“The Pilgrimage to Presence”
from the Dust Letters of the Root-Tongue Tradition
In the age before language settled into contracts and currency, there were those who spoke not to be heard, but to be felt - they were the Root-Tongue People, wanderers of vapor trails and moss paths, rarely glimpsed or noticed, but always just upstream of forgetting.
Even if you could talk, they warned, there comes a point where words dissolve - burned off like morning mist on the skin of silence. That’s when the real speech begins.
They called it smoke-speak, or leaf-breath. You didn’t say it, you became and were it. The syllables were shaped from steam on the tongue, the subtle throb behind the eyelid, the lonesome moment before recognition.
Those who wished to learn had to make the pilgrimage - to the edge of the world, where no fence had yet been erected into the soil, where the beasts still roamed freely and the stars drop their secrets into open hands.
Each seeker began by gathering leaves - how to pluck them, which nostril to place them in, how to breathe through the stem to the root. This was called nostalgic rooting, for it brings up forgotten sensations: the hand of a mother before memory, the ache of futures unrealized, the laughter of an ancestor never named. There are no instructions, only gestures. Every gesture, a transmission.
The Root-Tongue masters, endless generations deep, remained nameless and unsung. In other parts of the world, they were remembered as eccentric herbalists, prophets with no followers, mad poets. But in their own land - no land at all, just a constellation of memory and moss covered stone - they evolved in slow motion, like tides that shape the shore when no one’s watching.
Each evening, under moonlight, the apprentices would speak their “nothing,” a deliberate act of unknowing. For a moment, they would be encouraged by some intimate connection - a moth alighting on a wrist, a cloud echoing the shape of their own breath.
The final lesson was never given. It arrived like a growing nostalgia. It became clear only once the seeker no longer sought. They simply found themselves present.
The masters would say:
“You might be surprised. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s the point.”
In the end, all that was left was this:
The ultimate long game is not to arrive, but to become one with the infinite silence, the aloneness you once feared.
So be it.
This is beautiful.
Beautifully written