They are so far away from us, the heavenly beings, that we do not immediately think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we throw the mind into the cold black hummus from which the body will one day return, it becomes a spell against despair and the sanctification of all living things.
Under our feet, the roots spread fractal and pulmonary, vein the biosphere with life blood. The word itself shares its root with “radical” and “race” in Latin the radix – the place where all things grow.
As I was thinking about the logical language of roots – fragments of which have been revealed as a message in Morse code, a poem in Braille, a code language of fractals and the Fibonacci sequence and mathematics that we have yet to discover – I found botanist and naturalist John Weaver's amazing writings of the last century. Ecological Relations of Roots.
In the first year of the First World War, Weaver began to understand how life clings to the underbelly of life. He spent four years studying 1,150 roots of about 140 species of trees, grasses, and herbs in Nebraska, Washington, and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
Belonging to the last generation of scientists who had not yet been taught the art and its power to expand the imagination, he drew the book himself, drawing the root systems as he dug, always to get exact measurements, and later retracing them in India ink.
Looking back at the findings, he notes:
The general characters of the root systems of a species are often marked and different as the characters of the above plants. But the root processes of different species of the same species, while often similar, may be of completely different types.
It's not hard to see ourselves in them – how much of our essential character lives beneath the surface of a person, how people who look the same can differ profoundly in their subterranean essence. It is useful to remember that the visible person is nourished by an invisible partner at least as complex and comprehensive; that the two are so tightly intertwined that we are always in contact with the visible person and their invisible root system.
As it happens, my friend Hannah Fries has an appropriate poem honoring this existential aspect of roots and their relationships, available in her wonderful collection. Small Terrarium (public library):
EPITHALAMION
by Hannah FriesThe elm weaves the late field light, this hill
hanging from the roots of the tree like the moon
from its shadow and all
dry underworld.The roots stir the world's great sorrow.
Anyway, it leaves this.
From this unfolding, the song of the birds.I am the corn where you kneel.
wind and a moving stem.
The body of the elm is the vessel of the cloudy sky.The tree will die.
One day, the tree will die.Currently, this axis –
what we choose to walk with.
Couple that with Hannah's poem “Let the Last Thing Be a Song,” and return to meditation on disability and the meaning of life.
