I do not chase the East for its mysteries, nor the past for its ruins. I stand where I am. My feet press into this soil, and the land speaks to me. They call it Feng Shui in the East. In the West, we once called it geomancy. My ancestors called it root—the reading of earth and spirit, the listening to land. Different tongues, same truth: the earth is alive, and it shapes us if we dare to listen.
But the West forgets itself. The seekers here, restless and estranged from their own bloodlines, chase after foreign names, foreign temples, foreign spirits, while the bones of their ancestors whisper beneath their feet, ignored. I know why the seekers wander. They feel alien in their own culture, so they borrow shrines, robes, and languages not their own. But I do not need foreign altars to know the divine. My altar is the dirt beneath me, the rivers that cut the earth, the wind that bends the trees. My root is not imported—it is remembered.
The problem has never been the names. The problem has always been place—the spirit of the land, the pulse of location. In China, Feng Shui has been sung into the soil for a hundred generations, broken only briefly by revolution. In Europe, geomancy lived perhaps a hundred generations deep, until the sword of Christianity cut the thread. Roots severed. Memory burned. I inherit a truth split. But still, I know: tradition tied too tight can strangle.
Even so, geomancy was more than decoration. It was weaponry, weather-work, war-magic. I see it. Those bound to the land became slaves to it. And when the conquerors came, they broke them. Because for two hundred generations, Europeans had trained a different magic: not rooted but moving, invading, devouring. Their craft was not the stillness of place but the alchemy of transformation. Detached, restless, violent—it carried them until it named itself science, but its origin was war, blood, and the refusal to be caged by land. Unrooted, adaptive, alchemical. Land harnessed not only for harmony, but for destruction, for martial force, for storms that bent toward the one who listened.
Yet there is a danger in deep roots. Too much tether, and the land becomes a cage. Tradition hardens into prison. Stagnation waits in the soil. And when the colonial empires came, they broke these old earth-bound peoples because they were bound too tightly to their places. So I stand between two ruins: the stillness that binds, and the detachment that consumes. I take both into me. I will not be caged by land, nor severed from it. I will work the earth, and I will wield the storm. I am root worker of the present.
So here we are, at the meeting of ruins. Both truths scar the earth. Both paths have their price. This is my creed: I harness land without chains. I walk as one who listens and as one who strikes. I claim what others forgot, and I name it mine.
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