Photo by Sebastian Engler on Unsplash
“Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.”
~~ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Greetings to all my precious people,
The geese are gone now. What’s left behind is quieter work, and it happens where no one can see it.
Above ground, the trees look like they’re dying. Leaves gold, then rust, then gone. But below ground, something else entirely is happening — the sap that spent all summer reaching upward toward light is pulling back down now, into the roots, into the deep dark storage the tree has been quietly maintaining the whole time it looked like it was only reaching up. Nothing about this is loss. It’s consolidation. The tree isn’t disappearing. It’s remembering where its life actually lives.
In Chinese Medicine, this is Water’s season beginning to stir beneath Metal’s — the element of the Kidneys, the deepest of the organs, holding what’s called Jing: essence, inheritance, the root-store of vitality that every other system in the body draws from and returns to. Metal taught us how to release. Water teaches us what’s left once the releasing is done — the irreducible thing underneath everything we let go of this season. Lao Tzu called returning to that root “stillness,” and stillness, here, isn’t emptiness. It’s concentration. It’s a tree deciding, wordlessly, where its actual wealth is kept.
This is also, if we’re honest, the hardest part of any real journey — hero, shero, or otherwise. The wide sky of migration was almost exhilarating. This is different. This is the descent into what the old stories call the inmost cave — the part of the path where the tests actually start, where doubt shows up uninvited, where you find out what you’re made of because there’s no longer an audience or a destination in view to distract you from finding out.
But here’s what the forest knows that we mostly forget: no root goes down alone. Beneath the soil, trees are laced together by vast underground fungal networks — scientists have taken to calling it the “wood wide web” — through which an entire forest shares water, nutrients, even warnings, tree to tree, root to root, the whole system interdependent in ways no single trunk could survive without. A tree in trouble is fed by its neighbors before you’d ever see it struggling from above ground. The innermost cave was never meant to be a solo descent. It only looks like one from the surface.
This is what I keep coming back to, this season: Surrendering into Certainty doesn’t mean surrendering the desire for company down here in the dark. It means trusting that the roots were built for exactly this — reaching sideways for support at the very same moment they’re reaching down for depth.
A practice for the root:
Sit, and if you can, take your shoes off. Bring your attention to the sole of your foot — specifically the hollow just below the ball of the foot, in the soft indent when you curl your toes. This is Kidney 1, Yongquan, “Bubbling Spring” — the very lowest point on the body’s whole meridian system, where Water’s energy is said to rise up from the earth into you. Press gently there, on one foot and then the other. Breathe slowly, and on each exhale, imagine your own sap moving downward — out of your head, out of the noise, down through your spine, into that point, into the ground beneath it. You are not vanishing. You are consolidating. You are remembering where your own root-store actually lives.
A question for the descent:
What is the true, irreducible thing at your root — the thing that would still be true about you even if every outward reach you made this year came to nothing? Sit with that. Don’t rush past it looking for the encouraging answer. The cave doesn’t reward speed. It rewards staying long enough to actually see.
We are not alone down here. The whole forest never was.
