Mages with experience in Life radiate healthiness. The quickest way to achieve this is to transform oneself into a virus-like form to infect as many patterns as possible. To achieve this, the mage has to experience the flow of Quintessence through various Life patterns, experience the chain between predators and prey and see how Life patterns transform in the cosmic stream of Quintessence. To utilize the Archspheres of Life, the mage has to understand that all Life patterns are in effect part of one great uber-pattern. Conversely, without auxiliary Spheres, Life allows a mage to change shapes, restore youth and health, heal injury, but also to strike down foes, rend apart the living, and spread disease in his wake. Mages who have mastered Life can use it in combination with the other Pattern Spheres to change lifeforms into elements, turned to stone or metal, or else created from such substances. Preserved blood and organs, still-living plants, live-culture cheese, and so forth contain Life, but corpses, cotton fibers, withered organs, or cut wood become Matter. As a whole, this Sphere embraces everything that has living cells within itself, even if that object is technically dead. This process only ends when Life transforms into Matter, during the moment of death. Life patterns differ from the other two static Spheres in that they are not self-contained vessels of Quintessence, but draw on the Tellurian for sustenance and later return these energies.
Life governs those Patterns that grow, evolve and eventually change.