Imagine... a leaf, in community on its branch. By connection with the living bark, it knows all that its brothers sense, and all it feels is known. To live is their unspoken challenge, pressing into the space of this material world in geometric, patterned shapes, generating a little more will to reach a little further and sense a little more of life’s interaction. To cease would be to return—from shape into impulse, the will to live, uncloaked from cell and atom.

Then, one day of thousands alike, the push of the wind lifts the branch in tensile motion, and the leaf’s veins break, grown brittle in time. It falls without moment, but its death was sooner still: as soon as those material threads were severed, it lost its thousand senses—those feelings of its brothers. It lost also its purpose in sharing its own sense. On the ground, alone, it faces life without cause.

Having taken form for a goal now erased, it is left to exist without connection to its source of meaning. Still, it may feel. Slowly, it may curl and crumble. What impulses it sends none may hear. Those who could are fallen and far, and perhaps, have forgotten.

When at last it is ground to dust, individualism gained will again be community in loss.

-

There you go, tree. I have written your story.