The Root-Tongue Tradition
Before there were alphabets, there were gestures. Before gestures, breath. Before breath, the wind through trees no one had yet named.
The Root-Tongue Tradition begins there, or possibly never began at all – perhaps it always was.
It is said to arise not from any one people, but from the sediment between them. From borderlands, threshold places - where languages blur, where forgotten paths are covered in moss, and where even silence has dialects.
The Root-Tongue is not a tongue at all, but something prior to speech and posterior to silence. A kind of fragrant dissonance. A transmission by weather, touch, and the barely noticed shift of atmosphere when someone enters a room carrying memory too subtle for words.
Its keepers are unsung. Not teachers, but tendencies. They gather in the corners of memory, in market stalls and old libraries, in kitchens where water is boiled not for tea, but for listening. Some of them speak, but often they only hum or sigh. They are not known by name, but by effect. You leave their presence lighter, or more haunted.
They carry no doctrine. What they teach has no premise. They do not correct, only notice.
There is a phrase attributed to them - if any phrase could be - but it is untranslatable. It approximates:
“We do not speak to explain, but to remember together what has never been lost.”
In other parts of the world, they are mistaken for the mentally ill, the overly sensitive, the chronic scribblers, the ones still dancing when the music has stopped. But in their own tradition, they are not misunderstood. They are simply trees that took root in crag and crevice.
They are always evolving, though at a pace imperceptible to most. A slow-motion flowering that may take a generation just to adjust its angle toward the light. Their ultimate long game is not survival, but transmission through tone, through echo, through uncanny familiarity.
At the edge of the world - where most people assume the story ends - they have built no walls. There is no gate to the Root-Tongue. Only a softening of the soil beneath your feet. A growing quiet in the spine. You do not cross a threshold. You only notice that you already have.
There are beasts there. Creatures not of mythology, but of emotion. A deer made of longing. A crow of old regrets. The flickering, many-eyed beast that watches from behind dreams. These are not threats. They are guides. They come closer when you stop naming them.
The Root-Tongue masters commune with such beings, not to conquer or interpret them, but to offer presence. They sit together under moonlight, exchanging warmth, forgetting what needed saying.
There are rituals, yes, but they are mostly forgotten on purpose. The forgetting is part of the rite. Only what returns uncalled is remembered as true and only for the moment.
What remains is a transmission by contact. One hand brushing a shoulder. The way someone turns their head at the sound of rain. The pulse in the wrist when a leaf is pressed there just so.
The Root-Tongue Tradition is not preserved in books, but in the space between the lines. In the breath between sentences. In the look that passes between those who recognize one another without knowing why because they don’t ask why. They just know.
It is a lineage without hierarchy. A knowledge without claim. A grammar made of gossamer and morning dew.
Those who follow it do so unknowingly, until one day they realize they’ve been walking that way all along. Evolving in slow motion. Letting go in increments. Unlearning. Listening for a voice that was never meant to be heard, only felt - vapor trails on the tongue.
