Same Work, Different Shift
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We can't sleep and the night is long. Memory is haunting an obliterated song. How did we allow our Mycelial networks unravel? Answers are frayed and difficult to find. We can't sleep.
Hahnu Youn sits at the edge of somewhere no one visits anymore, which suits her fine. Visitors ask questions they already know the answers to. She prefers the other kind. Her hands are soil-stained—have been for sixty years now, no amount of washing changes it, and she stopped trying around the time she stopped apologizing for taking up space. Eighty-three years of weather have moved through her body and stayed there like houseguests who became family.
The night stretches. She doesn't mind. Sleep is for people who've finished thinking.
Colonialism is moving in reverse through our mind. Words are drenched ties that join threads. We should have embraced a hug instead of just saying goodbye. They should have thought more about the tears that could have happened but instead were laid out to quickly dry up.
She asks the ground a question that sounds ridiculous until it doesn't: Why do your roots know what our governments forgot?
The ground doesn't answer in words. It answers in the way a birch leans toward a struggling maple three meters away, sending sugar through the dark. It answers in the way dead things become live things become dead things again, a calendar with no January, no Monday, no beginning or end—only the patient rhythm of was and will be and the tender impossible present tense of still.
This is how the Oyparaploo language builds itself: not from definitions but from what happens when you place still next to was. When you let mother sit beside midnight until they start speaking to each other. When song follows obliterated and something new grows in the wound between them.
The vocabulary arrives like this:
Kaua'i — the last recording of something that used to be alive, now the only living copy
Thread-grief — sorrow that travels through networks you didn't know you belonged to
Root-government — the jurisdiction that predates maps
Hug-instead — what we meant to do but replaced with words
Still-calendar — time measured by what continues rather than what passes
Hahnu Youn is old enough to have watched three forests become parking lots and one parking lot become a forest again. She finds this almost funny. Humans thinking they're in charge. The mycelium underneath that parking lot never stopped talking. Just got quieter. Waited.
"Patience," she says to no one, "is not a virtue. It's just what happens when you've been here long enough."
We can't sleep. The voices of these ghosts remain so present. Soft whispers that cut like a new razor blade.
Underneath where she sits, the branched networks are still conjugating their verbs. Oceans remember rivers in the future tense. Rivers remember ponds in a tense that doesn't exist in English—the one that means this happened and is still happening and will happen again. The sacred underground has names for things we stopped naming and kept the names warm anyway, just in case.
Mother of Nature has been teaching optical illusions longer than eyes have existed to see them.
Here is the first: a seed in your palm. It looks like a small death—brown, dry, closed, finished. But hold it long enough and you understand you're holding the most alive thing in any room you'll ever enter. More alive than you. More patient. Containing a forest that doesn't exist yet, which means the forest already exists, which means what looks like ending is beginning pretending to be still. Hahnu Youn keeps three seeds in her pocket at all times. "For when I need reminding," she says, "that I don't know what alive looks like."
A man is standing near the treeline. She doesn't know how long he's been there. He has the look of someone who's been walking a long time—not tired, just worn into himself, the way water wears into stone and the stone doesn't mind. Dusty feet. Ordinary clothes. Hands that have worked.
He's looking at her palm. At the seeds.
"You know that one," she says. Not a question.
He nods. "I used to talk about it. What happens when it falls into the ground and dies."
"Did they listen?"
He almost smiles. "They built buildings."
Hahnu Youn laughs, a dry sound like leaves shifting. "They do that. Turn the message into a headquarters. Put the underground on a committee." She closes her palm around the seeds. "You here long?"
"Just passing through." He looks at the ground the way she does—like he's listening to it, like it's saying something back. "I keep passing through. They keep building buildings."
"The roots don't mind," she says. "They just grow around."
He nods again. Something in his eyes that she recognizes—the particular exhaustion of people who said simple things and watched them get complicated, who pointed at the dirt and watched everyone look at their finger instead.
"The kingdom's like mycelium," he says. "I told them that. More or less."
"More or less."
"They made it about later. About up there." He gestures vaguely skyward. "It was never about up there."
"No."
"It was about this." He touches the soil with his foot. Not dramatically. The way you touch something you've missed. "What's already here. What's already connected. They wanted a hierarchy. I gave them a network."
Hahnu Youn looks at him for a long moment. Two people who understood the same optical illusion from different centuries, different languages. Neither of them got listened to by the people who claimed to be listening.
"You want some tea?" she asks. "I have a fire going, back there."
"I should keep walking."
"You always keep walking."
"Someone might notice, eventually. Easier to notice what's moving than what's still." He looks at her, and there's something gentle in it, something that doesn't ask for anything. "You're doing the same work."
"Someone has to sit still while you walk."
He laughs—a real laugh, surprised out of him. "Yes. That's right. That's exactly right." He starts to turn, then stops. "The seed knows what it's doing. It doesn't need anyone to explain it."
"I know."
"I know you know."
And then he walks. Not toward anything in particular. Just away, the way everything that understands something important eventually has to leave the people who want to understand it by being told instead of by watching. His footsteps don't make much sound. After a while, she can't see him anymore. After a while longer, she's not sure he was there at all. But the soil where he touched it with his foot looks darker, damper, like something remembered itself.
Hahnu Youn opens her palm again. The seeds are still there. Still looking dead. Still being the most alive thing she's holding.
"Same work," she says to no one. "Different shift."
Here is the second illusion: the forest floor in autumn. A carpet of what appears to be death—brown leaves, fallen branches, the litter of everything that couldn't hold on. Get down on your knees. Put your ear to it. That silence is the loudest meal you've ever attended. Billions of mouths working. The illusion is stillness. The truth is a frenzy so slow it looks like rest. Decay and growth wearing each other's clothes, trading places so often they've forgotten who started as who.
Here is the third, and Hahnu Youn's favorite: watch water in a stream move fast enough and it becomes glass. Watch it long enough and the glass starts flowing again. Now you can't remember if it's moving or still. Now you understand that moving and still were never opposites—they were the same thing seen by eyes that hadn't learned yet. She spent a whole year once, watching one stream. "I didn't learn anything," she says. "I just forgot some things I shouldn't have known in the first place."
Here is the fourth: a murmuration of starlings at dusk. One bird? Thousands? A single organism or a collaboration so perfect it becomes indistinguishable from unity? The sky doesn't know. The starlings don't care. The illusion is that there's a difference between one and many. The truth is that the question only makes sense in languages that forgot the word for both.
Nothing wasted down there. A pine falls and becomes ten thousand meals. A mouse dies and travels through thread after thread until it becomes owl feather, becomes the egg of something not yet hatched, becomes the hunger that will break that egg open from the inside. Mother of the Earth running a kitchen where the scraps are the main course and the main course becomes tomorrow's scraps. She's been composting longer than humans have been walking upright, and she doesn't brag about it. Another thing Hahnu Youn appreciates. Competence without announcement.
A great blue heron lands three meters from where she sits. Folds its wings like someone closing an umbrella they didn't really need. Stands there, absolutely still, watching the nothing between them with the ancient patience of something that was already old when her grandmother was young. It doesn't look at her. It doesn't need to. It knows exactly where she is the way it knows where everything is—through some sense humans traded away for language.
She watches back. Two creatures practicing the same stillness.
The heron turns its head, slow as a century, and fixes one yellow eye on her. The look means nothing. The look means everything. I see you seeing me and I have been standing in water waiting for fish since before your species figured out fire, so what exactly do you want from me.
"Fair enough," she says.
The heron lifts off—that impossible unfolding, those prehistoric wings, the dinosaur elegance of something that refused to stop existing—and is gone before she can decide if it was there at all. This is the second visitor tonight who didn't stay. She's starting to see a pattern.
We can't sleep. Too much grieving and we are now found to be completely lost.
She hears "investment" in a language she wasn't born speaking and wonders what word it replaced. She hears "property" and tries to find the root that connects it to proper, to propriety, to the quiet violence of belonging to instead of belonging with. The words came from somewhere. They've been lost and found and lost again so many times they forgot what they were carrying. Now they carry the forgetting instead. Heavy bags, those.
Colonial time shears God's light.
Here is the fifth illusion, the one she doesn't talk about much: a very old tree and a very young tree, seen from the right angle, the same height. Stand where she's standing, squint your eyes just so, and the four-hundred-year-old oak and the three-year-old sapling line up exactly. Same reach toward light. Same ambition. The illusion is that time makes things bigger. The truth is that everything is always the same size as its hunger.
Something is growing in the dark that no one can experience yet. After the water was poisoned and the apologies were issued in fonts designed to look trustworthy. After the forest became houses for people who would never learn the names of what lived there first, who would plant ornamental cherry trees in yards where medicine plants used to grow without asking. After the forgetting became so complete it felt like quiet instead of absence, like peace instead of silence, like moving on instead of leaving behind.
The last Kaua'i o'o sang to a mate that wasn't coming back. Someone recorded it. Now the recording is the bird. Hahnu Youn has listened to it once. That was enough. Some tenderness you can only hold for a few seconds before it becomes unbearable, before it shows you all the other tenderness you've been failing to notice—the spider rebuilding her web for the nine hundredth time, the earthworm processing the same soil your great-grandmother walked on, the particular way grief visits between the last baboon barking and the first bird, like an old friend who knows where you keep the tea and doesn't need to be entertained.
If we had been a lot different, would we still thrive in this society?
The answer is probably no. Hahnu Youn knows this. Thriving in this society requires a kind of selective deafness to what the ground is saying. Requires believing that calendars begin in January and end in December, that time moves forward, that progress is a direction rather than a story we tell ourselves while the mycelium keeps its own counsel.
She makes connections the way roots do—across what looks like separation. The divide is where the thread goes. The wound is where the message travels fastest. This is not mysticism. This is just how soil works. Humans made it mysterious by forgetting and then being surprised when they remembered.
Here is the sixth illusion, the one the underground teaches to anyone willing to get low enough to learn: roots reaching down and branches reaching up are the same gesture. Mirror images. One drinks from the dark, one drinks from the light, and the tree doesn't know the difference, doesn't experience a difference, because there isn't one. Just reaching. Just hunger that looks like growing. The illusion is that up and down exist. The truth is there's only toward and away, and even those are the same thing, seen from where the mycelium sits.
Her hands speak a language her mouth never learned. Sixty years of soil will do that. The vocabulary is simple: hold, release, wait, trust what you can't see. Four words. Most of what matters can be said in four words.
Sleeplessness is a kind of grief. Grief is a kind of waiting. Waiting is a kind of listening for a song that ended but hasn't stopped—just moved to a frequency we stopped being able to hear when we started sleeping through the night, when we started believing that darkness was for resting instead of for the other kind of seeing.
Hahnu Youn places Mother of Nature above the rules. Not as rebellion. As recognition. As the quiet certainty of someone who has watched governments rise and fall while the oak outside her window kept growing at the same pace, indifferent to elections, unbothered by policy, running its own campaign through the underground networks: vote for continuation, vote for patience, vote for the long return.
"The illusion," she says to the heron who isn't there anymore, to the man who walked away, to the Kaua'i o'o still singing in a recording, to everyone who came and left and didn't stay, "is that we're watching. The truth is we're being watched back. Have been this whole time. By things with more eyes than we have names for."
She closes her eyes. Not to sleep. To listen better.
Da da da dodo bird. Da da da. La la la. Dum dum dum. Da da da.
That's all for now. The networks are still speaking—have been speaking since before speech, will be speaking after. We just can't sleep long enough to hear them yet. But the hearing is there, underneath, waiting. The way everything important waits. The way Hahnu Youn waits. The way a seed waits, looking dead, being the most alive thing in any room. The way he keeps walking through, saying the same things, watching us build buildings where he said look down.
Not for something to happen. For us to notice that it already is.
