186. Signs of Life

#186 Signs of life (pt. 2).  On my run yesterday, I took the ‘which path is more interesting’ route and stumbled across many signs of life amongst the death and decay of late autumn.  In nature, there is no death, not really.  If left alone for long enough, even the dead things create life and therefore are not really dead.  

At the same time, there were so many signs of human life in the woodland - a long-abandoned car and in another section, a motorbike (about which I might write a short story they were so evocative); a shelter made from branches, fallen trees supported by live ones, vines, some dead or dying, and trunks wrapped tightly around each other, creating a human-sized nest.

If you think about it, life feeds off this decay and eventual death in the same way that our creativity can.  When one idea or project comes to a close or fizzles out (as some ideas do if we do not breathe enough life into them), it can become the compost to another.  We mulch the old to create the new.  Nature, creativity, it’s all the same.  

For this prompt, look out for the endings you see in the natural world around you, or in your own creativity.  What is being sustained or started through this demise?  What is the decay turning into?  What new thing can be born from the old?  Sometimes letting something go in order to make space for something else is hard, especially if it’s something you’ve worked hard on, or put a lot of hope into, for a long time, but imagine what it could make space for.  Nature does that all the time.  

If you’re writing about nature, look for the light in all of it, and how it shines that much brighter when surrounded by life slowly closing down for the dark months.

Happy writing!

Helen x