[01] Introducing the Root Tongue Letters
This is the first installment of a manuscript I am working on. I will be publishing this series on Saturdays through at least the Fall.
Introducing the Root Tongue Letters
I’m not sure how to begin.
That’s not just a confession, it’s part of the problem. Or… perhaps the point. What I want to speak about is something that resists being spoken. It wiggles away from grammar, shrinks under punctuation, chafes against the borders of explanation. Yet here I am, trying to catch it with a butterfly net of letters.
What follows in the coming series of writings is an attempt - tentative, partial, and likely mispronounced - to give shape to something older than shape, a kind of singing beneath the skin and bark of things. I’ve started calling it Root Tongue, though even that feels like a gesture made with gloves on. Still, we do what we can.
Root Tongue is not a language, exactly. It doesn’t speak about the world. It speaks as the world. It’s what the moss knows, what the blood remembers, what the sea says when it hurls itself again and again against the shore. It’s the hum between particles, the murmur between people, the rhythm of revelation before any doctrine can solidify around it.
It is the underlying communication of the universe to itself—or perhaps, the Verse of Uni. I use that phrase as a kind of mnemonic charm, a way to remind myself that what we call “the universe” is not a thing but a singing, a constant weaving, a call and response with no end. The Verse of Uni is not silent. It is simply speaking at frequencies most of our instruments, including our languages, are not tuned to hear.
The Root Tongue Letters began as fragments whispered from this deeper register through intuitive gatherings. They come curled and luminous, like rootlets seeking the nourishment and belonging in dark. I find myself digging around them with a spoon, brushing off the earth with words.
These letters may read like riddles or driftwood on the beach. They may fail to make “sense,” in the conventional way. That’s fine. My hope is that they loosen the topsoil. That something ancient might sprout through the cracks in our thinking. That a buried voice might begin to hum in your bones, as it does in mine.
If this sounds strange, that’s because it is. If it feels familiar, then perhaps you’ve been listening too.
What you’ll find here is not a theory. It’s not a doctrine or philosophy. It’s a series of field notes written from the edge of language, at the threshold between what can be said and what is already singing.
These are the Root Tongue Letters.
They do not wish to be understood.
They merely wish to be heard.
What I’ve gathered - what gathers around me - has begun to take shape in a collection I’m calling The Root Tongue Letters. These aren’t letters in the postal sense, though they may sometimes arrive with the intimacy of correspondence. They are fragments, field notes, brief flashes from the periphery. Some are reflections, others more like weather reports from unseen interiors. A few may resemble essays, but only in the way that a spiral resembles a line.
What ties them together is not argument, but atmospheric explorations.
In these pieces, I am trying to sketch in language what cannot be spoken. To map the contours of a speaking that doesn't use words. The kind of meaning that seeps up through the soles, or falls unbidden while standing near water. Each letter is a kind of listening artifact - an attempt to honor what is already whispering through roots, clouds, sleep, and sudden encounters.
Most of my approach is fictional, imaginal, speculative, intuitive storytelling drawn often from fragments of text that I collect that attract me and become collage poems. These are lines of unrelated material hung on a string and then arranged to seemingly say something like reading runes, or I Ching or tarot cards. Much is based on chance operations to allow the Great Harmony as I call it, to speak so that I can listen.
Some of the entries will be called Field Notes. These arise like lichens on the stones of daily life, touched by dream, gesture, scent. They may describe encounters with what I call the Nine Kinships - different lineages or temperaments of Root Tongue perception. Other entries will carry the feel of a Transmission, a phrase I use when something more insistent arrives - an image, a voice, a song heard inwardly, as if from a place both beyond and within.
You may also encounter Reflections, shaped by my own attempts to live attuned to these murmurs. To recognize and point out traces, hintings and secrets found in the open left by travelers, masters from the past and from all over the world. These writings are not instructional, but confessional in the old sense - offered in humility, as a record of seeking, traveling the path and showing the view. They often carry more questions than conclusions. I do not argue or try to convince. I am just making an offering of seeds I have found along the wayside that you may want to grow in your own garden.
Throughout, I am less interested in building a system than in sounding a tone. A certain tonal resonance that might awaken a similar chord in those attuned to it.
I make no claims of reliability or completeness. This is a crooked trail walked in unpredictable weather, not a curriculum.
If you choose to follow along, do so with the understanding that you’re not being taught - you’re being invited into a listening and observing practice of your own.
An intuitive listening that might, over time, open our ear and heart to the Verse of Uni - the One, the Only.
To that song beneath things.
The Root Tongue.
Reading this feels like finding a trailhead I’ve always sensed, a path that winds through the roots and undercurrents of things, toward the music that’s always playing just beneath the surface. The way you describe Root Tongue, as a kind of listening, a tuning-in to what the world itself is singing, rings so true to my own experience and longing. I recognize the humility and courage it takes to write from the edge of language, to honor what can’t be pinned down but only gestured toward, and to offer that as an invitation rather than an argument.
There’s a kinship here, a resonance. Thank you for daring to share these field notes and transmissions. I’m looking forward to wandering these crooked trails with you, letting the seeds you scatter take root in unexpected places. May we all learn to listen more deeply, together.