Friday Fictioneers – Life and Death

Every week, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields (thank you, Rochelle!) hosts a flash fiction challenge, to write a complete story, based on a photoprompt, with a beginning, middle and end, in 100 words or less. Post it on your blog, and include the Photoprompt and Inlinkz on your page. Link your story URL. Then the fun starts as you read other peoples’ stories and comment on them!

PHOTO PROMPT © Sandra Crook

Life and Death

I have walked many days through the primeval forest to reach this tree. Red bark, dark leaves, it stretches into the sky, a monarch. As I lay my hand along that red bark, I feel the sharp rebuke of the tree:

Pay some respect.

I step away and make namaste; I honour the spirit within.

I hear the life of the forest, its growing and its dying; I feel the shelter it gives to small creatures and to large; I share their reverence for the trees. The forest is alive, conscious.

In the distance, a chainsaw snarls.

InLinkz – click here to join the fun!

42 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Life and Death”

    • Thank you for your comment, Plaridel. I couldn’t disagree with you more strongly. We need to fight in every way we can to prevent the rape of our planet. We must stop this so-called reality or our children/grandchildren will die in a catastrophe of our making.

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  13. The poignancy! So well written, Penny! Yes to the palpable energy of trees and all other living things, even to the slower, denser, energy on non-living things who live alongside us. And to the sorrow of knowing that so many choose to be deaf and dumb and blind to it, as long as they can take-take-take and make a profit off of what is not really theirs to exploit.

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    • Thank you for such a warm-hearted and spiritually open comment, Na’ama.
      This story was based on a real experience I had in Japan; I really did feel rebuked by a tree, and I really did make namaste to it. You know what it feels like when you’ve become charged with static electricity and you put a key in a lock and there’s a spark? Well, it felt like that, only stronger, and in the emotions rather than the physical nervous system. It took me completely by surprise.

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      • I know EXACTLY what you speak of, and …. yes, trees (and all plants) have their own energies. It doesn’t mean we always feel it (or heed it, or CAN heed it well enough), but it doesn’t mean it ain’t there. It is. And when it is communicated, it is a gift. 🙂 I hear that some trees don’t deign to even TRY communicating with us humans. We’re considered way too ‘dense’ in the energy-department … 😉

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  14. A great story that was expertly written. The awareness of life, of demanding respect evoke emotions we all know. And the snarling of the chainsaw presents the perfect counterpoint. We’re constantly torn between using and revering nature, being, bottom line, creatures of nature who have to live with and off the natural world. How would the story read if a beaver came out of the pond?

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