The Gardener (Part Three and the friggin end)

So, I'm lazy. I've got an apartment now, and in a few weeks I'll be actually living in it. Hopefully that'll introduce a modicum of stability to my life, and hopefully that will massage my writing habits, which will therefore hopefully mean that I update this blog often enough to, you know, justify its existence.

Hopefully.

But anyway, I'm getting sick of my Gardener story, so let's make this be the end of it! This is gonna be the quick and messy mostly-summary version of storytelling, so you'll have to use your imagination a lot to fill in the gaps because, again, I'm a lazy, lazy man. Maybe, though, I'll make a quick-and-dirty novella out of it for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)...


So, if you don't know what happened in the last two installments, go read them. They should be right below and appropriately labeled. However, in summary, a dude finds a seed, plants it and it's a tree and everybody's all OoooOOoo about it.

Good summary.

So they live in this nightmarish wasteland, but all of a sudden, their world is shaken with the introduction of simply the color green. We last left the story with all the townspeople standing in awe of it, swaying gently in the breeze.

So what should happen next?

These people aren't responsible. They aren't good. If you give them something, they'll find a way to harm one another with it, or they'll find a way to sell it. But this tree is something else to them. Not one man or woman who sees it can bear to doubt its importance, no one can look away or harm it.

This generation of people cherish it because to them it was such a rare and foreign thing. They move their city to be within view of the tree, and soon the city prospers under the shade of the tree. They appoint one man, our gardener, to watch over it, and see to its safety. He sleeps under the tree at night, and stands by it, tending it in daylight. When he wakes up one morning to find that it can spread and grow more green, it becomes his responsibility to prosper that growth for all society.

The Gardener starts a family under the tree's shade, and when he passes, he is buried under it. His children inherit his responsibility of protecting the growth of the greenness and the trees. Under the care of the Gardeners, the greenness spreads as grass, bushes, and trees of all kinds. It spreads across the landscape, encompassing the world as a whole.

And society spreads and grows with it, under its shade. Life, so hard, so dry, so pleasureless, becomes easy, becomes a joy. Generations pass and people spread across the landscape, eating fruit and grains. The Gardeners tell stories of past generations, of the first Gardener for there ever to be and of the ages that followed.

Generations pass and people grow.

Generations pass and people forget in unbelief the story of the Gardener. They doubt the wasteland that once was, the world of trials and turmoil, of burnt and burning trees, and the place in which it never rained. Even the Gardeners, with time, forget. They took their name, their inherited legacy, and used it to build cities to rule, to shape the skyline as they saw fit.

The world was theirs, and all in it.

But when one Gardener disagreed with another, there was war. They fought over the green earth, scorching, tearing, and shedding red. The red spreads faster than green ever could, as the landscape is drowned out in violence and turmoil of the forgetting peoples. There comes a generation of people, Gardeners and others, who know nothing but violence, strive, hatred and redness. In that generation, greenness is forgotten entirely. There are few of this last generation, and they do not last long.

[Is war too obvious here? I mean, it's the first thing I thought of, so other people probably thought of it to. And it's been done to death. But then again, this story is kinda supposed to go the way you expect; it's about situational irony in which we know the fallacies of the characters, but they themselves are unaware... oh well, back to the story!]

However, one pair of footsteps wanders through the apocalyptic remains. They scramble over rubble, trudge through blackened oil pits, and meander down broken streets, cluttered with war machines. The steps belong to the last man, a Traveler whose home he holds on his back.

The lonely Traveler carries a brown sack, torn, and it's filled with scraps of food. In the Traveler's hands, though, there's always a book. It's singed at the corners and worn and faded along its edges. But at the first glimpse of each day's light, he awakens to read with the hope that a new day brings with it. And as the days near their ends, he reads, to face the coming darkness with the hope that it is once more temporary.

On these pages is a simple image in green: a tree and a man.

The Traveler wanders, and reads, and wanders and reads and wanders and reads until he is old, tired, and at last his body is in its final moments. He crawls into his home for that night, a cave beneath a building, and, as he has done for his years of wandering, the Traveler opens the book and reads himself to sleep in what remains of the daylight, prepared to die, as the last man on earth.

And although this man will die, it will not be on that night. He awakens that morning, with a little shade above his head, green, and growing.

The End.

*************

So what'd ya think? I went for a weird kinda storytelling flavor with this one, and it was at least fun to write. So there's that. Oh well, share, follow, and become a minion of greenness!

The Gardener (part two)

A lot's happened in my life since my last post -- I got a job, I moved, I started that job... okay, three things have happened if I really push it. So that's why The Gardener is so far a massive cliffhanger. But hey, let's try writing a continuation!

So, in summary: a dead world, dry, hot in daylight and cold at night, with little or no life except the depraved people living in it. A man finds a seed, cherishes and buries it. It rains for the first time in his life, he freaks out and finds the seed to have grown. Good summary? Good. 

So what happens next?

The Gardener has never seen a tree wasn't burnt, wasn't hacked to rough chunks. He sits there, in the rain and the thunder, watching the tree sway, fearlessly. He can't believe it exists. He sits, and waits out the storm underneath the tree. Slowly, the thunder fades, the rain slows, and a dawn comes, softly. When the sun rises, the man sits in the tree's shade, still in disbelief. 

So, he has to share it, this vision, with someone to prove that it's real, this fantastic new thing, this GREEN. So we have to introduce a new character. But who? Is this guy married? No, this is a place without happiness, hope, or lifelong relationships (insert marriage joke here). What about a friend? Nope, same reason.

So who does this guy have to talk to? What's sad? What's depressing?

He reaches up, plucks one spot of GREEN, one leaf, and he takes it to the marketplace. He wasn't planning on selling it, don't worry! He had no idea how he would describe something so soft, so strong, so aggressive and loving as the color GREEN. So he had to bring it with.

As with the seed and the tree itself, the man protects and cherishes his leaf. He holds it gingerly in his hands until he finally arrives, muddy, dirty, and soggy at the marketplace. Everybody's selling brown, burnt and broken junk. That's all they've got because, remember, this place sucks. Seriously, the Gardener walks right up to his regular salesman -- as close as he gets to a friend -- and the guy tries to sell him a bucket with a hole in it. The hole is on the side -- it kinda works.

The Gardener shakes him off, and while the guy goes on to try and bark down people to buy the bucket from him, the Gardener tries telling him about the stone -- the seed -- and the storm and the tree! The salesman nods and pretends to listen, all while hawking broken plates like they're the best thing known to mankind.

The Gardener, frustrated, holds up the leaf of GREEN in his hand. The world stops. The salesman reaches out, briefly touches the leaf. "Everything," he says. "I'll give you everything I have for that." People swarm, and bid, but the gardener leads them away. He brings them to the tree, swaying gently in the sunlight and taller than it was before. Much taller, it towers over the crowd.

In that moment, each person stands and sees that the world does not have to be like it is for them, brown, burnt and broken.

So how do they respond?

That'll be next time.

For tonight, follow me -- don't bother clicking ads; I wanna build an army and take over the world!

Life by Code: Belief

I think everybody needs a code. Like, one to live by, not a sequence of numbers and letters that allows them to operate (God knows we don't need any more of those!). To a certain extent, we all have rules we follow, ingrained in each of us through a variety of means. But, like everything else we do unconsciously, when we bring it into our own awareness and try to truly understand and perfect our rules they become something different, and we with them. The rules become a Code (give that a capital "c"!) and we become People of a Code (almost epic, no?).

I believe in living by a Code, and one of the first fundamental codes by which I live is that belief, without practice, is dead.

What I mean by that is it's what we do, our actions, our practice that ultimately indicates who we are as people. It is all fine to say you believe in something, but if you do not act as though such belief is true, then what's the point of believing it?

Really.
Believe there's a Minnesota?
Cool.
Actually act as though Minnesota exists in the world?
Cool; that's belief.
Act as though Minnesota doesn't exist? Be bemused whenever something comes from Minnesota, or they show up in the news? Refuse that you can actually go there?
It's not practical; it might as well not be there. And that's not belief, but it's a way of thinking we often engage ourselves in modern society.

Here's an illustration: say you believe in the evolution. As in, species evolved from earlier ancestors over the course of eons and eons. Okay, now how do you practice it? That's actually pretty simple, although there are two answers that come to mind immediately. First is, you just live your life and boom, you're participating in and practicing evolution along with the rest of humanity like gravity. Yaaaay we won; let's coast. Second is, you breed. You actually try to propagate the species and your own genetic pattern because, frankly, we're kickass at this whole evolution thing. We may not have bacteria beaten, but rabbits? Hells yeah.

Now the first practical scenario is the one that ultimately the high majority of people practice, in my encounters and investigations. It's light-handed, hardly offends people, doesn't require any work, and it requires only fundamental understanding of the concept. People say "Sure, all species and life as we know it gradually changed over many eons  to become what they are today. Now gimme my coffee!" It's convenient, but that's not practice, which means that's not belief: that's acknowledgement. If that were Minnesota, you would say it's there, but you wouldn't go, and why go there, why say you believe in Minnesota at all? It's a space that does nothing but exist.

So, the second scenario of practice is a LOT more active! You're actually participating in the evolutionary process (you actually visit Minnesota!). The catch with that, though, is that we've done it before as people; we've actively engaged ourselves in evolution. Basically, if you get a bunch of people together, and they say they're the best, they say their genes are the best, you get big problems. Do you want me to drop a Nazi bomb? It's pretty obvious that their ideas were inspired or based on (or unrightfully justified by, most accurately) evolutionary biology.

 So, while we say that evolution and Minnesota exist, and are as real as gravity, we ourselves cannot employ evolutionary thought processes as a society, and we cannot actually go to Minnesota. Or we'll be branded Nazis... Minnesota Nazis.

So next time you find yourself making a stand in who you are and what you believe -- whatever it may be -- ask yourself if you really do believe it, ask yourself if you practice it, if it's REAL to you and you live it. If you do, then yeah, you believe it, but if you don't, find out what you believe and stand by it. Allow your actions to shape who you are. Start by clicking ads.