From Kingdom to Kin-dom*

PRESENTING UNDERSTORY: A 3 DAY RETREAT EXPLORING BODY, LAND & WORD THROUGH PRANAYAMA, SLOW YOGA, FOREST BATHING & CREATIVE WRITING.

There's a layer beneath the visible story - arising from the fertile forest floor, emerging from decay, woven through with mycelial threads; the slow conversation between things.

I've been thinking a lot about language lately. Not just the words we speak - analysed and ready for interrogation; but the precognitive dialects, the ancient languages of our ancestors that existed before words.

It is from this place that the Understory arises.

Consider: our nervous system is speaking constantly. The sudden exhale when we step into the forest. The way our body orients toward safety or away from threat. Co-regulation happens through shared breath; with each other and with the trees. Intelligent yet wordless - the two are not mutually exclusive. This is not the absence of language. This is an older one. The one we spoke before we domesticated ourselves out of it.

What non-verbal languages have you buried?

The land speaks. The forest is not a backdrop to our experience… it is in conversation with us, always. We know this language, we are of  this language - woven into the same web, no more or less significant than the mycelium beneath our feet or the canopy above our heads.  But we have largely forgotten how to hear it.

We arrive with our explanations, our itineraries, our interpretations. We project.

The first steps back into the web** are surprisingly simple:

1. Witness.

2. Receive.

Allowing the land to speak before varnishing her language with human words.

And what of written language?  Certainly not the villain of this story, perhaps more of a feral creature that has been over-tamed.

Consider: Homer was one of the most prolific poets in human history - author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic tales of war, gods, and the long journey home. And yet in all of that vast, magnificent writing… not a single use of the word blue.

He described the sea as "wine-dark" seventeen times. Was he accurate? Absolutely not. Did we feel it? Across three thousand years - yes. Because he wasn't explaining the sea. He was feeling it. What is more intoxicating and dangerous than a wine-dark body of water?  Homer was expressing something true rather than something correct.

Language as a wild thing. Language as a partner of experience rather than in dominion over it.

The creative writing we practice in the Understory lives here - not in the tame grammar of accuracy and explanation, but as an animate expression of this messy and chaotic and beautiful life. Of saying something true rather than something correct.

This is a portal to the kin-dom. Not the obsessive human quality of creating hierarchies; of naming and knowing and extraction - but the kin-dom of being in relationship. Of receiving as fluently as we project. Of trusting that the body, the land, and each other are already speaking - and that sometimes the most radical thing we can do is simply be.

In August, Nica Celly and I are hosting three days in the redwoods… not to learn something new, but to slow down enough to remember what we already know.  You can register here.

*I am grateful to the mycologist Giuliana Furci for introducing this reframing 

**of "stepping back into the web" the poet Mary Oliver says this... The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life—just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.