Feed the Roots
- Wiso
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
For well over a decade now, I have experienced Music a little differently than most people around me.
What started off as randomly hearing melodies in my head throughout the day slowly became more focused and intuitive over time. Eventually, I began noticing that different living things seemed to carry distinct songs with them. Plants. Animals. Places. People. Even certain moments seemed to hum with their own rhythm if I slowed down enough to listen.
At some point, I stopped resisting that and simply accepted it as part of my experience.
In the spring of 2023, my family moved into a new house with a large backyard. As we settled into our new surroundings, my wife, kids, and I started spending a lot of time outside with the trees, birds, plants, and little pockets of life that shared the space with us.
One of the trees in particular stood out.
It was a small pine tree that had clearly been struggling for a while. Most of its needles were brown except for a little patch of green at the very top. It had only grown to about a foot and a half tall and looked like it was doing its absolute best just to hang on.
For whatever reason, my kids loved that tree immediately.
My daughter was four at the time and my son was two. We started spending time around the little pine almost every day. Sometimes we would water it. Sometimes we would just sit with it. Sometimes we would sing to it.
At first, the melodies changed constantly. Nothing really stuck.
Then one spring morning in April, a simple little tune showed up in my head while we were standing around the tree together. As I started humming the melody, I asked the tree what it needed.
The response that arrived was immediate and incredibly simple:
“Feed my roots.”
So we did.
Or at least, we started singing about it.
Before long, all three of us were walking around the yard singing:
“Feed the roots,
feed the roots,
feed the roots of this tree.”
That was it.
No grand revelation.
No spiritual ceremony.
Just a family, a struggling little tree, and an incredibly catchy chant that refused to leave our heads.
Over the next few weeks, we sang it constantly. It became part of the rhythm of our spring. At the time, I didn’t think much of it beyond the simple joy of connecting with my kids and our surroundings in a playful way.
Then a couple months later, the song returned unexpectedly.
I was in the studio working on tracks for the album Fruit, and absolutely nothing was going my way that day. Every idea felt forced. Every direction hit a wall. I was frustrated enough that I finally walked outside to reset for a few minutes.
The second I stepped out of the studio, the chant came flooding back:
“Feed the roots,
feed the roots,
feed the roots of this tree.”
I laughed immediately.
Even though I had never planned on turning our backyard mantra into an actual song, I walked back inside, picked up the djembe, pressed record, and decided to see what happened.
The next hour and a half disappeared.
The rhythm arrived first. Then the groove. Then the hook. Then the verses. Before I knew it, an entirely new style of song had taken shape — something that felt simultaneously primal and modern. Hip-hop. Chant. Rhythm. Earth. Breath. Movement.
The whole thing felt deeply connected to the ground beneath me.
As soon as I started rapping, the lyrics showed up almost effortlessly:
“Metaphorically the tree in me has roots that touch the ground
From out my soles into the soul of Earth they grow abound…”
The deeper I moved into the song, the clearer its meaning became.
“Feed the Roots” was not really about a tree.
Well… not only about a tree.
It was about attention.
Presence.
Gratitude.
Grounding.
Remembering to nourish the unseen parts of ourselves that allow the rest of us to grow strong.
Roots are rarely visible, but they determine almost everything.
The truth is, that little pine tree did not survive.
By the end of the summer, it was gone.
In our own way, we all spent some time saying goodbye to it and thanking it for sharing part of its journey with us. In its own way, the little tree had already done exactly what it came to do.
The song remained.
And interestingly enough, the rest of the trees in the yard seemed to enjoy it too.
Maybe the singing was never really about saving the tree.
Maybe it was about learning how to participate more fully while something is still here.
Every time I hear “Feed the Roots” now, I think about those afternoons in the backyard with my kids singing to a struggling little pine tree that simply wanted somebody to pay attention.
The older I get, the more I realize most living things probably want the same.
Love and Respect,
Wiso
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