[3] On Tongues and Vapor Trails

The Root Tongue DustLetters

On Tongues and Vapor Trails

(From a fragment found among the Dust Letters, origin unknown)

Even if you can talk, there comes a point.

A point where language softens and frays at the edges. A point where words turn back to breath, and breath becomes vaper, and the vaper writes its own poem on the air then disappears. That is the point.

This is where we begin.

You will not find maps for this journey. Only scents on the wind. Butterfly wings beating against the cheek of memory. Leaves pressed to the nostrils in silence. It is not a pilgrimage toward meaning. It is a returning - slow, aching, unfinished - to the roots of the world.

Some say it began with a single syllable, never spoken but felt as vibration across the ribs of the world. Some have called it the Logos. Others have called it the Way. Others claim it came from those unsung masters who learned to listen so completely they could hear the sound of a shadow changing shape.

What is certain is this: those who hear the call feel a lonesome joy. A growing nostalgia for something they’ve never known or long forgotten but of which they are made. They begin to see vapor trails on the tongue of the day. They begin to feel presence in the quiet between songs.

You who read this - you who arrive in uncertainty, with no idea what to expect – expect nothing.

Know that this is not a guidebook.

These letters do not instruct. They emerge like moss, slow and directionless. They are a root system of speech, tender and absurd, reaching toward something it may never touch or be touched by.

The distance between things is thinner than it seems.

Speak if you must. But learn to hear the smoke.

They walk away as they walk toward.

“I am going there though I know not where.” One master was heard saying as he disappeared into a mountain trail covered with mist.

- Unsigned
from the edge of the world, under moonlight
a place with no fence, open to beasts