The pearl is made over the ages, through solitude and depth, and when it comes to the outer world it brings wisdom and light.
But that is the key: the pearl that lives within must be brought out to see the light.
This externalization is what Jesus was talking about when he said according to the Gospel of Thomas, “if you don’t bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you.”
Going in is not a challenge for the earth-people: their challenge strives in going out, and sharing their self with others. Often times, they find a way to be of help to others, and fulfill beautifully the role of the helper. But if we look deeper, we will find that there is little intimacy in their lives for they fail to share themselves with others and the world.
Joseph Campbell speaks of three stages in the hero’s journey, the departure, the solitude and their return. The earth-person is someone who has as his or her main challenge the return to the world, for where they go and what they find in their journey seems untranslatable to the rest of the world. So deep is their finding that no words reach it. Still, their challenge is to convey it even when it is done indirectly. The example of our breathing can help us with this point. We breathe in, and we breathe out. When our breath goes out, something of us goes with it. This is our deepest self, the most private and personal, and yet capable of extending out into the world. Our task is to do this consciously and deliberately. When we succeed in this process we join Carl Rogers the famous humanist psychologist who told us, “it often happens that what we consider the most private and personal part of our self is also the most universal.” And in the words of the poet Gibran Jalil, “what I say today with one voice, tomorrow will be said by many voices.”
And here we find another quality of earth people: given their inclination for the depth, they often extend the horizons for the rest of humanity. They stay longer in the dark, therefore, their eyes eventually adjust enough for them to discern the reality of a world that others tend to believe invisible. Thus, earth people have to have the courage of their own personal experiences even when these experiences seem to be neither common nor ordinary.
Silence and space are the great contributions of the earth people. And because they have been the first to master these powerful qualities, they can bring a sense of “presence” to the world they inhabit. Their being –rather than their doing- is their main source of power. They can also provide stability and order to relations, situations and organizations, making sustainability one of their priorities. By the same token, precisely because of the relevance of stability and order in their way of being, earth people are inclined to the world of inaction, and are keenly aware of the downfalls of the world of action. The problem arises when this preference becomes a fixation, and initiative is avoided. Then they don’t dwell in peace but in inertia; then, they don’t enter the world of non-resistance but the one of non-participation.
The concept of the circle, the one that brings together our inner and our outer world is one that earth people are to follow if they are ever to reach balance in their lives. To bring forth what they experience within is the main discipline of their lives. A doing that is rooted in their experience. Just like the Huichol Indians, who, having experience their vision of the spiritual world, they follow the discipline of drawing their journey, or expressing it by movement, words, sounds, songs or stories. The important factor being its expression. The Huichol Indians also give us good advice in this practice: when they express this experience in a painting, you can always find some deliberate imperfection. When you ask them, “what is this?” they tell you, “that is me.” And this pointing to their ego, is done so that they don’t become inflated with the divine and afflicted with the illness of the geniuses, narcissism.
Those who go to the deep, they are constantly taking the risk of taking themselves too seriously and becoming energetically heavy.
Lightness of being, and humor are wonderful allies for earth people, and they shall be cultivated by them as members of their closest family.
When earth people are in balance, we refer to them as “light earth”. When they begin to loose balance, we describe them as “heavy earth”, and when they loose balance completely, we call them “earth-quake!”
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