is its quest to ask the right questions, so paradoxically part of our grounding may be about ungrounding. In other words, part of philosophy’s aim is to free us from certitude.

It provides an open system and that grounds us in a healthy way. The ground is aerated and we are able to have all the elements at work in a flow of life that does not cut off, but rather feeds the quest for knowledge or better yet the quest for wisdom. Grounding doesn’t mean immovable or static. Earth has a lot of openness in its nature. It has to be an open system or there is death in it. And yet the solidness of earth allows trees to take root, get their nourishment and have somewhere to stand.

Our very existence depends on these principles. Mother Earth nurtures and cradles without crushing. Maybe this is a good way to look at philosophy. Just as earth is trying to have a Socratic conversation with us, helping us come to our own conclusion, to our own understanding, philosophy seems to be an ask, not a tell. And yet wisdom is wisdom, and that is ours to grapple with and it is also ours to engage. It seems that philosophy is not so much chaining us in irons to some dogma, but rather inviting us to live into the questions, just as earth is not hammering us into submission, yet it’s in our best interest to take up the quest for the sustaining wisdom we need to live in an enlightened relationship with the Mother who cradles us.

What foundations for thought do you rely on?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Living into the Questions