In the body, the locus of Air or East is the breath and the gases dissolved in the blood. The locus of Earth or North is the skeletal bones and the supportive structure network of connective fascia and sinew. The locus of Water or West is the blood and lymph. The locus of Center or Spirit is the subtle body or the coordination of all elements. The locus of Fire or energy or South are the mitochondria in every cell. This is the place of fire where our bodies burn sugars and carbohydrates for all the energy we ever use. Every cell comes equipped with its own tiny hearth.
Mitochondria are matrilineal, passed in the cytoplasm of the egg, inherited only from our mother and her mother, etc. They are so ancient as to be presexual, and their genetic material is uninvolved in the fusion of nuclei between the egg and sperm, standing free from the 46 resulting chromosomes. Mitochondrial DNA is from the mother’s cell, changing much more slowly, and does not even divide on the same schedule as the chromosomes. Symbiogenesis as creation of new life forms early in evolution out of the collision or incomplete digestion or teaming up of life forms.
This is how mitochondria ended up in ‘our’ cells. Cooperation more than competition, joining more than diverging, creativity more than random.
Biological life is not ruthless so much as it is mutually supportive: why? Biologist Lewis Thomas mentioned in his immensely popular Lives of a Cell the cross cultural persistence of merged or hybrid creatures in mythology. Perhaps this is a reflection of the early events of symbiogenesis, when creatures actually did merge to form cells with nuclei and mitochondria and chloroplasts.
Bacteria have the ability to trade useful bits of DNA quickly (called recombination), and do it separately from reproduction, so adaptive changes spread rapidly. As Fritjof Capra mentions in The Web of Life, “Thus microbiology teaches us the sobering lesson that technologies like genetic engineering and a global communication network, which we consider to be advanced achievements of our modern civilization, have been used by the planetary web of bacteria for billions of years to regulate life on Earth.”
Species co-evolve, shaping each other by our interaction. “The environment” is not a static and dead unchanging thing, but also co-evolves with the life on it. Life adapts itself, but it also adapts the globe for itself, and without governmental or economic coercion, without organizations. For example, our atmosphere is wildly chemically unstable; it is the continual action of living creatures upon it that keeps it at its current gas composition, precisely right to maintain life. The recent CO2 rise causing global warming could have devastating consequences for the current balance, but Gaia has handled more severe atmospheric changes before, from the early hydrogen shortage that triggered the use of water in photosynthesis to the oxygen poisoning that triggered the first animal respiration (in bacteria, of course).
The co-evolved context is holy while de-contexted opportunism is hubris. Outside the body, the loci of Fire or energy or South are all the energy we ever use for heating, cooling, cooking, transportation, lighting, communication, the Arts, maintenance, entertainment, etc.
Every day our Mother showers us with gifts of sunshine, wind, flowing water, and hot magma. There are gifts of renewable energy in all these beribboned packages. All we need to do is open them; She renews them every day.
