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http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/african_philosophy/the-african-wheel/

MALIDOMA SOMÈ

Excerpt of the beginning of a weekend workshop at the School of Wisdom

We want to begin with a little prayer, something that will express our intent to bring the spirits into this place, so that what we do can be for the greatest good, but also so that they can show us how to reach the greatest good. Maybe those of you who can stand up will do that. Here is how we're going to do it. We're going to make some invocation prayers in Dagara, so don't worry if you don't understand what's going on. Take it deep down into your bones where language is naturally understood. We will pray to the spirit of the land here, the spirit of the trees, the waters, the fires, and so on and so forth. After that, we're going to ask that any person who's got a good spirit, a good connection with some power source, and the other side of this reality whom you think can be of great use to the beauty we want to produce by being together here for the next couple of days, you can call that spirit name and invite that spirit to come and be with us throughout this time we're going to spend together.

Let's breathe in together and that will ground the energy.

At this point, it is time to bring in some good spirit allies in the interests of making our being together a very healing experience and a very peaceful experience with one another. Do that one at a time, so that we can hear who you are inviting.

We use the African Wheel shown here as a kind of model, a model to create this whole thing we call Ritual and Sacred Space, whatever it is. In the villages in Africa, life is essentially built around a lot of ritual doing. You don't do rituals because you don't have something else to do. You do them because you have a lot of things to do, and because you want to do those lot of things very well. So life is seen as a mechanism that is supported by all kinds of ritual. This is why such a large portion of people's lives is invested in either recovering from ritual, doing ritual or thinking about ritual.

What we're going to do in the next couple of days is basically going to be something like the creation of a village. There are probably not too many people in the village, but that's where it starts--the creation of a village. Inside of that village, we're going to try to build a kind of energy that normally sustains a village. You see, everywhere we go they talk about "community", people coming together as a village or other community; they talk about tribe and things like that. We're not going to talk about it. We're going to try to see if we can do it. It may not work, but if it doesn't work then we can sit together and talk about why it didn't work. At least trying is something practical.

The best context in which to try it is what we refer to as the Ritual and eventually the creation of Sacred Space. That means being able to at least bring that part of the Self that is supposed to be all-knowing, that knows everything, so that it can show us new ways of being with one another, that if it is deep enough will make us not want to quit, not want to leave and go back to the "normal", because this is the normal. Everything else we've been doing before now was abnormal. It took the space of normal.

This is what the content of the weekend, this couple of days is going to be. It's great! We're not going to spend it inside of these walls. That's beautiful! So just know that we want to use the four walls to make sure you get in and out of these papers. That way when we meet tomorrow, it's going to be under a new sky or a new air, and we'll take it from there.

The formation of any village, at least that we know of, is always based on some kind of cosmology, cosmologies that help people find out where they came from and where they're going. This is all based on the quest for people's identity, because without it it's very hard to live a life that is focused and motivated. What you have here is a Dagara model of building identity, or building community and creating a viable relationship with the spirit world.

That's why people in the tribes or in villages are divided into these five different categories, which are based on the understanding that the universe is made of five essential elements. Those elements are intertwined in such a way that it makes it possible for people like us to live in it. Our daily challenges are based on how we dance with these elements. Pain is the result of ignoring one or several of them, and the feeling of groundedness and focus is more connected to a balancing or a proximity to balancing these elements all together. But the most important thing in it is the possibilities or the availabilities in this so-called Wheel of giving us some very substantial knowledge about ourselves. When you know who you are you know how to dance, and then everything else perhaps becomes not as threatening as it looks.

We are finding out what your essence is, the kind of place from which you are contributing to this world. Then you need the other four elements in order to help you do that. That is also important to know. These elements in their order start with Fire, and then go as Water, and then move on to Earth, then to Mineral, and then Nature.

Fire is always associated with the dream world. It is an energy that is ancestral. That is the first in its order. We call it the primal energy. It is associated also with the emotional self, the intuitive self, the dream self, the instinct. Anything as impalpable as that is basically connected with Fire. They say that Fire is something that comes to us from below us where the Ancestors are. The Ancestors are beneath us sending their Fire onto us so that we can pass it on to one another. That's why you have people who are called Fire people, not because they go around burning other people off but because they have played that role of being the link between the Other world and this world as if they are walking on a thin line between the Ancestors' world and this world.

Water is the second element, and Water is essentially about reconciling. It's about peacemaking and making bridges--between two cultures for instance, or between two people. It's also about bringing your wisdom out. It is also about focusing somebody so that they can see beyond their turmoil. So anytime you experience the hot Fire, you need Water in order to bring the balance back to yourself.

Therefore you understand what Water people are supposed to do. The task of the Water people is indeed to do the impossible task of reconciling--reconciling people or reconciling things, bringing peace all over the place--and this is why a lot of them are into the teaching job. That is one of the most accessible ways of being a Water, or living your Water energy. You can understand it within the context of modernity, in terms of the fact that when you are not connected--Fire is connection with the Other world--then the Fire you have in you becomes a combustion chamber.

It becomes active in a way that is consuming. The consuming fire inside of you turns you into a consumer, too. Do you see the link? So what happens is that in this context you are in need of a great deal of reconciliation. Maybe this is a time when you need to call the fire department to "hose you down" or something.

Have you noticed that the fire department has nothing to do with fire? It has a lot of water. It's about Water, but they're called "fire". The need for reconciliation is much more pronounced in the modern world or in modern reality than anywhere else. Modern means that which is in Fire, that which is constantly burning. This is probably why they have a fire department. In a context like this you can see that everything gets easily measured in terms of "fire". For instance fire power--that's the unit where you measure the powers. The ultimate power is fire, the one that blows everything up, that pulverizes everything else. In a context like that there is also a fascination for speed. The faster you go--maybe because you think that you're going to run away from the Fire that is burning you? Who knows? The point is that it's stressed as the important of these two elements, fire/water, that are very important. So the Fire people are there perhaps to make people become aware of the fact that everybody needs this connection with the Ancestors, this connection with Spirit, this connection with the Otherworld in order to slow down and to stop measuring everything in terms of fire. In order to do that they have to have a lot of water around them. You're lucky here. (The School of Wisdom was located in Florida at the time.) There's water all over the place, so you should all be cool. It should be pretty quiet and quite reconciled. If not, go take a swim. It's great to be in a place where there's a lot of water, because at least it offers a great potential for all kinds of reconciliation ritual that could occur. I hope that there's going to be enough Water for us to reconcile a few things.

Then we have Earth as the third element. Earth is about nurturing, grounding, taking care of one another and unconditional love. It is also about empowerment, providing a sense of home and identity.

The next element is Mineral. Mineral is about communicating, the ability to translate things, the ability to converse. It has a lot to do with social connections. A lot of Mineral people are relatively talkative. In the indigenous world they are the Storytellers, the Great Communicators. Mineral is also something that we must see in terms of the conveying of energy, to convey energy that comes through you on its way somewhere else. This is why any person who is a Mineral person is supposed to be running energy, whether it is through your hands or your body or whatever. Mineral people are also recognized as Stone people--not that they're stone but because the stone is seen as the one that stores information. They say if you want to know the story of the earth, listen to the stones or listen to the rocks. Every time you go to someone's house and you see all these rocks, that person has something to do with mineral. This is the closest way to express that. It is interesting that in many communities in Africa, your birth certificate is a stone. Of course the stone does not record the date of birth. It records why you were born. Maybe that's why we don't bother with people's birthdays. The reason I'm bringing it out is because in the computer systems they use stones. They crystallize stone to the point where it can forward or manipulate or store information. This is to say that it's not all that disconnected from modern facts and reality.

The last element is Nature. It is about magic. It is about major changes--life, death, rebirth. It is about dropping the masks and coming to your true self. It is about the Coyote energy, the Trickster, the Joker. It is also about joy and laughter.

That is the overall picture of what this is about. Here's a scenario, because this is not just some kind of intellectual thing that you need to store up somewhere and then continue on. The point is that this is the Ritual model--a model for doing ritual and for living a life that is informed so that eventually you understand that you can use this to understand people's patterns of behavior, why people are drawn towards certain things or are not, why certain people get excited about something that other people just stay cold in front of. If you want to look at it that way then you're moving closer and closer towards something practical that you can extract from this circle. It's not something that you are supposed to understand in your head. By the way, if you manage to understand it in your head something is wrong. There is always going to be a question mark somewhere that cannot be answered anywhere else other than in the heart and in the soul. So what I'm trying to say is that the Ritual implication of this must be looked at from this point of view.

Let's start with the Fire. If fire is the symbol of connection with the Ancestors, and if a lack of connection with the Ancestors puts us in a state of fire--that is to say, puts us in combustion--and the result or experience is maybe this constant feeling of disconnectedness, or the need or the longing for something intimate with the Great Beyond. It means therefore that on the surface we can talk about the fact that yes, we are either lacking in Fire or we are not honoring the dynamic of the Fire, and it means therefore we will need to return to this kind of connection. I always believe that any person who wakes up to Spirit is a person who is Fire. That is to say there is this tremendous longing and fascination for the Other world. I would say indeed that in a lot of ways if you are an alien visiting this world, and you see what happens on freeways and planes, people constantly going somewhere, then you will realize that basically something will make you say that maybe these people are running after some kind of deep connection or running around looking for connection.

In the same way you move to the Water, and you realize that yes, when you are disconnected from the ancestors what happens is that you become a person who is seriously in need for some kind of reconciliation or for some kind of peace within. When that peace is not obtained because of this state of disconnectedness from the ancestors, which emphasizes the Fire, the tendency is that the person who is disconnected goes out there to pollute the very thing that could have brought reconciliation or peace. Why is it that pollution begun with the scientific era and the era of industrialism and so forth? I guess far from explaining it in a purely scientific manner you can see a psychic level as a direct result of disconnection, where the gods have been taken out of the earth and from the water and put into a machine.

Now you move from there into the Earth, and you find that if this is the case then we all at a certain level are experiencing homelessness. A person who is hearing the voice of the Spirit, that person's longing for Spirit is also a longing for Home. This is when the Earth as an element becomes something that is highly wanted. Sometimes I look at the whole invention of real estate and mortgage and rentals as an exploitation of an intrinsic presence in people and the culture of a state of homelessness. Everywhere else, as far as I know, the more ancient the culture is the less you will hear about mortgage and rent and so forth. Somebody must be feeling homeless, and therefore somebody who knows about it created a whole system whereby you can market on this state of homelessness. Maybe I'm wrong.

The other thing is that when we are all looking for this kind of home, which makes us constantly run around--that's what I see when I look at traffic being jammed--everybody's trying to get home, wherever home is. They find themselves going the same direction and screaming at each other for not going fast enough. It's funny. Home is a place of fulfillment. When I go into a supermarket and I watch people pushing those carts just loaded with stuff, and they're still grabbing more and putting it in, I will say, "Well in the absence of Home you gotta really load up this cart and feed yourself while you can."

So there's a need there to look at it from a practical point of view, because then you move into the Mineral and you find out that yes, the reason why this Home does not show up is because there are certain things we need to remember and we cannot remember it. Mineral is about remembering, being able to access pieces of information that we have stored in our bones and without which we cannot plot a proper course that would take us Home. Therefore that Home means that in order to get there the route is not so much through the car dealership and then the freeways and the gas stations. It may be through somewhere else, some kind of different road or roadways. In a situation where there is this general disconnection with home and this feeling of homelessness, where memory is not enough to tell people where to go, as a result there is a disfiguring of Mother Nature. The tendency is to show a certain kind of fear in the face of raw nature, what is called "wild" or anything by that name. What happens is that it becomes all too natural to speak about development whereby you can go cut the trees down, cut everything down and put up some nice little houses, no down payment for six months or something, so that the Homeless could run after it and say, "Well there are a lot of homes over there, let's go get them."

The problem is that what takes the toll is Nature. Nature may have some very useful information for us over there that becomes deleted. How long is it going to take for nature to rewrite what it wrote and which we deleted, which we erased? That's the question. I think that this is what happens when once in a while through this kind of wild destruction the way nature has described itself will bump into some wild virus, we'll call it Ebola virus, and we start running away from it because we disturbed the quiet of Nature. In this case there is a need to understand that somehow these elements either are exploited positively or negatively, depending on where our own consciousness is.

This is why I always like to get people involved and reinventing a relationship with these basic elements. In doing so we come up with those Sacred Spaces where these elements can be embraced in a way that tells us that somehow we carry them inside of us. Ritual is about somehow bringing in, emphasizing or honoring the presence of any one of these elements in us. Further, these elements are connected with some kind of Divine, some kind of Spirit, some kind of power source. When you are talking about Fire, what are the ancestors, dimensional beings? All these in existence that don't have the materiality that fixes them in time and space, and therefore can move from one dimension to another. This is pretty powerful. This is Spirit. This is what we experience when we are less conscious of the magnetic power of this world, and that's what we call a dream.

The same way one would talk about Water. Look at all the beings that live in water. Remember ourselves? Before we came here we were in water. It means that somehow that water has in it a spirit that has the power of making us remember what it means to be reconciled, to be in our natural milieu. The same thing applies to Earth. The Earth symbolizes mother, nurturer, the care-taker. What kind of spirit provides abundance? What kind of spirit gives a sense of nourishment and empowerment? We can find them all over the place.

The same thing for the Mineral. The stones are living entities. They can read signals from far away, as well as from deep down. The Trees too. They are antennas that link this world to other worlds. There are several planets that look just like the earth, and the only species that communicates with one another are the trees because the trees don't have this sense of geographic distance that we human beings have. We think that to go from point A to point B, you have to move your body. Trees don't think this way. This is probably why we will always see them standing in the same place. More often than not, those who wake up to Spirit will feel like trees caught in the modern world. Trees in the traditional context are in the natural milieu. When you go downtown and you look at a tree surrounded by all kind of cement and bricks and so forth, you look at this tree very carefully. The tree is constantly saying, "What the hell am I doing here?" For years the tree has remained the same size. It hasn't grown, because that's the wrong place and the wrong time to be. In a lot of ways a lot of us feel that way somehow. We keep wondering, "What the hell am I doing here?" I think this is what usually comes out when you feel as if somebody has stolen your identity, or someone has shut down something extremely dynamic within you. I think that this is what should motivate us in engaging together in ritual, in the creation of these momentary villages, so that we can try to see how far did we go in the business of going back home by deviating to the rental office or the mortgage bank or something, and get to the Home that we are all entitled to and which we know is over there.

You may look at your Wheel and think that you have a lot of Water, but if you count the water you have unit by unit, there must be three units of Water for every Fire unit you have. For every single digit you have in Fire, you need three digits in Water in order to compensate and be balanced. In other words, Water needs to be three times the Fire.

The important thing that we need to nail down is actually where you belong, where your Essence is in the Wheel--whether you are a Fire person, a Water person, an Earth person, a Nature person or a Mineral person. That's where we're going to start functioning from. Normally what we've known is that the year you chose to be born vibrates the energy that corresponds to your Essence, which means that each year vibrates one of these five energies. For instance, this year 1995 is vibrating Earth energy. Consequently any person who is born this year is coming into this world as an Earth person for the purpose of guiding people Home, nurturing, care-taking, empowering, grounding--whatever you call it, all these things. As long as it makes people feel comfortable. This means therefore if you want to know where you belong, check your year of birth. That's what will tell you.

In 1995, as we notice the number 5 is the one you pay attention to. Next year (1996) six is the one you're going to pay attention to, and then seven, and then eight, and on and on. You look at your year of birth, and you get stuck with the last number. Earth is 0 and 5. Water is 1 and 6. Fire is 2 and 7. Nature is 3 and 8. Mineral is 4 and 9. We're just using the last digit of your year of birth. We are not adding anything together there. Those whose years of birth end with 2 or 7 are the Fire Keepers, the Keepers of the Fire, the link between the village and the Ancestors' world, which means that you should be a good dreamer. If you are not then you need to figure out why. Your role, your task, what you do for the village is going to do with something pertaining to helping people link up to something about ancestors, about Spirit and so forth. Those who respond to 1 and 6 are the Peacemakers and the Reconcilers. For the sake of the village you need to be together and work together as one entity. Those with 0 or 5 are the Care-takers and the Home Providers. You've got to make real estate agents go bankrupt or something and bring us really home, to the real Home. Those with 3 or 8 are witches and wizards. Sobonfu is Nature.

Your task is to help people, the village, or the people within the village who want and need your energy in order for them to be balanced, so that you can give it to them. Of course, before you give your essence you've got to energize it. You've got to make it present in you. You may have noticed that you just discovered that you're one of those elements and you thought you were another one. That's not surprising at all, especially in this world. It's important that in order to be able to give to the village that there be opportunities for each one of these elements to come together as a group and work together. We call these groups Clans--these are different Clans. So we may refer to you as a Water Keeper or a Water Clan or a Water Person. Either way, this is who you are.

We want you to spend some time together first to check in with each other about what that element is to you, how you have experienced it in your life and how is it working or not working at the present. Having done that, build a shrine that is going to be the place that is like your base, where you're going to do things for yourself as well as have people who are going to be coming to you seeking your help. We're not trying here to just write out all kind of ritual and dump it into your hands to do it. We believe strongly that the rituals are in us. We know them. We have them. It's just that we've never actually empowered one another to do it. This is why people are so used to going into all these religious communities. They're taken with a book so that nothing happens unless they've asked you to turn to page 128 and read from paragraph 2 downward, or something like that.

It's all there in the bones. The bones are the correspondence of the stone in the earth. This is where information is stored in us. All we ask of people is to just trust their bones as containers of useful pieces of information so that they can go in there and dig those things out and let it out, let it work. Of course it can get to be very difficult because at that time the mind steps in and says, "Well listen. We've got an issue here. If I let you go to those bones and get that information, what about me?" The mind has been around for so long. You have to figure out some way to trick that. If you can't trick it go find a Nature person, because Nature people are Tricksters. That's why they are witches, and that's why a long time ago the world didn't like them. They burned a few of them down the road.

In the village only the Nature people can speak the truth and nothing would happen to them. Also they are usually referred to as the Fools because they go around noticing you. If it's off, they're going to say, "This is off," and keep on going as if nothing happened. Have you noticed in the Renaissance stories, Shakespeare's stories, that the most sane person in the king's court is called a fool? I wonder why. He's the only one who's got his feet on the ground. So we need a few more of those Fools around to help us be more real. Otherwise we'll shop ourselves to death.

There are colors that come along with this. For Fire it is red. For Water it is blue and black. For Earth it is yellow, Mineral is white, and Nature is green. Keep that in mind when you start to build shrines. Make sure that these colors are in your shrines. Also, if possible just wear that color. Wear the color of your Essence so that your Clan gets emphasized.

In the village that's how we identify the fingers. They don't say that this is your thumb; they say this is your Earth finger. This is your Earth finger because it is the only finger that can touch all the other fingers. This (index/pointer) is your Mineral finger, because that's the one that points to things. What you are pointing at, somehow you wake it up; or when people are screaming at one another and saying "you". It looks like everywhere people have agreed that if you want to finger-point at something you use this finger. That's why we call it a Mineral finger. It's a reminder, a communicator. The longest finger is called the Water finger because it is the tallest. Next to it is the Nature finger. The smallest finger is called the Fire finger. You don't need a lot of fire to do some damage. If you put a little bit of fire on the ground here it will grow, but if you put a little bit of water here it won't grow.

A lot of times for focus or for concentration on a specific element you have to use your Earth finger plus that element. Say you want to focus on water. Take your Earth finger against your Water finger. Has anybody seen The Lion King? There is a monkey there that is funny. The colors are very important, because colors usually are a translation of some kind of vibration that affects our psyche. I don't know quite well how that works, but indeed for some reason it does. That is why I was mentioning there the fact that--and it's trained--the fire department always paints their trucks red. That seems like a denial or something, because inside that red is water. They should have painted it blue because that's what it is. So color here really has an effect.

You can tell that people like certain colors because those colors do something to their own psyche. Someone who always likes to wear red, if you trace that person's life very carefully there's a need for self-affirmation. Be conscious of the color that you wear because it means something that your psyche is up to. This is why this kind of consciousness helps tremendously in taking care of things that are currently challenging you. This is why here this is a culture that has a lot of colors, but they are sometimes used in a very chaotic fashion. So it's good that there be some kind of attention to that.

By the way, the Dagara people have only five colors. Every other color falls into these. This is also why the music is based on five notes. Everything follows the five cycles. Every five years the cycle starts again. There is a certain cyclicality which is based on five. That's the main difference between a modern mentality and an indigenous mentality. The modern mentality is linear. It sees things in terms of progress, so you're going forth somewhere in a linear fashion. The indigenous mentality is cyclical. It keeps going in cycles. This kind of attitude determines how to deal with things. In a linear procession of reality, whenever there is a challenge somewhere people start saying, "Let's put it behind us," as if you're never going to encounter it again. In a cyclical culture, people know a cycle repeats a problem until it is solved. So people know when they have a problem that they have to deal with it. Otherwise they know they're going to bump into it again.

This makes a lot of difference, because everywhere when some major problem occurs, people want to rebuild: "Let's cover it. Let's get it over with in order to go ahead." What I see in this country is that you thought you had left something behind you, and then you saw yourself walking towards that thing. You thought you were going forward. In a lot of ways this has lead me to the strong belief that what we call progress is actually a rush towards the past. It may be fast or slow and we may be calling it by all kinds of different names, but we're rushing--modernity is rushing towards the past, and it's doing that faster because the sense of longing for the past is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. This is only what I can see when they say the speed limit is 55 miles per hour and then they make cars that go 140 miles per hour. What kind of contradiction is that?

Everybody wants to rush out of this moment and get somewhere else, and this is what I like to call the pull. It's like we are entering into the gravity of ancient wisdom, and so we can't pull back. We're going to have to make a machine that has greater horse power so we can get there fast. In this case what is called progress is actually catching up with that which we thought we had forgotten. If this is true it will be best for those of us who wake up to Spirit now to bump into that past than for those who thought that they were going into the future. It's going to be very unpleasant to bump into the past when you had purchased a ticket that says you are going into the future. You're going to curse the guy who sold you the ticket when you get there and you find out that you had been on the wrong train from the beginning.

I think, for me at least, this is how I see any kind of rise of consciousness. Any person who is interested in ancient wisdom, even though he or she doesn't understand it, is feeling some kind of attraction towards it. This is what is going on. The cycle is reaching that place where we hit the ancient again, so that the Wheel begins anew. Those who are awake now, however painful or however disturbing it is to be awake in the midst of tremendous sleepiness--it's amazing the isolating nature of awakeness and the fact that you hear all these things, see all these things, but nobody seems to notice it. That's what I call being awake in the middle of deep sleep. It's hard to wake the other people up because when you try to wake them they say, "You're weird. Go get yourself a life and call me back." What happens is that you turn around and say, "Am I normal or abnormal? Am I supposed to be like them or supposed to be like me? How do I go about ignoring?" There are so many questions you can't even answer.

These are the people that I think have awakened to the increasing magnetism of ancient energy and of ancient wisdom. These people are likely to check in still alive when the collision with this ancient wisdom happens, as opposed to those who are in deep sleep; they will wake up in a stupor wondering where they have arrived. This is what comes to mind when I hear talks from time to time about these changes that are coming up, changes that are going to mean the geography shifts at the same time as consciousness shifts. This is what makes what we do now look more like pioneering jobs that are meant to lead to the reestablishment of what I like to call a Universal Tribal Order, something that brings everybody into the same village or vibrating an energy that is familiar to one another, and not this kind of thing that stresses differences and competition. This is basically why I believe strongly in the practice of ritual and the harmonic vibration with cycles, so that at least we become conscious of that.

Among the Dagara our week is five days long. Each day has a name of the elements in the week: The Waterday, the Fireday, the Earthday, the Mineralday and so on. This is probably why the year is 10 months long. It is the Wheel rotated twice. I don't know why the Greek calendar adds two more months to the year. I think it has a different reason.

Q: Would you just go over the colors again?

A: The Water is a combination of blue and black. That is because we don't make a distinction between blue and black. It's seen as the same, probably because when the cloud forms itself it is black, and when the water comes down it is blue in the sea. That is the basic idea of why we have blue and black as the same color. Earth is yellow. Fire is red. Nature is green. Mineral is white. In the Wheel itself, Water is North, Fire is South, Earth is Center, Mineral is West and Nature is East.

Q: What about the five senses?

A: It is also connected. I have never thought about it. There is also a connection between these five elements and the human anatomy. This is something I have somewhere, but I have never actually looked at it because I've never had the opportunity to delve deep into presenting the Wheel. Before I get any further I see people sleeping. That has always lead me to postpone.

Q: Could you go through the fingers again?

A: The thumb is Earth. The index is Mineral. The middle one is Water. And then this one, the ring finger is Nature. The pinkie, that's Fire.

Q: If your color is a combination of blue and black--which is Water--but subconsciously you find that you tend to prefer the wearing of white for the Mineral or yellow, what is that telling us?

A: That's the response to the call of your psyche to work on the Mineral, to wake your Mineral up, to balance it because your Mineral is kind of dormant. For instance when you are preparing yourself for a conference where you have to give a speech, and you find yourself wearing white. It means that you are trying to bring yourself towards that Mineral place where you can communicate. When you open your mouth it's direct and you don't tumble on your words and say, "I have to think about this before I come back." Also, you need your peace and your focus.