Earth-Word

For a generation now, the voices that come to the druid beneath the cromlech have been changing. The Sun-Word, around which the fixed and wandering stars danced their mathematics and sang the mysteries of day and month and year, has grown more insistent yet more faint; for the last three years, almost silent, a murmur. Since then, on the high days, the druid has crawled out from beneath the stone, sick with vertigo from the wheeling stars clamouring through the stone without the root note of the sun to hold his heart in time. The heavens still said enough that he could tell us when to sow the oats and put the bull out to the heifers, but the Sun, he said, was mute. The Earth, too, has changed. She has been growing great with something: fuller, more contented, but also more perturbed. Birdsong seems to promise rather than proclaim.

And then, last night but one, as dusk was falling, she suddenly upheaved, groaning, stirring, shifting. We heard rocks grinding beneath us, and a slice of cliff fell into the sea. The cromlech cracked and slumped from its tripod. Then all day yesterday, no birdsong; the waves at the foot of the cliff panted like a sick dog, the smoke from the hearth-fires lingered in the huts, the cattle hung their heads, the rooster hid among the hens. No one picked up a tool or, if they did, they looked at it blankly and laid it down again.

And now, another night has passed, and none of us have slept. We are watching for dawn on the cliff top. We have not spoken; barely glanced at one another since the earthquake. We do not know who we are to each other, and words would have to be balled up, burned, and made again before we’d know what to say. We watch a grey-faced moon, three days past full, drop towards the sea, and as she consigns herself to drowning and slips into the water with a sigh, we feel the faintest touch between our shoulder-blades, and we turn.

There it is. The ripple of fire on the crest of the east that we have rejoiced in so many times before. But this is new. This is not the inevitable cantilever that hoists up a springtime sun as it lowers the moon whilst the pale stars chant like a pianola. The Earth is mothering this. The Sun-Word has gone to ground, made a heaven of Her, and now she emits a sun made new. It is She who sends the colour running down the slopes like wind in the barley, She who tingles up through the soles of our feet, makes us turn to each other and blush like before Eden, She who puffs up the little rouge of courage on the robin’s breast and sets him singing, back to those myriad wise other worlds, her own song: the Earth’s first words of Love.

Photo From Shaping Light, Laura Liska, 2025.