They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark humus to which the body will one day return, they become a spell against despair and a consecration of all that is alive.

Beneath our feet, roots spread fractal and pulmonary, veining the biosphere with the bloodstream of life. The word itself shares its root with “radical” and “race” in the Latin radix — the origin point from which all things centripetally grow.

Just as I was contemplating the logical language of roots — the exposed fragments of them across the trail like a message in Morse code, a poem in Braille, a code language of fractals and Fibonacci sequences and mathematics we are yet to discover — I came upon botanist and prairie ecologist John Weaver’s marvelously illustrated century-old book The Ecological Relations of Roots.

In the first year of the First World War, Weaver set out to understand how life anchors itself to the substrate of living. He spent four years studying 1,150 individual root systems of about 140 different species of shrubs, grasses, and herbs across Nebraska, Washington, and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Belonging to the last generation of scientists who were not yet schooled out of art and its power to magnify thought, he illustrated the book himself, drawing the root systems as he excavated them, always to exact measurements, and later retracing them in India ink.

Looking back on the discoveries, he observes:

The general characters of the root systems of a species are often as marked and distinctive as the above-ground vegetative characters. But the root systems of different species of the same genus, while often somewhat similar, may be of entirely different types.

It is not hard to see ourselves in them — how much of our essential character dwells beneath the surface of the self, how seemingly similar people may differ profoundly in their subterranean essence. It helps to remember that the visible self is fed by an invisible counterpart at least as intricate and extensive; that the two are so tightly stemmed together that we are always interacting with both the visible person and their invisible root system.

As it happens, my friend Hannah Fries has just the right poem to reverence this existential dimension of roots and their relations, found in her altogether wonderful collection Little Terrarium (public library):

EPITHALAMION
by Hannah Fries

The elm weaves the field’s late light, this hill
hanging from the tree’s roots like the moon
from its shadow and the whole
world beneath suspended.

Roots knead the earth’s thick sorrow.
Still, leaves from this.
From this unshackling, birdsong.

I am a blade of corn where you kneel,
wind and quaking stalk.
The elm’s body a vase of poured sky.

The tree will die.
Someday, the tree will die.

For now, this axis —
what we choose to compass by.

Couple with Hannah’s poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit a kindred meditation on lichens and the meaning of life.