We are Bleeding at the Roots

By: D.H. Lawrence

Augustine said that God created the universe new every day: and to the living, emotional soul, this is true.

Every dawn dawns upon an entirely new universe, every Easter lights up an entirely new glory of a new world opening in utterly new flower. And the soul of man and the soul of woman is new in the same way, with the infinite delight of life and the ever-newness of life.

So a man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year.

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox.

This is what is the matter with us.

We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table…

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

You can find this passage in Lawrence’s profound essay — A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)