Revealed Roots

I'm not sure where to start with my beloved space. To sit next to the stream in a cavity of roots, beneath your aged soaring canopy, pondering at how you're still standing when so much of your supporting Earth is gone.

Gone from years of erosion, the wear and tear of the seasons ebb and flow as the waters rise and fall.

To be entombed in your absence but looking with wonder at all that has kept you up for years- supported you. Fed you.

The Earth smells of leaf litter and worm-turned-over soil in the autumn. It barely smells at all in summer as the stream dries to a bone. But in the spring, the carcass of a nearby pigeon rots away, and its perfume of death mingles with the earth, a reminder of the labour of a sparrowhawk who sat and watched from your branches above.

For that time when I sat and removed my glasses and hearing aids, and with no taste or smell, labouring lungs, robbed by a global pandemic, but the absolute joy I felt to be back on the Earth. To be connected with a past touched by the hardships endured by generations gone by. A place where I was most sensorial 'dimmed' but the most held and most connected to the Earth... the most whole.

Aware of my privilege to have an intimacy with a place, unseen, unwatched, except by the eyes of the other non-humans in this space.

The years have again gone past, swiftly drawn down the stream of life, the stones and soil worn by the flow and carried away in minute detail.

Then one day, after storm after storm, your branches were broken and crashed to earth- destabilised by a life of erosion to your roots whilst revealing your intricacies, you could hold no more, and you too return to earth.

Your trunk slips into being deadwood utilised by bugs and grubs. Will your cavities be filled with dormice nests, will the moss that still cloaks your bark be scampered over by returning pine martens, or will you just be 'let be', and crumble and rot as the mycelial network works its magic and converts substance and structure to elements and minerals?

No longer will I sit beneath your cavity and canopy as the world changes and fragments, my understanding of interconnectivity and interdependence to the soil, to the water, to the air that I breathe, your body becoming my body. Your body becoming my mind.

Revealed Roots. Image: Kate Morley

This piece was written during the first of a series of creative writing sessions that are being led by Dr Tanvir Bush and supported by Dr Sarah Bell of the Sensing Climate project. The series is called ‘The Elementals’, with each session guided by an elemental theme; Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Spirit.