Will the trees remember you when you leave, will the crow of the mountain catch your eye again from that lofty farm on the hill, will the people speak in your name as a wanderer, a death? a legend? Where do your roots go, and where do your branches grow? The footsteps merge with the hoofprints of the other nomads of the land and if we could speak, I would ask them if they know what language the land speaks, when was the last rain, where are the trails that lead to the lake, the paths home. There is now, an innate sense, though very present of rootless-ness that I feel within. Living a gypsy lifestyle, always on the move, though I call my home by many names and places, and find my bed in whatever way I can, the depth of experience is starving, or perhaps fasting until the time it can truly eat with the spirit. By this I mean, the bioregionalism of place has taken priority, and yet it’s prioritization is at it seems a vista beyond what I currently comprehend. When one wanders, there is this sense of also feeling lost. In the truth of this hjarta, a lonely wind spills through me some times as a stranger, when it should feel more as a whisper of message. There are things one misses, for being on the road this long, and occupying spaces where one has no cultural definition or background to place within their spiritual saga. It is said not to trust a tree without roots.
84.
“ravening wolf, or croaking raven,
routing swine, or rootless tree”
So is a man, a mystery, who belongs to no place, yet can finds himself an inhabitant of all places. His is a different kind of tree, albeit, the rootless tree will eventually fall. This journey I make is for strengthening the old roots that are already there, and sowing the new seeds foraged along the way. No one knows then a man without a past, for his ancestral line is dim, his memory weak, his life raw, and his tree barren, to spread one’s roots wide and shallow may not help a man to support himself in the end.
“high on that Tree of which none hath heard
from what roots it rises”
One starves for the familiar after long periods of missing it, the old warmth of the wood fire in your own magically charged space, a grove of trees where the avifauna would congregate each winter, a well worn trail for barefoot walking, or the perfect peak to watch the sunset, and even deeper than this, a memory of the ancestors from before, the years of evolution, the manifestation of sacred spaces, the company who have come and gone, the still heard conversations from 5 years before over coffee, a sense of time, growth. One knows by the air when the thunder will come, one remembers where all the medicines of the woods belong, the efficiency of one’s work, the heathen voice of what is.
I still wander, and still I am a seeker, for this is the way I know how. Country is my landscape for the transformation, the hearth being the altar for skill building, and I take this with me on the weary way, like a snail with a big shell, in the pineal gland of a Raven, and the heart of a Wolf. Life must be lived through experience, but yet there is something of this frailty, where these roots must reach further down into the layers so dark, to strengthen and penetrate, that the grandfathers grandfathers can be proud of the tribe which dances around the fire on the soil, above.
:aferalspirit: 