Four Elements, Earth Composed from the paintings : Life, Earth, Faith, Longing, Threshold, Growth Nothing alive stays the same shape for long, and the earth is what keeps making it new. Each of these six faces emerged green beneath my brush, and no two of those greens are the same. Out of the same ground come all the ways of being alive. Life is the first of them: raw, green, moving before anyone asks it to. Growth is the one no one applauds, the slow becoming, the inch gained in the dark while we sleep. Faith is the seed's nerve: buried with no proof of spring, and trusting the season anyway. Longing is the stem's reach, the lean toward a light the root will never see. And a threshold waits at every turn, the green door from one season into the next, where one way of being ends and another has to be chosen. Under all of it, steady, the ground that feeds them. None of these comes once. The earth carries them all at the same time, in a balance that never holds still. Turn the cube and that balance falls one way, then another: the same forces of a single life, ordered as they have never been, and gone before the order can hold. This is not a picture of life. It is the ground itself at work: taking the same few things and making, out of them, something that has never lived before. The earth keeps turning, and never lifts the same life again.