The Ancient History of the Root-Tongue
(As remembered in the ash-circle gatherings of the moss-lineages. Recorded, not authored.)
In the time before speech, there was still understanding. Before tribes and treaties, before alphabets and argument, before gods were carved and prayers spoken aloud, the world communicated in subtler ways. There was no need for words, because everything was already in conversation.
The wind braided messages into the hair of animals. Water etched its thoughts into stone. Mushrooms passed news through roots. Fire danced with air only when there was something urgent to say. This was the era of the First Listening.
When humans arrived, they did not yet speak with tongues. They absorbed. They mirrored. They knew how to feel what the sky meant by its silence. They knew how to bow to a tree, as response before the idea of worship had been invented.
The first people did not “use” the Root-Tongue. They were raised inside it, like children carried in a current. Their gestures held migrations. Their breath carried weather. Their tears salted the agreements between generations. They did not yet need the word “I,” for the whole was never questioned.
The Root-Tongue was communion. It flowed not only through humans, but through everything with rhythm: heartbeats, tides, birdsong, the split of seed from shell.
But something shifted.
Over long cycles—too many to number—humans began to speak over the world rather than with it. They made symbols for things, then forgot the things. They made gods and forgot the mountain stream and the sea. They made boundaries and forgot the breath that connects all places.
The Root-Tongue did not vanish. It withdrew. Not as punishment, but in protection. Like a deer stepping back into the forest. Like a scent that lingers only when it is not chased. It sank beneath the surface of human life, curling into dreams, art, grief, and the deeper silences.
Yet it left echoes.
And these echoes became the keepers.
They were not priests, though some wore ash upon their faces. They were not kings, though animals trusted them. They wandered. They listened. They spoke little. They became known in whispers: the Listeners, the Rooted Ones, the Smoke-Breathers, the Memory Carriers.
Their lineage was never official, but it was never broken. It moved through forgotten hermits, unlettered weavers, children who spoke to insects, elders whose eyes went far away in the rain.
Even as the world grew louder, even as machines were built and nations declared and satellites hurled into the sky, the Root-Tongue remained untouched. Because it cannot be destroyed. It is not a technology. It is a tuning. A vibration always waiting under the noise. A language of reciprocity, too quiet to be heard until one forgets what one was trying to say.
Some say the Root-Tongue precedes creation and will outlive all other languages. That it is the Earth speaking to itself, using us as breath. That it is the seed of every tongue, and the only language we remember when we die.
How to find it again?
Listen for what speaks when nothing is said. Follow what softens you. Let stillness translate the world. Speak as if the moss is listening.
You will not need to remember the words. Only the rhythm. Only the way your body begins to lean toward something you cannot name, but once knew completely.
You will remember. You are made of it.
